The Year's Best Science Fiction 5

by Judith Merril

  Satisfied, he dropped the sonovac to the floor, listened for a moment to the caterwauling above, which was now being drowned by the mounting vocal opposition of the audience, then unlatched the door.

  Paul Merrill, his bow tie askew, burst in. He gaped blankly at Mangon, at the blood dripping from his fingers and the smashed sonovac on the floor.

  He seized Mangon by the shoulders, shook him roughly.

  “Mangon, are you crazy? What are you trying to do?”

  Mangon attempted to say something, but his voice had died. He pulled himself away from Merrill, pushed past into the corridor.

  Merrill shouted after him. “Mangon, help me fix this! Where are you going?” He got down on his knees, started trying to piece the sonovac together.

  From the wings Mangon briefly watched the scene on the stage.

  Madame Gioconda was still singing, her voice completely inaudible in the uproar from the auditorium. Half the audience were on their feet, shouting toward the stage and apparently remonstrating with the studio officials. All but a few members of the orchestra had left their instruments, these sitting on their desks and watching Madame Gioconda in amazement.

  The program director, Alto and one of the comperes stood in front of her, banging on the rail and trying to attract her attention. But Madame Gioconda failed to notice them. Head back, eyes on the brilliant ceiling lights, hands gesturing majestically, she soared along the private causeways of sound that poured unrelentingly from her throat, a great white angel of discord on her homeward flight.

  Mangon watched her sadly, then slipped away through the stage hands pressing around him. As he left the theater by the stage door a small crowd was gathering by the main entrance. He flicked away the blood from his fingers, then bound his handkerchief round them.

  He walked down the side street to where the sound truck was parked, climbed into the cab and sat still for a few minutes, looking out at the bright evening lights in the bars and shop-fronts.

  Opening the dashboard locker, he hunted through it and pulled out an old wrist-pad, clipped it into his sleeve.

  In his ears the sound of Madame Gioconda singing echoed like an insane banshee.

  He switched on the sonovac under the dashboard, turned it full on, then started the engine and drove off into the night.

  * * * *

  PLENITUDE by Will Worthington

  from Fantasy and Science Fiction

  There seems to be some doubt as to whether this was the first, second, or third story of three bought and published by three different magazines almost simultaneously. It marks, in any case, one-third of the debut of yet another striking new talent in the s-f field. Unlike Mr. Keyes, who has a long background in publishing, or Mr. Langart, who has written—I understand—in other fields, Mr. Worthington has turned to writing after years of experience in government work. There is a freshness of language and vigor of thought in all the stories of his I have seen which are rarely equaled by the more experienced writers in the field.

  * * * *

  “Why can’t we go home now, Daddy?” asked Mike, the youngest, and the small tanned face I saw there in the skimpy shade of the olive tree was mostly a matter of eyes —all else, hair, cheeks, thumb-sized mouth, jelly-bean body and usually flailing arms and legs, were mere accessories to the round, blue, endlessly wondering eyes. (“The Wells of ‘Why’”... It would make a poem, I thought, if a poem were needed, and if I wasn’t so damned tired. And I also thought, “Oh, God! It begins. Five years old. No, not quite. Four.”)

  “Because Daddy has to finish weeding this row of beans,” I said. “We’ll go back to the house in a little while.”

  I would go back to the house and then I would follow the path around the rocks to the hot springs, and there I would peel off what was left of my clothes and I would soak myself in the clear but pungent water that came bubbling—perfect—from a cleft in the rocks to form a pool in the hollow of a pothole—also perfect. And while I steeped in the mineral water I could think about the fish which was soon to be broiling on the fire, and I could think of Sue turning it, poking at it and sprinkling herbs over it as though it was the first or perhaps the last fish that would ever be broiled and eaten by human creatures. She would perform that office with the same total and unreserved dedication with which, since sun-up, she had scraped deerskin, picked worms from new cabbage-leaves, gathered firewood, caulked the walls of the cabin where the old chinking had fallen away or been chewed or knocked away by other hungry or merely curious creatures, and otherwise filled in the numberless gaps in the world—trivial things mostly which would not be noticed and could not become great things in a man’s eyes unless she were to go away or cease to be. I don’t think of this because, for all immediate purposes—there are no others—she is the first Woman in the world and quite possibly—the last.

  “Why don’t we live in the Old House in the valley, Daddy?”

