Universe 03 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Terry Carr

  “My hair is up,” she says. “Oh. Well.”

  “But it isn’t that at all!”

  “Well, I dare say it has to be something,” says she, working on the red apple.

  “It’s the smile!” cries Kerbisher.

  “I do smile at times, Walter. You may have hit on something there.”

  “And it’s because you never get into an R&D,” he cries, his face puffing up redly at the despicable thought. “I’m beginning to understand what this is all about, woman!”

  “I dare say it’s about time,” she observes, propping herself on a tall chair, and studying herself in the polished red apple.

  Kerbisher waves both fists. “It isn’t fair,” he cries. “We’ve got our rules in this world. It’s the only road to the Great Generation. We must learn to hate, hate, hate, and then Taper Off with love, love, love.

  “But you don’t go by the rules!” he yells at the eating Emily. “You don’t pay any attention to the Randy-Tandy man. He calls, you say phooey. Tell me you don’t do it that way, just tell me.”

  “Well,” she says, having some trouble talking around a mouthful of apple.

  Kerbisher throws up his hands. He is red and perspiring. How can he say such things? Oh, Emily, Emily, he whimpers inside himself as if he’s TV’ing again. He blunders toward his room, and never comes out again until the Revile and Despise period is over. He wakes in the morning and the Tapering Off and Denying period has begun. He finds Emily in the kitchen working over dishes.

  “Uch-hmm,” Kerbisher coughs.

  “Yes, dear.”

  “You do smile a lot, and you do seem to have big ears, although not as big as one would suppose,” he tells her.

  “I would be the last to deny it,” says Emily, swiping with a dishcloth at a shining tumbler.

  “But smiling isn’t a bad thing, and you can hear nicely with big ears.”

  “I’m glad you’ve made the discovery,” smiles Emily.

  “Uch-hmm,” coughs oaf Kerbisher, fleeing the scene. But he begins to leave his room, and on the second day of the Tapering Off, he returns to work. As he works, wrecking buildings, this Kerbisher, this big oaf, begins to smile. “Yahoo!” he is yelling inside, riding the bucking bronco of himself across the range under western skies. He’s back to loving again.

  Yahoo! He’s into the house, tossing off his shirt, grabbing at Emily, and whirling her like a flag of joy. “Randy-Tandy man,” he says grimly, and cries out some junior high school swearwords which he happens to remember.

  Now Kerbisher finds that he is anxious to talk to the Randy-Tandy man. Where’s the Randy-Tandy man? The Free Term goes on and on. Kerbisher frets, pacing the floor, and forgetting his comic book. What do you do to get hold of a Randy-Tandy man?

  Kerbisher’s sweet wife Emily muses, “But why? Why would you want to get hold of a Randy-Tandy man, of all people?”

  “Because I’m going to tell him what’s what,” Kerbisher declares. “He drove me crazy this last time. I’m through with hating. Nothing but loving after this, Emily doll.”

  So it is that less than two hours later the Randy-Tandy man calls.

  At the sound of all that smoothness of voice, Kerbisher almost crumbles. His resolve begins to fade. He has to grit his teeth to say what he has to say.

  “I’m Mr. Kerbisher,” he shoots back without too much delay. “Mr. Randy-Tandy man, you can stop right there. Don’t say any more. It’s all over. After this, the only prejudice I’ve got in this life is against the Randy-Tandy man.”

  “Indeed?” says the Randy-Tandy man. “Against the R&D and T&D man, of all people?”

  “You heard me,” says Kerbisher.

  “But you don’t seem excited. You don’t seem angry. You don’t seem to have built a proper foundation of hate.”

  “Because I’m in a long Free Term,” says Kerbisher, with a strong sound in his voice. “This Free Term is going to last all my life. I’m not singing any more of your little hate songs. I’m not dancing any more of your bigot trots. I am a Free Man,” he finishes, TV’ing it a little.

  The Randy-Tandy man is silent.

