The Cache

by Philip José Farmer

  It was the skins that had made the universal peace possible on the planet of New Gaul. And it would be the custom of the Skins that would make possible the change from peace to conflict among the populace.

  Through the artificial Skins that were put on all babies at birth—and which grew with them, attached to their body, feeding from their bloodstreams, their nervous systems—the Skins, controlled by a huge Master Skin that floated in a chemical vat in the palace of the rulers, fed, indoctrinated and attended day and night by a crew of the most brilliant scientists of the planet, gave the Kings complete control of the minds and emotions of the inhabitants of the planet.

  Originally, the rulers of New Gaul had desired only that the populace live in peace and enjoy the good things of their planet equally. But the change that had been coming gradually—the growth of conflict between the Kings of the different species for control of the whole populace—was beginning to be generally felt. Uneasiness, distrust of each other was growing among the people. Hence the legalizing of the Underground, the Philosophy of Violence by the government, an effort to control the revolt that was brewing.

  Yet, the Land-dwellers had managed to take no action at all and to ignore the growing number of vicious acts.

  But not all were content to drowse. One man was aroused. He was Rastignac.

  They were Rastignac’s hope, those Six Stars, the gods to which he prayed. When they passed quickly out of his sight, he would continue his pacing, meditating for the twenty-thousandth time on a means for reaching one of those ships and using it to visit the stars. The end of his fantasies was always a curse because of the futility of such hopes. He was doomed! Mankind was doomed!

  And it was all the more maddening because Man would not admit that he was through. Ended, that is, as a human being.

  Man was changing into something not quite homo sapiens. It might be a desirable change, but it would mean the finish of his climb upwards. So it seemed to Rastignac. And he, being the man he was, had decided to do something about it even if it meant violence.

  That was why he was now in the well-dungeon. He was an advocator of violence against the status quo.

  II

  There was another cell next to his. It was also at the bottom of a well and was separated from his by a thin wall of cement. A window had been set into it so that the prisoners could talk to each other. Rastignac did not care for the woman who had been let down into the adjoining cell, but she was somebody to talk to.

  “Amphib-changelings” was the name given to those human beings who had been stolen from their cradles and raised among the non-humanoid Amphibians as their own. The girl in the adjoining cell, Lusine, was such. It was not her fault that she was a blood-drinking Amphib. Yet, he could not help disliking her for what she had done and for the things she stood for.

  She was in prison because she had been caught in the act of stealing a Man child from its cradle. This was no legal crime, but she had left in the cradle, under the covers, a savage and blood-thirsty little monster that had leaped up and slashed the throat of the unsuspecting baby’s mother.

  Her cell was lit by a cageful of glowworms. Rastignac, peering through the grille, could see her shadowy shape in the inner cell inside the wall. She rose langorously and stepped into the dim orange light cast by the insects.

  “B’zhu, m’fweh,” she greeted him.

  It annoyed him that she called him her brother, and it annoyed him even more to know that she knew it. It was true that she had some excuse for thus addressing him. She did resemble him. Like him, she had straight glossy blue-black hair, thick bracket-shaped eyebrows, brown eyes, a straight nose and a prominent chin. And where his build was superbly masculine, hers was magnificently feminine.

  Nevertheless, this was not her reason for so speaking to him. She knew the disgust the Land-walker had for the Amphib-changeling, and she took a perverted delight in baiting him.

  He was proud that he seldom allowed her to see that she annoyed him. “B’zhu, fam tey zafeep, “ he said. “Good evening, woman of the Amphibians.”

  Mockingly, she said, “Have you been watching the Six Flying Stars, Jean-Jacques?”

  “Vi. I do so every time they come over.”

  “Why do you eat your heart out because you cannot fly up to them and then voyage among the stars on one of them?”

  He refused to give her the satisfaction of knowing his real reason. He did not want her to realize how little he thought of Mankind and its chances for surviving—as humanity—upon the face of this planet, L’Bawpfey.

