Partners in Wonder

by Harlan Ellison

  But—Skilton…

  Silence, youngling! Do you want me to give you the Bird?

  The Wonderbird?

  THE Bird, fool!

  The youngling retreated, cringing.

  Skilton’s words were brave, and trusting of the Lams. Yet his thoughts could not help but be colored with doubt. He fought to submerge these unworthy feelings—the younglings must never doubt for an instant. If they did, the Performances would never come again. He was not quite certain what the Performances were—but they boasted a golden age for everyone on The Palace. He must deep-thrust his unworthy feelings, both for himself, for the younglings, and for the doubting, corroded-minded older tribers loping down the foothills toward them.

  He looked back at the Wonderbird, as a blast of thought and sound struck him.

  The thing was leaning through the skin of the Wonderbird, at the top of the reaching thing that stretched to the sand. He was calling—words still in the air…

  “Marge! Yo, Marge! Come on out; we got us an audience, awreddy!”

  He turned and looked back over his shoulder at Skilton and the calf-pups. Skilton knew it was his head, knew it was his shoulder, simply enough. The thing thought.

  Then why the words in the air?

  Another thing came from the Wonderbird. It was a she; the first thing identified it as a she. She stopped at the top of the reaching thing (her thoughts called it a ramp) and looked at the flickering, color-changing skin.

  She looked at the odd squiggles that formed the shapes:

  MARGE AND ANDY PETERBOB!

  COMEDIANS EXTRAORDINAIRE!

  and in smaller squiggles…

  HAVE TUX, TRAVEL

  She opened her mouth wide (yawn, the first thing thought it). She scratched with one of her two paws at the space under her left arm. “Fix it?” she asked.

  “What the hell’s it look like?” he answered.

  “Cute, cute. Alla time with the wide-eyed, wise answers.” Her face grew annoyed—her thoughts grew annoyed. “Where’s the marks?”

  The first thing pointed toward Skilton and the calf-pups on the edge of the plain.

  “There they be, me sweet young pretty. There they be.”

  She let her eyes follow his hand. Her eyes grew larger.

  “Them? Them things? That’s what we’re gonna play to?”

  He shrugged. “We got any better?”

  “You use the civilcometer? Check, if there’s any culture?”

  He nodded. “Not a trace of a city. If there’s life here, that’s it.”

  She let her tongue lick her lower lip. “You sure this is the planet?”

  He pulled a sheaf of odd, thin skin from a hole in his own skin, and unfolded it. He ran a finger down a column, said to her “The record says a show-ship came by here in ’27…gave three hundred consecutive performances. Carted off a whole shipful of raw sogoth fiber. They called the place The Palace. Must be…only planet on these co-ords.”

  She gave him a rueful look as he folded the skin away into his own baggy hide.

  “I ain’t doing my act for them shaggy lap-dogs!”

  “Aw, Marge, for Chrissakes, we done our act before worse than this. Them three-eyed slugs on Deepassa…or them little spike-balls on Garrity’s Hell…or them…”

  She cut him off with a wave of her hand, sharp and final. “No!”

  “Aw, Marge, for Chrissakes, you gotta at least test ’em. You gotta see if maybe they ain’t intelligent.”

  She screwed her face up horribly. “Take a look at the damned things…you can see they ain’t nothin’ but eight-legged mutts!”

  At this point, Skilton felt things had advanced poorly enough. He sensed the rest of the tribe loping in behind them. Now was the moment for him to make his appeal to his gods, to the Lams who had come at last.

  All the years of waiting and believing, of suffering the abuse of those who were unfaithful, were about to reach fruition. He would be the chosen of these great god Lams.

  He let words float on the air.

  The bellow welled up in his throat, coursed through his amplifier-baffle vocal cords, and erupted in the dusk.

  “Bah-roooooooooooooo!”

  The she-thing leaped off the top of the ramp, came back down trembling, her eyes even larger.

  “Ta hell with you,” she squawked oddly, “that goddam thing wants me for supper. Uh-uh. Goo’ bye!”

  The first thing was turned toward Skilton, also. His eyes were as large as the she’s. His mouth fluttered. But his thoughts said they must stay.

  “But, look, Marge honey, you gotta…don’t let a little moan like that bother ya…uh…we’re out this far, honey, we gotta bring somethin’ back…pay the costs, you know…”

  She started to say something, then her thoughts said: What’s the use? I’m gettin’ the hell outta here!

  “Honey…it’s been a real slack season, we gotta…”

  She reached inside the Wonderbird’s skin, pulled out a weird square thing, and threw it at the man-thing. It hit him on the head.