  “Well,” he says, and his voice is all smiles.

  Smiles!

  Kerbisher almost drops through the floor. The Randy-Tandy man says warmly, “My personal congratulations, Mr. Kerbisher! We have been waiting for this moment. Your name will be entered in our Exempt Files. What this means is that you are officially exempt for life from the necessities of bigotry, prejudice, and/ or hate. Good day, sir, and my congratulations again. It’s been a rough battle for all of us. And all we had to do was to learn we didn’t have to put up with it, right? And, oh yes, Mr. Kerbisher?”

  “Huh?” says Kerbisher.

  “I would like to inform you that one of our representatives will call on you this evening.”

  Kerbisher hangs up, and sees Emily smiling. “Emily,” he says sternly, and that’s when they have it out, but without any R&D, mind you.

  In the evening, Bill Stotter, the Kerbishers’ smiling neighbor from down the street, pays Kerbisher a visit, just as the Randy-Tandy man said he would. Well, you can just imagine being face-to-face with a Randy-Tandy man, who sticks out his hand, smiling, and shakes Kerbisher’s hand, and says, “Mr. Kerbisher, I am the R&D and T&D representative you have an appointment with this evening. I am here to ask you a favor, to ensure the dawning of a new day throughout our world.”

  Oh, the Randy-Tandy man still visits the schools, still makes his calls. There is no other way; people have to learn they don’t have to do it. Anyway, the next time the Randy-Tandy man calls somebody, he should listen carefully, because it just might be the voice of that big oaf Kerbisher!

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  * * * *

  THE WORLD IS A SPHERE

  by Edgar Pangborn

  Edgar Pangborn’s stories of a post-holocaust North America have already been collected into one book, the fondly remembered Davy, and there’ll be another book before long. “Tiger Boy” in Universe 2 marked his return to this richly imagined world, and here’s another: a coolly impassioned story of the enslavement of tomorrow’s mutants . . . and tomorrow’s minds.

  * * * *

  “WE HAVE slain bigger monsters,” said Ian Moltas, Deliberator of the Ninth Ward of Norlenas. He had spoken aloud within his solitude; the words brought him no consolation, no increase of courage. After a while a man, or a people, will grow weary of slaying monsters, and then back comes the rule of disorder.

  He stood by a western window of his museum in the tropic night, his hands pleased by the cool stone sill, his ears accepting the innocent clamor of the dark—insect shrilling, intermittent husky roar of a rutting alligator in the swamp at the border of his parkland, and now and then the trill and chuckle of the nitingal, bird of mystery. They tell us it’s good luck to hear that on a clear night of the old moon.

  No one ever sees the nitingal, yet it lived in the world at least two hundred years ago in the great time of the Republic, for the poets of that age spoke of it, and by that singing name.

  Good luck? Ian Moltas no longer believed in luck of either sort. Out of confusions, sufferings, compromises, you won what you could: let God and the Devil contend for the rest.

  “We have cut down monsters like you before,” he said, and held up a clotted fist, shutting away the twinkle of lamps in the palace windows half a mile off across the parkland. He did not let his fist obscure the tender brilliance of the old moon declining. Under those lamps the Emperor’s clerks might carry the day’s toil to midnight or beyond—Musons all, of course, and therefore slaves dependent for life itself on the Emperor’s whim. Dwarfish, with delicate hands, high foreheads, often that telltale six finger, the poor devils would scratch away at their mean tasks—recording, copying documents and correspondence, above all transcribing to fine vellum the latest imperial rantings and platitudes in the service of Emperor Asta’s immortality; and no one would guess from the small pale Muson faces what fires migh
t be ablaze behind their masks. Moltas supposed he knew a little about that; he was not arrogant enough to think that he, a Misipan of the ruling class, could know very much. To know anything at all of it might be regarded as treason to his peers.