  “I look at them because they remind me that Man was once captain of his soul.”

  “Then you admit that the Land-walker is weak?”

  “I think he is on the way to becoming non-human, which is to say that he is weak, yes. But what I say about Landman goes for Seaman, too. You Changelings are becoming more Amphibian every day and less Human. Through the Skins, the Amphibis are gradually changing you. Soon you will be completely sea-people.”

  She laughed scornfully, exposing perfect white teeth as she did so.

  “The Sea will win out against the Land. It launches itself against the shore and shakes it with the crash of its body. It eats away the rock and the dirt and absorbs it into its own self. It can’t be worn away nor caught and held in a net. It is elusive and all-powerful and never-tiring.”

  Lusine paused for breath. He said, “This is a very pretty analogy, but it doesn’t apply. You Seafolk are as much flesh and blood as we Landfolk. What hurts us hurts you.”

  She put a hand around one bar. The glow-light fell upon it in such a way that it showed plainly the webbing of skin between her fingers. He glanced at it with a faint repulsion under which was a countercurrent of attraction. This was the hand that had, indirectly, shed blood.

  She glanced at him sidewise, challenged him in trembling tones. “You are not one to throw stones, Jean-Jacques. I have heard that you eat meat.”

  “Fish, not meat. That is part of my Philosophy of Violence,” he retorted. “I maintain that one of the reasons man is losing his power and strength is that he has so long been upon a vegetable diet. He is as cowed and submissive as the grass-eating beast of the fields.”

  Lusine put her face against the bars.

  “That is interesting,” she said. “But how did you happen to begin eating fish? I thought we Amphibs alone did that.”

  What Lusine had just said angered him. He had no reply.

  Rastignac knew he should not be talking to a Sea-changeling. They were glib and seductive and always searching for ways to twist your thoughts. But, being Rastignac, he had to talk. Moreover, it was so difficult to find anybody who would listen to his ideas that he could not resist the temptation.

  “I was given fish by the Ssassaror, Mapfarity, when I was a child. We lived along the seashore. Mapfarity was a child, too, and we played together. ‘Don’t eat fish!’ my parents said. To me that meant ‘Eat it!’ So, despite my distaste at the idea, and my squeamish stomach, I did eat fish. And I liked it. And, as I grew to manhood, I adopted the Philosphy of Violence and I continued to eat fish although I am not a Changeling.”

  “What did your Skin do when it detected you?” Lusine asked. Her eyes were wide and luminous with wonder and a sort of glee as if she relished the confession of his sins. Also, he knew, she was taunting him about the futility of his ideas of violence so long as he was a prisoner of the Skin.

  He frowned in annoyance at the reminder of the Skin. Much thought had he given, in a weak way, to the possibility of life without the Skin.

  Ashamed now of his weak resistance to the Skin, he blustered a bit in front of the teasing Amphib girl.

  “Mapfarity and I discovered something that most people don’t know,” he answered boastfully. “We found that if you can stand the shocks your Skin gives you when you do something wrong, the Skin gets tired and quits after a while. Of course, your Skin recharges itself and the next time you eat fish it shocks you again. But, after very
many shocks, it becomes accustomed, forgets its conditioning, and leaves you alone.”

  Lusine laughed and said in a low conspiratorial tone, “So your Ssassaror pal and you adopted the Philosophy of Violence because you remained fish and meat eaters?”

  “Yes, we did. When Mapfarity reached puberty he became a Giant and went off to live in a castle in the forest. But we have remained friends through our connection in the underground.”

  “Your parents must have suspected that you were a fish eater when you first proposed your Philosophy of Violence?” she said.

  “Suspicion isn’t proof,” he answered. “But I shouldn’t be telling you all this, Lusine. I feel it is safe for me to do so only because you will never have a chance to tell on me. You will soon be taken to Chalice and there you will stay until you have been cured.”

  She shivered and said, “This Chalice? What is it?”

