The Best of C.L. Moore & Henry Kuttner

by Henry Kuttner

  His eyes dwelt upon Oliver for an instant very keenly, like a physician’s eyes, impersonal and observing. Absently he reached for his stylus and the note pad. And as he moved, Oliver saw a familiar mark on the underside of the thick, tanned wrist.

  “Kleph had that scar, too,” he heard himself whisper. “And the others.”

  Cenbe nodded. “Inoculation. It was necessary, under the circumstances. We did not want disease to spread in our own time-world.”

  “Disease?”

  Cenbe shrugged. “You would not recognize the name.”

  “But, if you can inoculate against disease—” Oliver thrust himself up on an aching arm. He had a half-grasp upon a thought now which he did not want to let go. Effort seemed to make the ideas come more clearly through his mounting confusion. With enormous effort he went on.

  “I’m getting it now,” he said. “Wait. I’ve been trying to work this out. You can change history? You can! I know you can. Kleph said she had to promise not to interfere. You all had to promise. Does that mean you really could change your own past—our time?”

  Cenbe laid down his pad again. He looked at Oliver thoughtfully, a dark, intent look under heavy brows. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, the past can be changed, but not easily. And it changes the future, too, necessarily. The lines of probability are switched into new patterns—but it is extremely difficult, and it has never been allowed. The physio-temporal course tends to slide back to its norm, always. That is why it is so hard to force any alteration.” He shrugged. “A theoretical science. We do not change history, Wilson. If we changed our past, our present would be altered, too. And our time-world is entirely to our liking. There may be a few malcontents there, but they are not allowed the privilege of temporal travel.”

  Oliver spoke louder against the roaring from beyond the windows. “But you’ve got the power! You could alter history, if you wanted to—wipe out all the pain and suffering and tragedy—”

  “All of that passed away long ago,” Cenbe said.

  “Not—now! Not—this!”

  Cenbe looked at him enigmatically for a while. Then—“This, too,” he said.

  And suddenly Oliver realized from across what distances Cenbe was watching him. A vast distance, as time is measured. Cenbe was a composer and a genius, and necessarily strongly empathic, but his psychic locus was very far away in time. The dying city outside, the whole world of now was not quite real to Cenbe, falling short of reality because of that basic variance in time. It was merely one of the building blocks that had gone to support the edifice on which Cenbe’s culture stood in a misty, unknown, terrible future.

  It seemed terrible to Oliver now. Even Kleph—all of them had been touched with a pettiness, the faculty that had enabled Hollia to concentrate on her malicious, small schemes to acquire a ringside seat while the meteor thundered in toward Earth’s atmosphere. They were all dilettantes, Kleph and Omerie and the other. They toured time, but only as onlookers. Were they bored—sated—with their normal existence?

  Not sated enough to wish change, basically. Their own time-world was a fulfilled womb, a perfection made manifest for their needs. They dared not change the past—they could not risk flawing their own present.

  Revulsion shook him. Remembering the touch of Kleph’s lips, he felt a sour sickness on his tongue. Alluring she had been; he knew that too well. But the aftermath—

  There was something about this race from the future. He had felt it dimly at first, before Kleph’s nearness had drowned caution and buffered his sensibilities. Time traveling purely as an escape mechanism seemed almost blasphemous. A race with such power—

  Kleph—leaving him for the barbaric, splendid coronation at Rome a thousand years ago—how had she seen him? Not as a living, breathing man. He knew that, very certainly. Kleph’s race were spectators.

  But he read more than casual interest in Cenbe’s eyes now. There was an avidity there, a bright, fascinated probing. The man had replaced his earphones—he was different from the others. He was a connoisseur. After the vintage season came the aftermath—and Cenbe.

  Cenbe watched and waited, light flickering softly in the translucent block before him, his fingers poised over the note pad. The ultimate connoisseur waited to savor the rarities that no non-gourmet could appreciate.