  The Emperor Asta was already officially a god by act of the Assembly of Deliberators (Moltas concurring—what can one do?), but he would not rest content with that. Two of the three preceding emperors had also been deified, so the bloom was off that peach. No—he meant to be known to eternity as a great thinker, statesman, and literary artist. Unfortunately, he had never had an original idea, and could barely read and write.

  “We’ll cut you down too.” But Moltas, listening for the iron ring of rebellion in his voice, did not hear it. Can you have rebellion without the people? Can rebellion speak in elderly tones with a quaver, almost a note of peevishness? After all, the quarrel was not between him, Deliberator of the Ninth Ward, and the gaunt little egomaniac over there in the palace; it was between the spark of evil in the human world and the spark of good. As for the people—

  The Republic! Ah, they said, the Republic! Yes, we must bring back the Republic, but not just now, because the Emperor (long live the Emperor) has promised to do it himself the first moment it seems practical. Bread and rice! More fights! More fuck-shows in the Stadium! Long live the Emperor! Fights! Fuck-shows! BREAD AND RICE!

  And the Assembly of Deliberators, once the very heart and conscience of the Republic? Moltas thought: Why, we are mostly old men, and the waves have gone over us. The Republic is not to be brought back only by remembering it with tears.

  The stone sill was paining his hands. He rubbed his fingers and straightened his elderly back, and turned to the spacious quiet of the room he called his museum—like all the house, a little too grand and a little shabby. The spoils of a rich man’s curiosity had accumulated here for thirty years. Not wanting to trouble a servant for such a trifle, he touched a taper to a bracket-lamp and carried the flame to a standing lamp on a long table in the center of the room. The table was of mahogany, careful Misipan workmanship of about a hundred and fifty years ago, from the last years of the Republic; but one would not think of it as old compared to the dozen treasures that stood on it, most of them from the American age, the Age of Sorcerers.

  Oldest of all, he thought, was a crude two-faced image of blackened stonelike substance, probably clay, male on one side, female on the other, which surely belonged to some period earlier than the Age of Sorcerers, although the mere notion was heresy. A few years ago he had noticed the image in the trashy wares of a peddler from the north, who let it go for one menin, almost a junk price. It really had nothing in common with American relics. However . . .

  Time was not, said the priests, until Sol-Amra made the world out of water and air and earth and fire, and gave it to the Americans, the Sorcerers, who became afflicted with the sin of pride, and were destroyed by pestilence and fire, all but a handful. And we, the remote descendants of that handful, are still corrupt, and must continue to bear the divine curses of poverty and mutation until the year 7000, when Sol-Amra comes to judge the world. Poverty is punishment for the sin of greed. Mutation is punishment for our lecherous nature. Most corrupt of all are the Musons, for does not the wrath of God show clearly in their dwarfish size, pallid faces, evil hands? So let them be safely held in slavery, and sacrificed at the Spring Festivals to take upon them the sin of the world.

  One knew all that, and knew the necessity of ritual agreement. One also belonged to the not-quite-secret society of the Tera, discreetly smiling in private at the barbarity of the times; even smiling, very privately and rather dangerously, at Sol-Amra and the Lesser Pantheon. These traditions and legends, you know, said the gentlemen of the Tera—excellent stuff for the multitude. Must have something to keep them happy, while we pursue philosophy and pure reason and the quiet life.

  If any visitor showed interest in the two-faced image, Ian Moltas would shrug and dismiss it as a curiosity of no importance, most likely made by the little naked savages in that wilderness away up north, west of Penn; or it might even have come from the scarcely explored lake country much farther north. But Moltas had seen enough of the barbarous wooden images and clumsy pottery of those savages to know that this two-faced image was nothing of theirs.

  The other treasures on the table were relics of the American age, valuable but not unfamiliar to connoisseurs. A gray metal dish known to have come from the jungle-buried ruins east of Nathes (apparently called Natchez in the Age of Sorcerers, with heaven knows what pronunciation). A tiny cylinder of an unknown bright metal tapered to a hollow point, with part of an inscription still visible, a few of the antique letters that so closely resemble the Misipan alphabet. A disk of heavy glass with the mystic power of magnification. A tray of coins, some of corroded copper, others that appeared untouched by age.

