The Moon Moth and Other Stories

by Jack Vance

  “And I would like to announce a small but significant accomplishment. I have established the Sea Cow numerical system and it is much like our own. An unbroken black rectangle is ‘zero’. A single bar is ‘1’. A cross-bar is ‘2’. An inverted ‘u’, conventionalized perhaps from a triangle, is ‘3’. A digit resembling our own ‘2’ is the Sea Cow ‘4’. And so on. Perhaps Professor Kosmin has established the Wasp numeration?”

  Kosmin, who had been listening without expression, said, “I have been busy with the work for which I was appointed: the formation and supervision of a decipherment program. Numbers at the moment are no great matter.”

  “I will look over your formulations,” said Gench. “If any aspects seem well-conceived I will include them in the master program I am preparing. Here I wish to utter a testimonial to Professor Kosmin. He was urged into the commission against his better judgment, he was assigned a task for which he had no training; nonetheless he has uncomplainingly done his best, even though he is anxious to return to Earth and the work he so generously interrupted in our behalf.” And Gench with a grin and bob of the head bowed toward Kosmin. From the other members of the commission came a spatter of dubious applause.

  Kosmin rose ponderously to his feet. “Thank you, Professor Gench.” He reflected a moment. “I have not heard any report on the condition of ‘Big Blue’. It seems precariously balanced, but on the other hand it has remained in stasis for thousands of years. I wonder if there has been any decision as to the feasibility of boarding this ship?” He peered toward the engineers.

  Director Drewe responded: “I don’t think there has been any definite verdict here. For the present I think we had better stand clear of it.”

  “Unfortunate,” said Kosmin. “It appears that the damage suffered by Big Purple destroyed that chamber which served as a repository of written materials. The corresponding location of Big Blue by some freak is quite undamaged, and I am anxious to investigate.”

  Gench sat kneading his long chin.

  “In due course, in due course,” said Drewe. “Yes, Professor Gench?”

  Gench frowned down at his hands. He spoke slowly. “It may interest the commission to learn that aboard Sea Cow B, the ship north of Big Purple, I have located just such a repository of Sea Cow documents, though I haven’t checked the contents yet. This repository is in Room 11 on the second deck from ground level and seems to be the only such repository undamaged.”

  “Interesting news,” said Drewe, squinting sidelong toward Gench. “Interesting indeed. Well, then, on to the drive technicians: what, off-hand, do you make of the Wasp and Sea Cow space-drives, vis-à-vis each other and our own?”

  The meeting lasted another hour. Director Drewe made a final announcement. “Our primary goal has almost been achieved, and unless there is a pressing reason to the contrary, I think that we will start back to Earth in two days. Kindly base your thinking upon this timetable.”

  VI

  The following morning Professor Gench continued his investigations aboard Sea Cow B. At lunch he appeared highly excited. “I believe I have located a Wasp–Sea Cow compendium in Room 11 of Sea Cow B! An amazing document! This afternoon I must check Sea Cow E for a similar store-room.”

  Professor Kosmin, sitting two tables distant, lowered his head over his plate.

  VII

  Gench seemed somewhat nervous, and his fingers trembled as he zipped himself into his out-suit. He stepped out upon the plain. Directly overhead glittered Sulwen’s Star; the wrecked ships stood like models, without human reality or relevance.

  Sea Cow E lay a mile to the south. Gench marched stiffly across the plain, from time to time glancing back at other personnel, unidentifiable in out-suits. His course took him past Big Blue and he veered so as to pass close under the great broken ship. He turned another quick glance over his shoulder: no one in his field of vision. He glanced up at the precariously balanced hulk. “Safe? Safe as jelly-bread.” He stepped through a gap in the hull, into a picturesque tangle of girders, plates, membranes and fibers.