  Those thin, distant rhythms of sound that was almost music began to be audible again above the noises of the distant fire. Listening, remembering, Oliver could very nearly catch the pattern of the symphonia as he had heard it, all intermingled with the flash of changing faces and the rank upon rank of the dying—

  He lay back on the bed letting the room swirl away into the darkness behind his closed and aching lids. The ache was implicit in every cell of his body, almost a second ego taking possession and driving him out of himself, a strong, sure ego taking over as he himself let go.

  Why, he wondered dully, should Kleph have lied? She had said there was no aftermath to the drink she had given him. No aftermath—and yet this painful possession was strong enough to edge him out of his own body.

  Kleph had not lied. It was no aftermath to drink. He knew that—but the knowledge no longer touched his brain or his body. He lay still, giving them up to the power of the illness which was aftermath to something far stronger than the strongest drink. The illness that had no name—yet.

  Cenbe’s new symphonia was a crowning triumph. It had its premiere from Antares Hall, and the applause was an ovation. History itself, of course, was the artist—opening with the meteor that forecast the great plagues of the fourteenth century and closing with the climax Cenbe had caught on the threshold of modern times. But only Cenbe could have interpreted it with such subtle power.

  Critics spoke of the masterly way in which he had chosen the face of the Stuart king as a recurrent motif against the montage of emotion and sound and movement. But there were other faces, fading through the great sweep of the composition, which helped to build up to the tremendous climax. One face in particular, one moment that the audience absorbed greedily. A moment in which one man’s face loomed huge in the screen, every feature clear. Cenbe had never caught an emotional crisis so effectively, the critics agreed. You could almost read the man’s eyes.

  After Cenbe had left, he lay motionless for a long while. He was thinking feverishly—

  I’ve got to find some way to tell people. If I’d known in advance, maybe something could have been done. We’d have forced them to tell us how to change the probabilities. We could have evacuated the city.

  If I could leave a message—

  Maybe not for today’s people. But later. They visit all through time. If they could be recognized and caught somewhere, sometime, and made to change destiny—

  It wasn’t easy to stand up. The room kept tilting. But he managed it. He found pencil and paper and through the swaying of the shadows he wrote down what he could. Enough. Enough to warn, enough to save.

  He put the sheets on the table, in plain sight, and weighted them down before he stumbled back to bed through closing darkness.

  The house was dynamited six days later, part of the futile attempt to halt the relentless spread of the Blue Death.

  Afterword: Footnote to “Shambleau”…and Others

  One question is almost certainly asked of every professional writer more than any other: “Where do you get your ideas?” For the past forty-odd years I have had to admit I didn’t know. But the answer has suddenly come to me as I look back over the origins of my first story, “Shambleau,” and I am very happy indeed to pass it on to you.

  Brace yourself now for some rather dull but necessary background: My name was Catherine Moore and I lived in a large midwestern city and the depression of the 1930s was rampant over the land. So I was snatched from my sophomore year at the state university and crammed into a business school to learn the rudiments of shorthand and typing. By incredible good fortune, before I’d finished the course, a job opening in a large bank loomed up and I leaped at it, unprepare
d but eager. (In those days you didn’t mess around. You bluffed, prayed, and grabbed.)

  Well, I was adequate, but typing was something I practiced in every spare moment. And this is where “Shambleau” began, halfway down a sheet of yellow paper otherwise filled up with boring quick-brown-foxes, alphabets, and things like “The White Knight is sliding down the poker. He balances very badly,” to lighten the practice.

  Midway down that yellow page I began fragments remembered from sophomore English at the university. All the choices were made at random. Keats, Browning, Byron—you name it. In the middle of this exercise a line from a poem (by William Morris?) worked itself to the front and I discovered myself typing something about a “red, running figure.” I looked at it a while, my mind a perfect blank, and then shifted mental gears without even adding punctuation to mark the spot, swinging with idiot confidence into the first lines of the story which ended up as “Shambleau.”