  “It is a place far to the north where both Terrans and Ssassarors send their incorrigibles. It is an extinct volcano whose step-sided interior makes an inescapable prison. There those who have persisted in unnatural behavior are given special treatment.”

  “They are bled?” she asked, her eyes widening as her tongue flicked over her lips again hungrily.

  “No. A special breed of Skin is given them to wear. These Skins shock them more powerfully than the ordinary ones, and the shocks are associated with the habit they are trying to cure. The shocks effect a cure. Also, these special Skins are used to detect hidden unnatural emotions. They recondition the deviate. The result is that when the Chaliced Man is judged able to go out and take his place in society again, he is thoroughly reconditioned. Then, his regular Skin is given back to him, and it has no trouble keeping him in line from then on. The Chaliced Man is a very good citizen.”

  “And what if a revolter doesn’t become Chaliced?”

  “Then, he stays in Chalice until he decides to become so.”

  Her voice rose sharply as she said, “But if I go there, and I am not fed the diet of the Amphibs, I will grow old and die!”

  “No. The government will feed you the diet you need until you are reconditioned. Except. . .” He paused.

  “Except I won’t get blood,” she wailed. Then, realizing she was acting undignified before a Landman, she firmed her voice.

  “The King of the Amphibians will not allow them to do this to me,” she said. “When he hears of it, he will demand my return. And, if the King of Men refuses, my King will use violence to get me back.”

  Rastignac smiled and said, “I hope he does. Then, perhaps, my people will wake up and get rid of their Skins and make war upon your people.”

  “So that is what you Philosophers of Violence want, is it? Well, you will not get it. My father, the Amphib King, will not be so stupid as to declare a war.”

  “I suppose not,” replied Rastignac. “He will send a band to rescue you. If they’re caught, they’ll claim to be criminals and say they are not under the King’s orders.”

  Lusine looked upwards to see if a guard was hanging over the well’s mouth listening. Perceiving no one, she nodded and said, “You have guessed it correctly. And that is why we laugh so much at you stupid Humans. You know as well as we do what’s going on, but you are afraid to tell us so. You keep clinging to the idea that your turn-the-other-cheek policy will soften us and insure peace.”

  “Not I,” said Rastignac. “I know perfectly well there is only one solution to man’s problems. That is—”

  “That is Violence,” she finished for him. “That is what you have been preaching. And that is why you are in this cell, waiting for trial.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “Men are not put into the Chalice for proposing new philosophies. As long as they behave naturally, they may say what they wish. They may even petition the King that the new philosophy be made a law. The King passes it on to the Chamber of Deputies. They consider it and put it up to the people. If the people like it, it becomes a law. The only trouble with that procedure is that it may take ten years before the law is considered by the Chamber of Deputies.”

  “And in those ten years,” she mocked, “the Amphibs and the Amphibian-changelings will have won the planet.”

  “That is true,” he said.

  “The King of the Humans is a Ssassaror and the King of the Ssassarors is a Man,” said Lusine. “Our King can’t see any reason for changing the status quo. After all, it is the Ssassaror who are responsible for the Skins and for Man’s position in the sentient society of this planet. Why should he be favorable to a policy of Violence? The Ssassarors loathe violence.”

  “And so you have preached Violence without waiting for it to become a law? And for that you are now in this cell?”

  “Not exactly. The Ssassarors have long known that to suppress too much of Man’s naturally belligerent nature only results in an explosion. So they have legalized illegality—up to a point. Thus, the King socially made me the Chief of the Underground and gave me a state license to preach—but not practice—Violence. I am even allowed to advocate overthrow of the present system of government—as long as I take no action that is too productive of results.

  “I am in jail now because the Minister of Ill-Will put me here. He had my Skin examined, and it was found to be ‘unhealthy.’ He thought I’d be better off locked up until it became ‘healthy’ again. But the King . . .”