  Professor Kosmin, watching Gench veer toward Big Blue, nodded: three jerks of the massive head. “Well, then. Now we shall see.” He walked north toward Sea Cow B, and presently stood by the crushed hull. “The entrance? Yes…To the second deck then…Surprising architecture. What peculiar coloring…Hmm. Room Eleven. The numerals are clear enough. This is the ‘1’, the single bar. And here the ‘2’.” Kosmin proceeded along the corridor. “‘6’…‘7’…Strange. ‘10’. Where is ‘8’ and ‘9’? Well, no matter. Unlucky numbers perhaps. Here is ‘10’, and here ‘11’. Aha.” Kosmin pushed aside the panel and entered Chamber 11.

  VIII

  Sulwen’s Star slanted down to the gray horizon and past; darkness came instantly to the plain. Neither Gench nor Kosmin appeared for the evening meal. The steward called Director Drewe’s attention to the fact.

  Drewe considered the two empty seats. “I suppose we must send out to find them. Professor Gench will no doubt be exploring ‘Big Blue’. I presume we will find Professor Kosmin hard at work in Sea Cow B.”

  IX

  Professor Gench had suffered a broken collar-bone, contusions and shock from the blow of the heavy beam which Professor Kosmin—so Gench claimed—had arranged to fall upon whoever might enter Big Blue’s control cabin.

  “Not so!” boomed Professor Kosmin, both of whose legs had been broken as a result of his fall through the floor of Chamber 11 on the second deck of Sea Cow B. “You were warned expressly not to set foot in Big Blue. How could I set a trap in a place you were forbidden to visit? What of the detestable pitfall by which you hoped to kill me? Aha, but I am too strong for you! I caught the floor and broke my fall! I survived your worst!”

  “You survive your own stupidity,” sneered Gench. “Sea Cows, with two fingers on each of four arms, use base eight in their enumerations. You went into Chamber 9, not Chamber 11. A person as obtuse and as murderous as yourself has no place in the field of science! I am lucky to be alive!”

  “Were my legs still sound I would tread upon you for the roach you are!” shouted Professor Kosmin.

  Director Drewe intervened. “Gentlemen, calm yourselves. Reproaches are futile; remorse is more appropriate. You must realize that neither of you will head the decipherment program.”

  “Indeed? And why not?” snorted Gench.

  “Under the circumstances I fear that I can recommend neither of you.”

  “Then who will be appointed?” demanded Kosmin. “The field is not crowded with able men.”

  Drewe shrugged. “As a mathematician, I may say that deciphering appeals to me as a fascinating exercise in logic. I might be persuaded to accept the post myself. To be candid, it is probably my only chance for continued association with the project.” Director Drewe bowed politely and left the room.

  Professor Gench and Professor Kosmin were silent for several minutes. Then Gench said, “Peculiar. Very peculiar indeed. I arranged no pitfall in Chamber 9. I admit I had noted that the panel could be opened from one direction only, from the corridor…A person venturing into Chamber 9 might find himself in a humiliating position…Strange.”

  “Hmm,” rumbled Kosmin. “Strange indeed…”

  There was another period of silence as the two men reflected. Then Kosmin said, “Of course I am not altogether innocent. I conceived that if you ventured into ‘Big Blue’ against orders you would incur a reprimand. I propped up no beam.”

  “Most peculiar,” said Professor Gench. “A puzzling situation…A possibility suggests itself—”

  “Yes?”

  “Why kill us?”

  “To the mathematical mind the most elegant solution is the simplest,” reflected Professor Kosmin.

  “A canceling of the unknowns,” mused Professor Gench.

  RUMFUDDLE

  I

  From Memoirs and Reflections, by Alan Robertson:

  Often I hear myself declared humanity’s preeminent benefactor, though the jocula
r occasionally raise a claim in favor of the original Serpent. After all circumspection, I really cannot dispute the judgment. My place in history is secure; my name will persist as if it were printed indelibly across the sky. All of which I find absurd but understandable. For I have given wealth beyond calculation. I have expunged deprivation, famine, over-population, territorial constriction: all the first-order causes of contention have vanished. My gifts go freely and carry with them my personal joy, but as a reasonable man (and for lack of other restrictive agency), I feel that I cannot relinquish all control, for when has the human animal ever been celebrated for abnegation and self-discipline?

  We now enter an era of plenty and a time of new concerns. The old evils are gone; we must resolutely prohibit a flamboyant and perhaps unnatural set of new vices.