  “Goddamn it, Marge, why’d ya toss that thing at me? You know it’s part of the last borrow from that library-ship! It ain’t ours! Aw, come on, Marge! We gotta…”

  “We don’t gotta do nothin’! And if you don’t wanna get left standin’ right there with egg on ya kisser, ya better haul-ass in here and help me blast! I wanna go!”

  She stared at him hard for a moment, casting strange looks every few seconds at Skilton and the group of younglings. As she did, the rest of the tribe appeared out of the foothills and fell hushed behind the emcee.

  “Yaarghhh!” she bellowed, till it made Skilton’s antennae twitch. Then she bolted inside the Wonderbird, waving her arms in the air.

  The man-thing cursed, and looked over his shoulder. When he saw the group on the moss-edge of the sanded plain had grown, his mouth flapped oddly and he stumbled clankingly up the ramp.

  His thoughts flowed and boiled in his head, the words rolled and burned in the air.

  Then he got into the Wonderbird, and they heard the sound of sounds on sounds, and the skin fastened tight to the rest of the skin.

  They watched as the flickering colors dimmed, and the beating noises burst from the back of the Wonderbird. They let the primary lids slide over their eyes as the fire ripped from the Wonderbird. And then they watched terrified as it swept into the air, and left.

  It blossomed and flickered and ticked and colored its way back over the Great Mountain, up toward the swirlers, and out of sight.

  Skilton watched it with mixed feelings.

  It was going, and with it was going the entire core of his beliefs. His religion, his thoughts, his very being had been sundered by the dusk’s happenings.

  The Lams were not gods. They had not come again to do the Performances. They would not play The Palace again.

  This was the end.

  He kept the thoughts below scanning-level, so the tribe might not know what he thought. He felt their unease, and they waited for his explanation. How could he tell them the truth; that there was no Performance, and that all the years of waiting for the Time of the Prophecy were in vain. How could he tell them he had been deceived? How? How?

  He began to summon the thoughts from their lower-level home, when he stopped, and forced them back down, keeping the surface of his mind clear and untroubled.

  He saw the square thing on the silver-sanded plain, fallen where the man-thing had let it fall; fallen where the she had thrown it. Perhaps in that square thing there might be a clue to help him. A sign, a symbol, an omen to reinstate his belief in the Lams once more.

  Skilton? The thoughts swam toward him from the awed tribe.

  Skilton, tell us, oh worthy and far-seeing emcee, what does all this mean? Was this the Performance?

  He could only answer: Come.

  And they followed him…

  Followed him off the moss-ground, away from the Great Mountain, onto the silver-sanded plain, and toward the square
thing. There they stopped and looked and thought.

  After a great long while, they asked Skilton, and he told them, and they knew it was true, for they could see the square thing.

  After a great while, they knew.

  There was another thing. This was not the end. There would be a new beginning.

  A new way of life…a new era.

  When they got back to the home of their births, they would discard the old Tophatt rituals, and the Jomillr-jowks, and the new life would flower for them—and this time there would be no doubting, for they had all seen the Wonderbird.

  Skilton lowered his massive head and clamped the square thing in his toothless mouth. He trotted back toward the foothills and the Great Mountain.

  The younglings followed quickly, and the tribe followed them, and there were no laggards, for they were all trying to reason out the meaning of the squiggles on the new Truth.

  The squiggles that declared the new religion.

  The squiggles that said:

  The Complete Works of the

  Marquis de Sade

  ILLUSTRATED

  INTRODUCTION

  Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison

  THE SONG THE ZOMBIE SANG

  It isn’t so much how or why this one got written, but what happened to it after it got written.

  I’ve known Silverberg longer than all but one or two of my friends. He was the first guy I saw when I came into New York, and the first to put me up till I got a place to stay upon returning, a year later. We had only collaborated once before, in all those years—which are rapidly approaching twenty—a mystery story called “Ship-Shape Payoff” for one of the Manhunt-style magazines, back in the mid-fifties. But it would have been impossible to do this book without a collaboration by myself and Bob. At least, for me it would have been impossible.

  So here’s how it came to be.

  I was teaching writing at a major college workshop last year (not Clarion, in this case), and one of the guest lecturers, a magazine writer whose work I’d admired for decades, was also on the staff with me. But he was not the glamorous jet-setter his past glories had led me to expect. He was a tired, old man, with too much booze in him and too many bad relationships behind him, and though he was smashed drunk from morning to night, falling down drunk so that he could literally not keep down food, every morning he dragged himself to one of the three typewriters he had ranked around the dorm room where he was billeted, and he would peck out a few words on this or that article. It was a pathetic performance, and it haunted me for months. Some time later, on a business trip to New York, I recounted the story to Bob and Bobbie, his wife, and said it was as though he was a zombie, that he continued writing only as a reflex, the way a frog’s leg jumps when it receives a galvanic shock, that he might as well be dead and stored in a vault except when he had to write.

