The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  Sato is some kind of a Buddhist. Only vaguely and imperfectly do I understand what this implies; not being unnecessarily explicit about itself is certainly a part of that doctrine. But there is also the injunction against killing. And I am—notwithstanding every meretricious attempt of my own mind to convert that fact into something more comfortable—a killer. And so…I may now contemplate what it will mean not merely to have lost my older son, but also the priceless, undemanding, and yet immeasurably rewarding friendship of the family in the next valley.

  “It was not intentional,” I tell myself as I lower my griminess and weariness into the hot water. “It was necessary. How else explain why we chose…?” But it isn’t worth a damn. I might as well mumble Tantric formulae. The water feels lukewarm—used.

  I go on flaying myself in this manner. I return to the house and sit down to supper. The food I had looked forward to so eagerly tastes like raw fungus or my old sneakers. Nothing Sue says helps, and I even find myself wishing she would go to hell with her vitamin-enriched cheerfulness.

  On our slope of the mountain the darkness comes as it must come to a lizard which is suddenly immured in a cigar box. Still no sign of Chris and so, of course, the pumas are more vocal than they have been all year. I itemize and savor every disaster that roars, rumbles, creeps, slithers, stings, crushes, or bites: everything from rattlers to avalanches, and I am sure that one or all of these dire things will befall Chris before the night is over. I go outside every time I hear a sound—which is often—and I squint at the top of the ridge and into the valley below. No Chris.

  Sue, from her bunk, says, “If you don’t stop torturing yourself, you’ll be in no condition to do anything if it does become necessary.” She is right, of course, which makes me mad as hell on top of everything else. I lie on my bunk and for the ten millionth time reconstruct the whole experience:

  —

  We had been hacking at elder bushes, Chris and I. It had been a wet winter and clearing even enough land for a garden out of the encroaching vegetation began to seem like trying to hold back the sea with trowels. This problem and the gloomy knowledge that we had about one hatful of beans left in the cabin had conspired to produce a mood in which nothing but hemlock could grow. And I’d about had it with the questions. Chris had started the “Why” routine at about the same age as little Mike, but the questions, instead of leveling off as the boy began to exercise his own powers of observation and deduction, merely became more involved and challenging.

  The worst thing about this was that I could not abdicate: other parents in other times could fluff off the questions of their kids with such hopeless and worthless judgments as “Well, that’s how things are,” thereby implying that both the questioner and the questioned are standing passively at the dead end of a chain of historical cause, or are existentially trapped in the eye of a storm of supernal origin, or are at the nexus of a flock of processes arising out of the choices of too many other agencies to pinpoint and blame definitively…our life, on the other hand, was clearly and in every significant particular our own baby. It did not merely proceed out of one particular historical choice, complete with foreseeable contingencies, but was an entire fabric of choices—ours. Here was total responsibility, complete with crowding elder bushes, cold rain, chiggers, rattlers, bone-weariness, and mud. I had elected to live it—even to impose it upon my progeny—and I was prepared for its hardships, but what galled me was having to justify it.

  “The people in the City don’t have to do this, do they?” (“This” is grubbing out elder bushes, and he is right. The people in the City do not have to do this. They do not have to hunt, fish, gather, or raise their own food. They do not have to build their own cabins, carry their own water from springs, or fashion their own clothes from the skins of beautiful, murdered—by me—animals. They do not have to perspire. One of these days I will have to explain that they do not even have to sleep with their own wives. That of itself should be the answer of answers, but twelve is not yet ready; twelve cares about things with wheels, things which spin, roar, roll, fly, explode, exude noise and stench. Would that twelve were fourteen!)

  In the meantime it is dig—hack—heave; dig—hack—heave! “Come on, Chris! It isn’t sundown yet.”

  “Why couldn’t we bring an old tractor up here in pieces and put it together and fix it up and find oil and…” (I try to explain for the fifty millionth time that you do not simply “fix up” something which is the outgrowth of an enormous Organization of interdependent Organizations, the fruit of a dead tree, as it were. The wheel will not be turned back. The kid distrusts abstractions and generalities, and I don’t blame him, but God I’m tired!) “Let’s just clear off this corner by the olive tree, Chris, and then we’ll knock off for the day.”