  Ian Moltas slumped in one of the massive chairs by the table. At the uncommon age of fifty-eight he was heavy but not fat, not very wrinkled, only somewhat gray. Mild sea-blue eyes belied the fierceness of his beaky nose; his flexible orator’s mouth was darkly bracketed. He was wearing the scarlet loincloth of the ruling class; his sleeveless white tunic carried on the front the gold-and-green rice-plant symbol of the Assembly of Deliberators. Often if angry or depressed he sought for quiet in the contemplation of the clay image, and often found it. It must have been made, he thought, by fingers alone. How simple the gouges that marked the eyes! The mouths had been achieved by pressure of a thumbnail gone back to dust how many hundreds or thousands of years ago?

  He looked up, startled and vague. “Yes, Elkan?” The slave had come silently, or might have been standing in the shadows several moments. He was trained, of course, to go about like a ghost, to be present suddenly whenever needed; but that magical quiet was also a part of the Muson nature.

  “A peddler, Deliberator—perhaps not worth your time, but he was insistent. He gives his name as Piet Brun. He apologized for the late hour, saying he didn’t wish to carry his treasure in the streets by daylight. This seemed irrational to me—whatever he has is carried in an ordinary sack—and I said so. He replied, with a smile—a rather unpleasant smile, sir, or so I thought—that he felt stronger than others in the dark. I did not like him, Deliberator, but I told him I would bring in his name.”

  “Does he say what he has?”

  “No, sir, only that he thinks you might want to buy it. He says he was Misipan born but has spent most of his time traveling and trading in the barbarous northern countries. His speech suggests it—trader’s jargon, quite coarse.”

  “Well, I’ll see him. These people often do have something. But let him wait a few moments—I want to talk to you.” Elkan also waited, quiet as the clay image. He was tall for a Muson, nearly five feet, which modified the deceptive childlike proportions that most of them had because of their large heads and stocky bodies, and he was eighty years old, middle-aged for his breed. He stood with arms folded—they never lost an alertness that seemed to cost them no effort—and his pale six-fingered hands spread out over the elbows as if to emphasize their difference. “Elkan, you’ll remember that two years ago, two full years, I introduced a measure in the Assembly which would have declared that your people, sharing a common ancestry with humankind, a common language, a history of coexistence—”

  “ ‘—are and of right ought to be equal with the human race before the law and in every aspect of our social being.’ Forgive the interruption, Deliberator. The words—your own, I believe—have sung in my mind a long time.” Elkan’s eyes, large and luminous, now and then met Moltas’ gaze like the touch of a roving beam of light. “The measure, I presume, has been defeated, sir?”

  “Oh, the measure—no, not exactly, not formally. Many times debated, cut to pieces and cobbled together again, saved up in committee for further waste of words, but never quite defeated. I had no hope at any time—as I think I told you—of winning all or even most of what we prayed for. I did hope that by askin
g for all we might win something. If we had merely won that technical admission of equality, it would have become impossible, by any kind of logic, for the law to say, as it does now, that your people are to exist forever in a state of slavery. The Assembly was almost ready for that simple first step at the time of Asta’s accession. No, Elkan, the measure has not been defeated, but— Oh my God, how am I to tell you? . . . Elkan, the best hope of your people was always the Assembly. Nothing good can be expected from any other political source. We Deliberators—we are all that remains of a Republic that once did uphold an ideal of virtue, limited though it was; and it’s on my mind tonight that we are not much.

  And I am obliged to tell you—you must know it for your own safety—the Assembly itself may be dying.”

  “There have always been passages of failing light.” The Muson way, to state anything important as neutrally as possible, not in denial of passion—far from it—but in order to protect rational discourse from the tumults of the heart.