  * * * * * * *

  The three girls gulped down breakfast, assembled their homework and departed noisily for school.

  Elizabeth poured coffee for herself and Gilbert. He thought she seemed pensive and moody. Presently she said, “It’s so beautiful here…We’re very lucky, Gilbert.”

  “I never forget it.”

  Elizabeth sipped her coffee and mused a moment, following some vagrant train of thought. She said, “I never liked growing up. I always felt strange—different from the other girls. I really don’t know why.”

  “It’s no mystery. Everyone for a fact is different.”

  “Perhaps…But Uncle Peter and Aunt Emma always acted as if I were more different than usual. I remember a hundred little signals. And yet I was such an ordinary little girl…Do you remember when you were little?”

  “Not very well.” Duray looked out the window he himself had glazed, across green slopes and down to the placid water his daughters had named the Silver River. The Sounding Sea was thirty miles south; directly behind the house stood the first trees of the Robber Woods.

  Duray considered his past. “Bob owned a ranch in Arizona during the 1870s: one of his fads. The Apaches killed my father and mother. Bob took me to the ranch, and then when I was three he brought me to Alan’s house in San Francisco and that’s where I was brought up.”

  Elizabeth sighed. “Alan must have been wonderful. Uncle Peter was so grim. Aunt Emma never told me anything. Literally, not anything! They never cared the slightest bit for me, one way or the other…I wonder why Bob brought the subject up—about the Indians and your mother and father being scalped and all…He’s such a strange man.”

  “Was Bob here?”

  “He looked in a few minutes yesterday to remind us of his ‘Rumfuddle’. I told him I didn’t want to leave the girls. He said to bring them along.”

  “Hah!”

  “I told him I didn’t want to go to his damn Rumfuddle with or without the girls. In the first place, I don’t want to see Uncle Peter, who’s sure to be there…”

  II

  From Memoirs and Reflections:

  I insisted then and I insist now that our dear old Mother Earth, so soiled and toil-worn, never be neglected. Since I pay the piper (in a manner of speaking) I call the tune, and to my secret amusement I am heeded most briskly the world around, in the manner of bellboys jumping to the command of an irascible old gentleman who is known to be a good tipper. No one dares to defy me. My whims become actualities; my plans progress.

  * * * * * * *

  Paris, Vienna, San Francisco, St. Petersburg, Venice, London, Dublin surely will persist, gradually to become idealized essences of their former selves, as wine in due course becomes the soul of the grape. What of the old vitality? The shouts and curses, the neighborhood quarrels, the raucous music, the vulgarity? Gone, all gone! (But easy of reference at any of the cognates.) Old Earth is to be a gentle, kindly world, rich in treasures and artifacts, a world of old places: old inns, old roads, old forests, old palaces, where folk come to wander and dream, to experience the best of the past without suffering the worst.

  * * * * * * *

  Material abundance can now be taken for granted: our resources are infinite. Metal, timber, soil, rock, water, air: free for anyone’s taking. A single commodity remains in finite supply: human toil.

  * * * * * * *

  Gilbert Duray, the informally adopted grandson of Alan Robertson, worked on the Urban Removal Program. Six hours a day, four days a week, he guided a trashing-machine across deserted Cupertino, destroying tract houses, service stations and supermarkets. Knobs and toggles controlled a steel hammer at the end of a hundred-foot boom; with a twitch of the finger Duray toppled power-poles, exploded picture-windows, smashed siding and stucco, pulverized concrete. A disposal rig crawled fifty feet behind. The detritus was clawed upon a conveyor-belt, carried to a twenty-foot orifice and dumped with a rush and a rumble into the Apathetic Ocean. Aluminum siding, asphalt shingles, corrugated fiber-glass, TVs and barbeques, Swedish Modern furniture, Book-of-the-Month selections, concrete patio-tiles, finally the sidewalk and street itself: all to the bottom of the Apathetic Ocean. Only the trees remained: a strange eclectic forest stretching as far as the eye could reach: liquidambar and Scotch pine; Chinese pistachio, Atlas cedar and gingko; white birch and Norway maples.