  “Are we better than the City people?”

  (This one hit a nerve. “Better” is a judgment made by people after the fact of their own decisions. Or there isn’t any “Better.” As for the Recalcitrants, of which vague class of living creatures we are members, they were and are certainly both more and less something than the others were—the City people—the ones who elected to Go Along with the Organization. Of all the original Recalcitrant families, I would guess that not 10 percent are now alive. I would if I had any use for statistics. If these people had something in common, you would have to go light-years away to find a name for it. I think it was a common lack of something—a disease perhaps. Future generations will take credit for it and refer to their origins as Fine Old Stock. I think most of them were crazy. I am glad they were, but most of them were just weird. Southern California. I have told Chris about the Peters family. They were going to make it on nothing but papaya juice and stewed grass augmented by East Indian breathing exercises. Poor squittered-out souls! Their corpses were like balsa wood. Better? What is Better? Grandfather was going to live on stellar emanations and devote his energies to whittling statues out of fallen redwoods. Thank Nature his stomach had other ideas! And God I’m tired and fed up!)

  “Dammit, boy! Tomorrow I’ll take you to the City and let you answer your own questions!”

  And I did. Sue protested and old Sato just gave me that look which said, “I’m not saying anything,” but I did.

  The journey to the City is necessarily one which goes from bad to worse. As a deer and a man in the wilderness look for downward paths and lush places if they would find a river, the signs which lead to the centers of human civilization are equally recognizable.

  You look for ugliness and senselessness. It is that simple. Look for places which have been overlaid with mortar so that nothing can grow or change at its will. Look for things which have been fashioned at great expense of time and energy and then discarded. Look for tin and peeling paint, for rusted metal, broken neon tubing, drifts and drifts of discarded containers—cans, bottles, papers. Look for flies and let your nose lead you where it would rather not go.

  What is the difference between the burrow of a fox and a huge sheet-metal hand which bears the legend, in peeling, garish paint: THIS WAY TO PERPETUAL PARMENIDEAN PALACES…? I do not know why one is better than the other, or if it is. I know that present purposes—purposes of intellect—lead one way, and intuition leads the other. So we resist intuition, and the path of greatest resistance leads us from one vast, crumbling, frequently stinking artifact or monument to another.

  Chris is alternately nauseated and thrilled. He wants to stay in the palatial abandoned houses in the outskirts, but I say no. For one thing, the rats look like Doberman pinschers and for another…well, never mind what it is that repels me.

  Much of the City looks grand until we come close enough to see where cement and plaster, paint and plastic have sloughed away to reveal ruptured tubes and wires which gleam where their insulation has rotted away, and which are connected to nothing with any life in it. We follow a monorail track which is a silver thread seen from a distance, but which has a continuous ridge of rust and bird droppings along its upper surface as
far as the eye can see. We see more of the signs which point to the PERPETUAL PARMENIDEAN PALACES, and we follow them, giving our tormented intuition a rest even while for our eyes and our spirits there is no relief.

  When we first encounter life we are not sure that it is life.

  “They look like huge grapes!” exclaims Chris when we find them, clustered about a central tower in a huge sunken place like a stadium. The P. P. Palaces are indeed like huge grapes—reddish, semitransparent, about fifteen feet in diameter, or perhaps twenty. I am not used to measuring spaces in such terms anymore. The globes are connected to the central tower, or stem, by means of thick cables…their umbilicals. A high, wire-mesh fence surrounds the area, but here and there the rust has done its work in spite of zinc coating on the wire. With the corn knife I have brought to defend us from the rats and God knows what, I open a place in the fence. We are trespassing, and we know this, but we have come this far.

  “Where are the people?” asks Chris, and I see that he looks pale. He has asked the question reluctantly, as though preferring no answer. I give none. We come close to one of the spheres, feeling that we do the wrong thing and doing it anyway. I see our objective and I point. It is a family of them, dimly visible like floating plants in an uncleaned aquarium. It is their frightened eyes we first see.