  III

  Lusine’s laughter was like the call of a silver-bell bird. Whatever her unhuman appetites, she had a beautiful voice. She said, “How comical! And how do you, with your brave ideas, like being regarded as a harmless figure of fun, or as a sick man?”

  “I like it as well as you would,” he growled.

  She gripped the bars of her window until the tendons on the back of her long thin hands stood out and the membranes between her fingers stretched like windblown tents. Face twisted, she spat at him, “Coward! Why don’t you kill somebody and break out of this ridiculous mold—that Skin that the Ssassarors have poured you into?”

  Rastignac was silent. That was a good question. Why didn’t he? Killing was the logical result of his philosophy. But the Skin kept him docile. Yes, he could vaguely see that he had purposely shut his eyes to the destination towards which his ideas were .slowly but inevitably traveling.

  And there was another facet to the answer to her question—if he had to kill, he would not kill a Man. His philosophy was directed towards the Amphibians and the Sea-changelings.

  He said, “Violence doesn’t necessarily mean the shedding of blood, Lusine. My philosophy urges that we take a more vigorous action, that we overthrow some of the biosocial institutions which have imprisoned Man and stripped him of his dignity as an individual.”

  “Yes, I have heard that you want Man to stop wearing the Skin. That is what has horrified your people, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “And I understand it has had the same effect among the Amphibians.”

  She bridled, her brown eyes flashing in the feeble glowworms’ light. “Why shouldn’t it? What would we be without our Skins?”

  “What, indeed?” he said, laughing derisively afterwards.

  Earnestly, she said, “You don’t understand. We Amphibians—our Skins are not like yours. We do not wear them for the same reason you do. You are imprisoned by your Skins—they tell you how to feel, what to think. Above all, they keep you from getting ideas about noncooperation or nonintegration with Nature as a whole.

  “That, to us individualistic Amphibians, is false. The purpose of our Skins is to make sure that our King’s subjects understand what he wants so that we may all act as one unit and thus further the progress of the Seafolk.”

  The first time Rastignac had heard this statement, he had howled with laughter. Now, however, knowing that she could not see the fallacy, he did not try to argue the point. The Amphibs were, in their way, as hidebound—no pun intended—as the Land-walkers.

  “Look, Lusine,” he said, “there are only thre
e places where a Man may take off his Skin. One is in his own home, when he may hang it upon the halltree. Two is when he is, like us, in jail and therefore may not harm anybody. The third is when a man is King. Now, you and I have been without our Skins for a week. We have gone longer without them than anybody, except the King. Tell me true, don’t you feel free for the first time in your life?

  “Don’t you feel as if you belong to nobody but yourself, that you are accountable to no one but yourself, and that you love that feeling? And don’t you dread the day we will be let out of prison and made to wear our Skins again? That day which, curiously enough, will be the very day that we will lose our freedom.”

  Lusine looked as if she didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “You’ll see what I mean when we are freed and the Skins are put back upon us,” he said. Immediately after, he was embarrassed. He remembered that she would go to the Chalice where one of the heavy and powerful Skins used for unnaturals would be fastened to her shoulders.

  Lusine did not notice. She was considering the last but most telling point in her argument. “You cannot win against us,” she said, watching him narrowly for the effect of her words. “We have a weapon that is irresistible. We have immortality.”

  His face did not lose its imperturbability.

  She continued, “And what is more, we can give immortality to anyone who casts off his Skin and adopts ours. Don’t think that your people don’t know this. For instance, during the last year more than two thousand Humans living along the beaches deserted and went over to us, the Amphibs.”

  He was a little shocked to hear this, but he did not doubt her. He remembered the mysterious case of the schooner Le Pauvre Pierre which had been found drifting and crewless, and he remembered a conversation he had had with a fisherman in his home port of Marrec.

  He put his hands behind his back and began pacing. Lusine continued staring at him through the bars. Despite the fact that her face was in” the shadows, he could see—or feel—her smile. He had humiliated her, but she had won in the end.