Universe 5 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Terry Carr

  As we walked along our quiet streets, I sensed that the trees, pleasant gardens and fountains were all subtly different. I can’t explain it. Contentment, pleasure in these things, had gone. I felt as I did the day Regan bore Arthur—upset, different, how to describe it? Disturbed? It took me back to those dreadful walks home from school when I knew Lesley was waiting down the road behind the big elm, ready to pounce on me, throw me on the ground and kick and punch me.

  The Council House stood there in the center of the big square with its marble statues and twenty small fountains. There were people in the square buying and selling foodstuffs and material. All spoke in low voices, smiled at each other—there were more people walking to and fro on the long marble floor of the House. The smell of aromatic tea from the restaurant was strong, as it usually is in the mornings. All over the country the doors of the Houses had just swung open, the citizens had entered and were talking to each other, the scent of the tea was wafting through hall, offices and corridors.

  As we mounted the stairs to the town officer’s room, I felt quite easy and calm in my mind.

  We went in. Hendricks, the town officer, sat in an easy chair by his big windows, which look out onto the square. The light flooded into the elegant room. Regan and I sat down. Hendricks poured tea for us. He is a big man, ruddy-skinned, round-headed, with a mane of golden hair. The sunlight caught it as we sat there, turning the top of his head into a cap of gold strands. I thought as he sat solidly in his chair that he must look very like a ship’s captain of the old days.

  He looked at us with his large, very bright blue eyes. He said, “You look—disturbed.” There was a touch of mild dislike in his tone. Well, it is bad to have citizens walking about looking hard-pressed and upset.

  “We have a reason,” Regan said, somewhat defensively.

  ‘I am sure you have,” he replied. There was a pause as we drank our tea. Hendricks went on looking at us and said finally, “Perhaps you would like to tell me what is amiss with you.”

  I disliked the attitude implied in that “with you.” It came to me that Hendricks scented disturbance in our manner and did not wish to have any part in it. But I was confident that once we had told our stories his attitude would alter.

  “There are two stories we must tell you,” I said briskly. I had worked often with Hendricks on building projects. I told myself he knew me as a sensible man and a reliable citizen. “In fact,” I said, “these tales may disturb you very much. But they must be told. I will tell one, and Regan the other. Mine concerns Keeney.”

  I was studying his face. His eyes flickered at the mention of Keeney’s name. He reminded me suddenly of a big, healthy child being accused of some misdeed which he has decided to deny.

  I told him how I had gone to visit Keeney, of the disturbed look of the place, of the locked door, of Mrs. Keeney’s peculiar air and, finally, of the dog. Then I told him that Keeney had not been in Juram when we went there.

  Hendricks said, “I am amazed. Tell me your story now, Regan.”

  And she told him about our drive from Juram and the wild man caught in the headlights of the car.

  When she had finished, Hendricks looked at us with his bright-blue eyes and said, “Thank you. We will look into all this.”

  “What are we going to do?” I asked.

  “It will be discussed in the council,” he said. He sat stiffly in his chair and looked at me as if he were expecting me to go.

  “That hardly satisfies me,” I said. “These are not matters which can wait. Or be left to the council alone to decide—they are for all the citizens. Above all, I would like to know your thoughts.”

  He drank some tea and said, “It all needs sifting.”

  “Sifting!” I cried. “Do you imply there are errors in our reports?”

  ‘We need to get to the bottom of it,” he said slowly.

  Regan sat up straight in her chair and said, “Come, come, Hendricks. You have accounts of disconcerting events from two responsible citizens. Either you believe that we are making up stories to mislead you, or that we are both deluded, or you must take us seriously and share your thoughts and ideas with us.”

  Hendricks gazed out of the window at the people in the square.

  He said, “I don’t know.”

  We both stared at him. Then Regan stood up and said, “This will have been a great shock to you. Perhaps we should approach your deputy?”

  “Leave it with me. Leave it with me,” he muttered.

  When we went out of the room, he was still sitting there staring from the window. The sun had gone in.

  On the stairs Regan said decidedly, “We must approach someone else.”

  I stopped with my hand on the rail. “I wonder,” I said, “if anyone will listen to us.”

  Standing on the stairs, she began to laugh. I looked at her in alarm, conscious that down in the hall people were beginning to look up at her.

  “What—?” I said.

  “You think anyone we tell about these events will behave like Hendricks?” she asked. She was still smiling.

  “In most cases,” I said.

  She nodded, fairly accepting the situation, which I could not truly understand. “I knew it,” she said. “I told my mother this would happen.”