  I do not know very much about the spheres except from hearsay and dim memory. The contents, including the occupants, are seen only dimly, I know, because the outer skins of the thing are filled with a self-replenishing liquid nutrient which requires the action of the sun and is augmented by the waste products of the occupants. We look closer, moving so that the sun is directly behind the sphere, revealing its contents in sharper outline.

  “Those are not real people,” says Chris. Now he looks a little sick. “What are all those tubes and wires for if they’re real people? Are they robots or dolls or what?”

  I do not know the purpose of all the tubes and wires myself. I do know that some are connected with veins in their arms and legs, others are nutrient enemata and for collection of body wastes, still others are only mechanical tentacles which support and endlessly fondle and caress. I know that the wires leading to the metal caps on their heads are part of an invention more voracious and terrible than the ancient television—direct stimulation of certain areas of the brain, a constant running up and down the diapason of pleasurable sensation, controlled by a sort of electronic kaleidoscope.

  My imagination stops about here. It would be the ultimate artificiality, with nothing of reality about it save endless variation. Of senselessness I will not think. I do not know if they see constantly shifting masses or motes of color, or smell exotic perfumes, or hear unending and constantly swelling music. I think not. I doubt that they even experience anything so immediate and yet so amorphous as the surge and recession of orgasm or the gratification of thirst being quenched. It would be stimulation without real stimulus; ultimate removal from reality. I decide not to speak of this to Chris. He has had enough. He has seen the wires and the tubes.

  I have never sprung such abstractions as “Dignity” upon the boy. What good are such absolutes on a mountainside? If there is Dignity in grubbing out weeds and planting beans, those pursuits must be more dignified than something, because, like all words, it is a meaningless wisp of lint once removed from its relativistic fabric. The word does not exist until he invents it himself. The hoe and the rocky soil or the nutrient enema and the electronic ecstasy: he must judge for himself. That is why I have brought him here.

  “Let’s get away from here,” he says. “Let’s go home!”

  “Good,” I say, but even as I say it I can see that the largest of the pallid creatures inside the “grape” is doing something—I cannot tell what—and to my surprise it seems capable of enough awareness of us to become alarmed. What frightening creatures we must be—dirty, leather clothes with patches of dried animal blood on them, my beard and the small-boy grime of Chris! Removed as I am from these helpless aquarium creatures, I cannot blame them. But my compassion was a short-lived thing. Chris screamed.

  I turned in time to see what can only be described as a huge metal scorpion rushing at Chris with its tail lashing, its fore-claws snapping like pruning shears, and red lights flashing angrily where its eyes should have been. A guard robot, of course. Why I had not foreseen such a thing I will never know. I supposed at the time that the creature inside the sphere had alerted it.

  The tin scorpion may have been a match for the reactions and the muscles of less primitive, more “civilized” men than ourselves, or the creators of the Perpetual Parmenidean Palaces had simply not foreseen barbarians with heavy corn knives. I knocked Chris out of the way and dispatched the tin bug, snipping off its tail stinger with a lucky slash of the corn knife and jumping up and down on its thorax until all its appendages were still.

  When the reaction set in, I had to attack something else. I offer no other justification for what I did. We were the intruders—the invading barbarians. All the creatures in the spheres wanted was their security. The man in the sphere set the scorpion on us, but he was protecting his family. I can see it that way now. I wish I couldn’t. I wish I was one of those people who can always contrive to have been Right.

  I saw the frightened eyes of the things inside the sphere, and I reacted to it as a predatory animal reacts to the scent of urea in the sweat of a lesser animal. And they had menaced my son with a hideous machine in order to be absolutely secure! If I reasoned at all, it was along this line.

  The corn knife was not very sharp, but the skin of the sphere parted with disgusting ease. I heard Chris scream, “No! Dad! No!”…but I kept hacking. We were nearly engulfed in the pinkish, albuminous nutritive which gushed from the ruptured sac. I can still smell it.