  The red, running figure in the poem had been a young witch pursued by soldiers and townspeople in some medieval village. In my story they had perfectly sensible reasons for killing her as soon as possible.

  I sat at the typewriter and heard distant bells ringing somewhere on the backstairs of my mind. The situation was wide open, and with no conscious mental processes whatever I surrendered myself to it and the typewriter. (This is among life’s most luxurious moments—giving the story its head and just keep your fingers moving. They know where they’re going.)

  Unfortunately, you can’t expect your unconscious to carry on for very long unaided. So far I have only promised to reveal where the ideas come from, not the story itself. So stay with me, pay close attention, and I’ll see what I can do.

  First, you have to read a great deal of the works you enjoy most. Much of it will be useless. But the trusty unconscious can be relied on to make lots of unseen notes, just in case. Mine did not fail me.

  I couldn’t let my character Shambleau go on running forever, could I? I had the whole scene in hand now—medieval setting, red, running figure, pursuing soldiers and citizens. But then what?

  Obviously she was going to need help—also a foil to set her off effectively and to give the story a shape it didn’t yet have. So Northwest Smith strolled onstage without even a glance my way, perfectly sure of what he was going to do about this. (Northwest Smith? Well, once I had typed a letter to an N. W. Smith, and the name lingered tantalizingly in my mind, waiting for this moment. What would a man named Northwest Smith look like? Be like? Occupy himself with? I soon found out.)

  To complete the triumvirate of lead characters to whom my typewriter introduced me that day long ago, a companion and foil for Smith slouched carelessly into view, thirsting for drink and women. His name was Yarol, and I cannot conceal from you that it is an anagram from the letters in the name of the typewriter I was using. But I like it anyhow.

  Here we return to my conviction that you must read enough, enjoy it enough, to absorb unconsciously the structure of the fiction you like best. In this case Shambleau needed help urgently. There wasn’t any yet. The story required a backbone strong enough to support the plot, and Northwest Smith arrived on cue. For contrast with the seemingly helpless fugitive, “Shambleau” needed a strong, tall, romantically steely-eyed male. I think it was along about here my mind got devious and I realized that after his use as a defender was over she might just possibly spring her trap and destroy him. You will note that this gave my still unfledged plot a way to go after the rescue.

  So Smith himself was going to need help. Preferably from someone as antithetical to Smith as Smith was to Shambleau. (Who needs two Northwest Smiths?)

  Therefore, Yarol.

  And that’s how it all began.

  There are of course seven or eight other stories in this collection, which could be traced along much the same curve as I’ve just plotted for “Shambleau.”

  “No Woman Born,” for instance. Given the basic idea—what would happen to the most beautiful and gifted dancer of her time if she were totally incapacitated by a frightful accident? Well, you gear your mind to a technological solution, but the human element keeps intruding and you know you haven’t really answered the question. How would being a quasi-robot, no matter how beautiful, affect her thinking and her feeling as a human being? How would you handle it?

  “Vintage Season” was, I believe, the first science-fiction story to ask, “What if time travelers from the future visit epic events of our era simply as tourists, here to make a Roman Holiday of our personal disasters?” It’s a challenging idea and has been dealt with often since.

  If you have read past Shambleau to Jirel, you will probably have noticed what a close relationship the two women bear to one another. They set the keynote for a lot of my own (incessant) writing until I met and married Henry Kuttner. I realize now that, unconsciously, no doubt, both were versions of the self I’d like to have been. I’d never noticed this before. The unconscious works in a mysterious way, doesn’t it? (I have just glanced at my Unconscious to see if the tribute was noticed. It wasn’t. He has fitted himself into the image of a large black cat and is preening his left shoulder and ignoring me. A rebuke I should take to heart. The unconscious more than anything hates being dragged into public. He can’t work under the inspection of the conscious mind.)

  All but two of the stories in this collection (“No Woman Born” and “Vintage Season”) were written before Henry Kuttner and I married, and there was not yet any melding of styles or even collaboration—beyond my asking helplessly now and then “What should come next?” All started out with some wild but malleable idea for which I had to choose a lead character strong enough to play the action against, which is what gives a story form.