  “What would happen?’ said I.

  “I said that one day she would wake up and”—she began to laugh again—”and she would be able to ignore the fact that it was raining and go for a walk without protective clothing and come home and catch pneumonia and die saying what a lovely day it had been.”

  I became impatient. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Regan,” I said. “But I do know that you’re making a public spectacle of yourself. Come home.”

  She sobered down and said, “I suppose so. That’s all there is to do, isn’t it?”

  * * * *

  the drum heater is beating tonight. He beat for many hours last night and the night before, drumming through the night while we kept fire alight with many logs. We did not sleep till morning. We love that wild drumming and our blood runs hot and fast.

  * * * *

  Regan, Arthur and I ate our evening meal in my room at the top of the house this evening. We had never done it before. Through the glass walls we can see south, over the broad, white streets of the city and forward, north, down over the lawn to the forest. The building work lay abandoned. The men had downed tools in the afternoon. Bricks lay in small piles along its length; tools had been flung down on the grass. The deep trench lay like a gash across the lawn between the forest and my house. The foundations were almost ready. The real work should begin tomorrow.

  A cool breeze shook the trees of the forest. The sky overhead was cloudy. We sat on as the evening grew darker.

  * * * *

  drums beating, drums, beating, beating, beating...

  * * * *

  Suddenly, in the dusk, a figure appeared, treading over the ramparts, straddling them, head down to examine them.

  “Keeney,” Regan said.

  We sat watching him in silence.

  In the gloom we could not make out his face. We could see his thickset figure walking heavily along the course of the foundations, bending over the bricks and tools.

  Then, in the dusk, he stood athwart the trench, raised his big head, stood with his large hands hanging by his sides and laughed out loud, up at the sky. From where we sat we could catch the faint sound of his laughter.

  Arthur said nothing at first. He looked at Keeney laughing in the dark. Then he said, “What the boys say is right.

  “What do they say?” I asked.

  But he only shook his head.

  I looked at Regan. At last I had identified the uneasiness, uncertainty, I had felt this morning and wondered at. It was fear of the future. Regan shot a glance at Arthur.

  Regan stood up suddenly and said, “I’m going down to talk to Keeney.” She ran out of the room. I heard her feet on the stairs and saw her running over the lawn �
�and suddenly Keeney was gone. He had vanished in the darkness.

  Regan came back and said, “Come on, Arthur—bed.”

  Arthur followed her out of the room. It was quite dark now. I could see the trees ahead and the dim lights of the town behind.

  Later I said to Regan, “Shall we leave for another city?”

  “It would be the same anywhere else,” she said.

  “Other cities may be more ready to defend themselves.”

  “After five hundred years of developing our kind of life,” she said mildly. ‘Electing councils, planting gardens, living by the law, playing gentle music, writing gentle verse, creating beauty, pleasure and peaceful scenes everywhere, avoiding every kind of violence, even that of birth and death, as if it were a dreadful, contagious disease—”

  “As it is,” I said.

  “Oh, certainly,” Regan said. “The cities came out of the ruin created by violence, aggression and competitiveness. But our fear of violence may have been as destructive as the violence itself. Do you know what it’s like to rear a child in constant terror of its rages, its hatreds, its inability to tell the difference between order and chaos? And then to know, and have to pretend not to know, that all these things were in us once— and probably still are? You men—hypocrites, all of you. Your Unexpected Arrivals—unexpected by you, perhaps, not by us. Your solemn conclaves, decisions that someone must leave the city for this crime or that. We women conceal the worst for you—we hide births and deaths, we deal with malformed babies as we’ve always done, we get sent away for conceiving, for giving birth without permission, we hide children who bite, whine and scream until we can eradicate enough of them to present them as citizens, we secretly threaten the older children until they abandon their uncontrolled way. And then we conceal from ourselves what we do.”

  “I’m going to bed,” I said.

  “Go to bed,” she said. “But we still have to face the results of what we’ve done. And what about Arthur?”

  “What about him?” I asked.

  “What about him indeed,” she said savagely. “When it happens—this thing we aren’t talking about—what will happen to Arthur?”

  “I’ll think about that in the morning,” I said.

  “Goodnight,” she said. “Goodnight.’

  * * * *

  the drums do not beat anymore. It is the Holy Time.

  * * * *

  It is happening at last.

  Night after night we have come up to my room here at the top of the house. We have eaten and sat in silence as the darkness came down, catching the scents and gentle sounds from the city on one side, seeing the trees of the forest waving ahead on the other. The ramparts creep up a little each day. They are three feet high now and go all around the town at that height, like a tpy wall to stop little children from straying.