  The creatures inside were more terrible to see in the open air than they had been behind their protective layers of plastic material. They were dead white and they looked to be soft, although they must have had normal human skeletons. Their struggles were blind, pointless, and feeble, like those of some kind of larvae found under dead wood, and the largest made a barely audible mewing sound as it groped about in search of what I cannot imagine.

  I heard Chris retching violently, but could not tear my attention away from the spectacle. The sphere now looked like some huge coelenterate which had been halved for study in the laboratory, and the hoselike tentacles still moved like groping cilia.

  The agony of the creatures in the “grape” (I cannot think of them as people) when they were first exposed to unfiltered, unprocessed air and sunlight, when the wires and tubes were torn from them, and especially when the metal caps on their heads fell off in their panicky struggles and the whole universe of chilly external reality rushed in upon them at once, is beyond my imagining; and perhaps this is merciful. This and the fact that they lay in the stillness of death after only a very few minutes in the open air.

  Memory is merciful too in its imperfection. All I remember of our homeward journey is the silence of it.

  —

  “Wake up! We have company, old man!”

  It is Sue shaking me. Somehow I did sleep—in spite of Chris and in spite of the persistent memory. It must be midmorning. I swing my feet down and scrub at my gritty eyes. Voices outside. Cheerful. How cheerful?

  It is Sato and he has his old horse hitched to a crude travois of willow poles. It is Sato and his wife and three kids and my son Chris. There trussed up on the travois is the biggest buck I have seen in ten years, its neck transfixed with an arrow. A perfect shot and one that could not have been scored without the most careful and skillful stalking. I remember teaching him that only a bad hunter…a heedless and cruel one…would risk a distant shot with a bow.

  Chris is grinning and looking sheepish. Sato’s daughter is there, which accounts for the look of benign idiocy. I was wondering when he would notice. Then he sees me standing in the door of the cabin and his face takes on about ten years of gravity and thought, but t
his is not for the benefit of the teenage female. Little Mike is clawing at Chris and asking why he went away like that and why he went hunting without Daddy, and several other whys which Chris ignores. His answer is for his old man:

  “I’m sorry, Dad. I wasn’t mad at you…just sort of crazy. Had to do…this….” He points at the deer. “Anyhow, I’m back.”

  “And I’m glad,” I managed.

  “Dad, those elder bushes…”

  “To hell with them,” say I. “Wednesday is soon enough.”

  Sato moves in grinning, and just in time to relieve the awkwardness. “Dressed out this buck and carried it down the mountain by himself.” I think of mountain lions. “He was about pooped when I found him in a pasture.”

  Sue holds open the cabin door and the Satos file in. Himself first, carrying a jug of wine, then Mrs. Sato, grinning greetings. She has never mastered English. It has not been necessary.

  I drag up what pass for chairs. Made them myself. We begin talking about weeds and beans, and weather, bugs, and the condition of fruit trees. It is Sato who has steered the conversation into these familiar ways, bless his knowing heart. He uncorks the wine. Sue and Mrs. Sato, meanwhile, are carrying on one of their lively conversations. Someday I will listen to them, but I doubt that I will ever learn how they communicate…or what. Women.

  I can hear Chris outside talking to Yuki, Sato’s daughter. He is not boasting about the deer; he is telling her about the fight with the tin scorpion and the grape people.

  “Are they blind…the grape people?” the girl asks.

  “Heck no,” says Chris. “At least one of them wasn’t. One of them sicced the robot bug on us. They were going to kill us. And so, Dad did what he had to do….”

  I don’t hear the details over the interjections of Yuki and little Mike, but I can imagine they are as pungent as the teenage powers of physiological description allow. I hear Yuki exclaim, “Oh how utterly germy!” and another language problem occurs to me. How can kids who have never hung around a drugstore still manage to evolve languages of their own…characteristically adolescent dialects? It is one more mystery which I shall never solve. I hear little Mike asking for reasons and causes with his favorite word. “Why, Chris?”