  It is All-Eyes again. Make no mistake about it; there is a kind of connectedness between the seemingly random questions of very small kids. These are the problems posed by an Ur-logic which is much closer to the pulse of reality than are any of the pretentious, involuted systems and the mincing nihilations and category-juggling of adults. It is we who are confused and half-blinded with the varieties of special knowledge. But how explain? What good is my experience to him?

  “There are too many old things in the Old House which don’t work,” I say, even as I know that I merely open the floodgates of further questions.

  “Don’t the funny men work, Daddy? I want to see the funny men! Daddy, I want . . .”

  The boy means the robots. I took him down to see the Old House in the valley once before. He rode on top of my haversack and hung on to my hair with his small fingers. It was all a lark for him. I had gone to fetch some books— gambling that there might be a bagful of worthwhile ones that had not been completely eaten by bugs and mice; and if the jaunt turned out depressing for me, it was my fault, which is to say the fault of memory and the habit of comparing what has been with what is—natural, inevitable, unavoidable, but oh, God, just the same . . . The robots which still stood on their size-thirty metal feet looked like grinning Mexican mummies. They gave me a bad turn even though I knew what they were, and should have known what changes to expect after a long, long absence from that house, but to the kid they were a delight. Never mind transphenomenality of rusted surfaces and uselessly dangling wires; never mind the history of a senile generation. They were the funny men. I wish I could leave it at that, but of course I can’t. I hide my hoe in the twigs of the olive tree and pick up Mike. This stops the questions for a while.

  “Let’s go home to Mummy,” I say; and also, hoping to hold back the questions about the Old House long enough to think of some real answers, “Now aren’t you glad we live up here where we can see the ocean and eagles and hot springs?”

  “Yeth,” says Mike firmly by way of making a querulous and ineffectual old man feel better about his decision. What a comfort to me the little one is!

  I see smoke coming from the chimney, and when we round the last turn in the path we see the cabin. Sue waves from the door. She has worked like a squaw since dawn, and she smiles and waves. I can remember when women would exhaust themselves talking over the phone and eating bonbons all day and then fear to smile when their beat husbands came home from their respective nothing-foundries lest they crack the layers of phony “youthful glow” on their faces. Not like Sue. Here is Sue with smudges of charcoal on her face and fish-scales on her leather pants. Her scent is of woodsmoke and of sweat. There is no artificial scent like this—none more endearing nor more completely “correct.” There was a time when the odor of perspiration would have been more of a social disaster for a woman than the gummata of tertiary pox. Even men were touched by this strange phobia.

  Sue sees the question on my face and she knows why my smile is a little perfunctory and strained.

  “Chris . . . ?” I start to ask finally.

>   “No. He took his bow and his sleeping-bag. Muttered something about an eight-point buck.”

  We do not need the venison. If anything has been made exhaustively and exaustingly clear to the boy it is that our blessings consist in large part of what we do not need. But this is not the point, and I know it is not the point.

  “Do you think he’ll ever talk to me again, Sue?”

  “Of course he will.” She pulls off my sweaty shirt and hands me a towel. “You know how twelve is. Everything in technicolor and with the throbbiest possible background music. Everything drags or jumps or swings or everything is Endsville or something else which it actually isn’t. If it can’t be turned into a drama it doesn’t exist. He’ll get over it.”

  I can think of no apt comment. Sue starts to busy herself with the fire, then turns back to me.

  “You did the best thing. You did what you had to do, that’s all. Go take your bath. I’m getting hungry.”

  I make my way up the path to the hot springs and I am wearing only the towel and the soles of an ancient pair of sneakers held on with thongs. I am thinking that the hot water will somehow dissolve the layers of sickly thought that obscure all the colors of the world from my mind, just as it will rid me of the day’s accretion of grime, but at once I know that I am yielding to a vain and superstitious hope. I can take no real pleasure in the anticipation of my bath.

  When I emerge from the underbrush and come in sight of the outcroppings of rock where the springs are, I can see Sato, our nearest neighbor and my oldest friend, making his way along the path from his valley on the other side of the mountain. I wave at him, but he does not wave back. I tell myself that he is concentrating on his feet and simply does not see me, but myself answers back in much harsher terms. Sato knows what happened when I took my older son to the City, and he knows why my son has not spoken more than a dozen coherent words since returning. He knows what I have done, and while it is not in the man’s nature to rebuke another or set himself above another or mouth moral platitudes, there are limits.

  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 garden truck 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 ten per cent 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.