  At one o’clock Howard Wirtz emerged from the caboose, as they called the small locker room at the rear of the machine. Wirtz had homesteaded a Miocene world; Duray, with a wife and three children, had preferred the milder environment of a contemporary semi-cognate: the popular Type A world on which man had never evolved.

  Duray gave Wirtz the work schedule. “More or less like yesterday; straight out Persimmon to Walden, then right a block and back.”

  Wirtz, a dour and laconic man, acknowledged the information with a jerk of the head. On his Miocene world he lived alone, in a houseboat on a mountain lake. He harvested wild rice, mushrooms and berries; he shot geese, ground-fowl, deer, young bison, and had once informed Duray that after his five year work-time he might just retire to his lake and never appear on Earth again, except maybe to buy clothes and ammunition. “Nothing here I want, nothing at all.”

  Duray gave a derisive snort. “And what will you do with all your time?”

  “Hunt, fish, eat and sleep, maybe sit on the front deck.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “I just might learn to fiddle. Nearest neighbor is fifteen million years away.”

  “You can’t be too careful, I suppose.”

  Duray descended to the ground and looked over his day’s work: a quarter-mile swath of desolation. Duray, who allowed his subconscious few extravagances, nevertheless felt a twinge for the old times, which, for all their disadvantages, at least had been lively. Voices, bicycle bells, the barking of dogs, the slam of doors, still echoed along Persimmon Avenue. The former inhabitants presumably preferred their new homes. The self-sufficient had taken private worlds, the more gregarious lived in communities on worlds of every description: as early as the Carboniferous, as current as the Type A. A few had even returned to the now uncrowded cities. An exciting era to live in: a time of flux. Duray, thirty-four years old, remembered no other way of life; the old existence, as exemplified by Persimmon Avenue, seemed antique, cramped, constricted.

  He had a word with the operator of the trashing-machine; returning to the caboose he paused to look through the orifice across the Apathetic Ocean. A squall hung black above the southern horizon, toward which a trail of broken lumber drifted, to wash ultimately up on some unknown pre-Cambrian shore. There never would be an inspector sailing forth to protest; the world knew no life other than molluscs and algae, and all the trash of Earth would never fill its submarine gorges. Duray tossed a rock through the gap and watched the alien water splash up and subside. Then he turned away and entered the caboose.

  Along the back wall were four doors. The second from the left was marked G. DURAY. He unlocked the door, pulled it open, and stopped short, staring in astonishment at the blank back wall. He lifted the transparent plastic flap which functioned as an air-seal and brought out the collapsed metal ring which had been the f
lange surrounding his passway. The inner surface was bare metal; looking through he saw only the interior of the caboose.

  A long minute passed. Duray stood staring at the useless ribbon as if hypnotized, trying to grasp the implications of the situation. To his knowledge no passway had ever failed, unless it had been purposefully closed. Who would play him such a spiteful idiotic trick? Certainly not his wife Elizabeth. She detested practical jokes, and, if anything, like Duray himself, was perhaps a trifle too intense and literal-minded. He jumped down from the caboose and strode off across Cupertino forest: a sturdy heavy-shouldered man of about average stature. His features were rough and uncompromising; his brown hair was cut crisply short; his eyes glowed golden-brown and exerted an arresting force. Straight heavy eyebrows crossed his long thin nose like the bar of a T; his mouth, compressed against some strong inner urgency, formed a lower horizontal bar. All in all, not a man to be trifled with, or so it would seem.

  He trudged through the haunted grove, preoccupied by the strange and inconvenient event which had befallen him. What had happened to the passway? Unless Elizabeth had invited friends out to Home, as they called their world, she was alone, with the three girls at school…Duray came out upon Stevens Creek Road. A farmer’s pick-up truck halted at his signal and took him into San Jose, now little more than a country town.

  At the transit center he dropped a coin in the turnstile and entered the lobby. Four portals designated ‘Local’, ‘California’, ‘North America’, ‘World’, opened in the walls, each portal leading to a hub on Utilis*.