  Almost every night Keeney comes at the same time and paces the length of the wall as far as we can see, with his short, heavy steps. Sometimes I think I can see him smiling.

  The matters of the dog and his unexplained absence have never been raised. No one wants to know. So Keeney pads around his ramparts every night in peace.

  But tonight everything is different. The city—men, women and children—have all come out in the soft, evening air. They are strolling about or sitting in groups all over the lawn behind the ramparts. The women are sewing, children playing ball, men chatting. We can hear laughter.

  Arthur, sitting quietly with us, does not ask why they are there or want to go out and join them. His eyes have grown large over the weeks. We cannot tell him what is wrong. But I think he knows.

  And, as we watch, it grows darker. Torches are brought out on stands and the stands are placed on the grass. There is a fire in the center of my smooth lawn. The women are heating food. Now we see people moving in and out of the light cast by the fire and the torches. An innocent and pleasant scene.

  As they did not know why they wanted the wall, so they do not know why they are gathering behind its unfinished length.

  Now it grows dark, really dark. There is a full moon which shines down when the cloud is not over it. It eclipses the light thrown by the torches. The children are laughing harder. The men talk more, the womens’ voices grow shriller. Some children are tired and crying.

  Regan and Arthur sit with their arms around each other, looking from the window. We three notice, from our vantage point, that the branches on the forest trees are beginning to shake, although there is no wind.

  Our citizens begin to sing an old song, a high, clear song. They stand in the dark singing. Tears begin to run down Regan’s cheeks.

  And the first man comes out of the trees. He is very pale. He blinks, screws up his face against the light. He is a small man dressed in skins, with blue tattoos up his arms. He seems about to return to the safety of the trees and has taken a step back when the bushes part again and his woman, long-haired, tattered and very thin, comes out and stands beside him. She has only one eye. The other one is covered by a mass of scarred skin. She pulls and something, a child, comes out of the forest and stands in front of her. It is a small boy, barefoot and wearing a torn pair of shorts. He stands, head lowered, holding her hand. His head is scabby; patches of hair have fallen out completely.

  Regan looks at the trio calmly. What does she think? That the woman might be her sister Jessica, who walked out into the forest when she became pregnant without authority for the second time? That the woman might have been she?

  Quietly, the bushes part again and again. More and more of the forest people appear and stand together silently at the edge of the trees, getting used to the light falling into their eyes. There is a woman in a stocking cap. There is a fat man gnawing on a bloody bone. Strange how, even at this point, I find the sight of the blood running down the corners of his mouth so disgusting.

  “Keeney,” whispers Regan, incredulous.

  Yes, of course the man in front of the wild men is Keeney. He stands there in a suit, gnawing his piece of meat, talking to a small man in front who carries a club.

  Our citizens go on singing. They have not yet seen the men and women on the other side of the barrier. But now, over the song, I hear the drums inside the forest pounding out a strong, meaningless rhythm; and as the drums get louder, the singers, at last, hear them, and their song falters and dies away. They peer across the ramparts, trying to see what is happening.

  Keeney whispers to his companion, the small man. The forest people seem to gather themselves together. The drums beat louder. Suddenly the wild men and women begin to scream. Yelling in high, weird voices, they run to the ramparts, scramble over them and hurl themselves at the citizens, clubbing and spearing. In one corner Keeney’s dog fells a child and mauls it. The child’s mother tries to pull it off but the animal is tearing at its prey. The child’s face screams in the moonlight. Then the moon is covered by a cloud. In the darkness there are howls. Torches are overturned. In the light thrown by the fire I see the townspeople milling about, falling, crying out. They are like children. They do not know what is happening to them.

  Arthur is asleep, asleep forever now. Our house is quiet as Regan and I watch the carnage below.

  Yet I am not shocked by the scene, by the thought of our city in flames, as it will be, the pillars, the flower gardens, the fountains all destroyed. Our city turned its back on pain, violence and disorder. Now the accumulation of all that chaos over five hundred years is on us.

  The horde pauses in its work. The moon reappears. Our men, women and children lie dead and wounded on the torn-up grass. The people of the forest look at the house and suddenly, like leaves driven by the wind, they begin to run toward us. Keeney, at their head, glances up at the window where I am sitting. He opens his mouth in a scream and leads them on and on in my direction. Soon we will hear their feet on the stairs.

  Soon. Very soon.

  <>

  * * * *

  erry Carr, Universe 5 - [Anthology]