  Sometimes the stories went very fast and I had to cast around desperately when I outran the idea, until Unconscious Himself came in dragging a rat or a bird and I could get on with it. (I always make him let the birds go.—If possible.)

  One last comment on “Shambleau.” This is as good a time as any to clear up a misconception which has long crept about unchallenged. This story was not rejected by every magazine in the field before it crept humbly to the doorstep of Weird Tales. My own perfectly clear memory tells me that I sent it first to WT because that was the only magazine of the type I knew well, and that an answering acceptance and a check for the (then) fabulous amount of $100.00 arrived almost by return mail.

  Actually, I was far too unsure of myself to have hammered on the door of every publisher in New York if my first opus had been so unkindly treated. I’d simply have given it up and turned to some other form of activity, and this book would not be in your hands now. (I’m glad it is, too.)

  C. L. MOORE

  1975

  More from C.L. Moore

  Black God’s Kiss

  Originally published in the legendary magazine Weird Tales in 1934, C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry is fantasy’s first true strong female protagonist, as well as one of the most striking and memorable characters to come out of the golden age of science fiction and fantasy. Published alongside landmark stories by H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, the five classic stories included in this volume prove that C.L. Moore’s Jirel is a rival to Conan the Barbarian and Elric of Melnibone, making BLACK GOD’S KISS an essential addition to any fantasy library.

  Doomsday Morning

  In the wake of a nuclear war, the totalitarian system known as COMUS has restored order in a shattered America. COMUS controls every aspect of American life, from communications to transportation to law enforcement, but cracks are beginning to show: rumors of a rebellion in California are brewing, and COMUS’ leadership is aging. History is at a crossroads, and the man who will decide the outcome is a washed-up actor named Howard Rohan.

  Leading a troupe of theatre players to perform in the heart of rebel territory, Howard’s true mission is to gather intelligence on a device which could bring down COMUS. But Rohan finds himself slipping between his roles as a double agent and supposed re
volutionary sympathizer, to the point where even he isn’t sure where he stands. As America edges closer to its reckoning, Rohan will need to decide who he’s been lying to: the rebels, COMUS, or himself.

  Jirel of Joiry

  With her red hair flowing, her yellow eyes glinting like embers, and her face streaked with blood, Jirel is strong, fearless, and driven by honor. Her legendary debut, BLACK GOD’S KISS, begins as her castle, Joiry, is overrun by invaders, but knowing that this is one battle she cannot fight, she summons her courage and cunning and descends into the castle’s hidden reaches, where she crosses through a doorway into Hell itself…

  JIREL OF JOIRY collects the classic tales of blood and vengeance that secured C.L. Moore’s place among legendary authors of sword and sorcery like Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Originally published in the magazine Weird Tales, Moore’s fantastic tales of warriors, gods, and magic are defined by a fierce, romantic vision that helped define the genre, earning her the title of Grand Master for lifetime achievement by the World Fantasy Convention.

  Includes BLACK GOD’S KISS, BLACK GOD’S SHADOW, JIREL MEETS MAGIC, THE DARK LAND, and HELLSGARDE.

  Judgment Night

  JUDGMENT NIGHT is a classic space opera, a tour-de-force from the golden age of science fiction.

  The Lens of Death was the most destructive weapon in the history of the cosmos. Now it will decide the fate of the Lyonese, whose galactic empire is crumbling before the assaults of a new, younger race, the H’vani. The champion of the empire and its home-world of Ericon is the daughter of the Emperor, Juille: a tall, fierce Amazon who will not see her dynasty end. But Juille could never have foreseen the twist of fate that turns her mortal enemy, the godlike H’vani warrior known as Egide, into her lover. As their races clash, the two are locked in a swirling embrace of death and lust that might end in the destruction of their peoples, the galaxy, and one another.