  And from that came the idea of a great artist who has died, who is brought back when he has to perform.

  Bob took the initial idea, altered it, and wrote a basic plot. Which he sent to me in L.A. I wrote the first draft, leaving small holes where Bob’s specific scientific and musicological information was better than mine. He wrote the final draft. I did a few noodles here and there. It was finished.

  We talked long distance and I said I thought it would go at either McCall’s (which, a few months ago, was interested in buying mainstreamish science fiction) or Cosmopolitan, neither one of which slicks either of us had ever sold.

  Bob hectored me mercilessly for my naïveté. “They aren’t going to buy it, so why bother?” he said. “Let’s sell it to Galaxy and take the 4¢ a word and run. At least it’s $220 we can split.”

  I persisted, telling him that since I run the universe, it would sell. He shrugged, thinking me the fool, and though I couldn’t see him or the shrug, I knew it was the same kind of shrug Bob has been shrugging about me since I was in high school in Cleveland.

  But I sent it on to Bob Mills, my agent, and in short order McCall’s bounced it. Then it went to Junius Adams, the fiction editor of Cosmo. Five minutes after Mills called me, several weeks later, to tell me that Cosmo was buying it for $1250, I rang up Bob and the conversation went like this:

  “Bob? Harlan.”

  “Hello.”

  “I’m afraid we won’t be able to sell, ‘Zombie’ to Knight Magazine for the second serial money.”

  “Why? Is Galaxy’s pub date too close to the book?”

  “No, huh-uh. Galaxy won’t be taking it, either.”

  He was silent. He didn’t seem happy. Then, “How come?”

  “Because Cosmo just bought it for twelve hundred and fifty, you asshole, that’s why!”

  Telephonically, across a continent, I had the lifetime thrill of hearing Silverberg’s jaw drop. He was without words, and the thrill was mine.

  Finally, in a very soft voice, he said, “Jesus, maybe you do run the universe.”

  Now understand that it was through no lack of faith in the story, or of Cosmo’s editorial perceptivity, that Bob had felt the story would not sell at that market. It was a combination of our attitudes and Cosmo’s history of never having published an sf short story (though they’ve done a few abridged versions of sf novels that toyed with the mainstream). The magazine is an important woman’s slick, it had never published what readers of sf would call straight non-Ira Levin sf, and we had never moved in that sort of arena. So it was wholly unexpected. For Bob. Not for me. I knew the instant we finished writing the story that Rhoda and Nils Bekh were right for Cosmo; they just felt right.

  Sometimes they come out like that.

  The Song the Zombie Sang

  From the Fourth Balcony of the Los Angeles Music Center the stage was little more than a brilliant blur of constantly changing chromatics—stabs of bright green, looping whorls of crimson. But Rhoda preferred to sit up there. She had no use for the Golden Horseshoe seats, buoyed on their grab-gray plates, bobbling loosely just beyond the fluted lip of the stage. Down there the sound flew off, flew up and away, carried by the remarkable acoustics of the Center’s Takamuri dome. The colors were important, but it was the sound that really mattered, the patterns of resonance bursting from the hundred quivering outputs of the ultracembalo.

  And if you sat below, you had the vibrations of the people down there—

  She was hardly naïve enough to think that the poverty that sent students up to the top was more ennobling than the wealth that permitted access to a Horseshoe; yet even though she had never actually sat through an entire concert down there, she could not deny that music heard from the fourth balcony was purer, more affecting, lasted longer in the memory. Perhaps it was the vibrations of the rich.

  Arms folded on the railing of the balcony, she stared down at the rippling play of colors that washed the sprawling proscenium. Dimly she was aware that the man at her side was saying something. Somehow responding didn’t seem important. Finally he nudged her, and she turned to him. A faint, mechanical smile crossed her face. “What is it, Laddy?”

  Ladislas Jirasek mournfully extended a chocolate bar. Its end was ragged from having been nibbled: “Man cannot live by Bekh alone,” he said.

  “No, thanks, Laddy.” She touched his hand lightly.

  “What do you see down there?”

  “Colors. That’s all.”

  “No music of the spheres? No insight into the truths of your art?”

  “You promised not to make fun of me.”

  He slumped back in his seat. “I’m sorry. I forget sometimes.”

  “Please, Laddy. If it’s the liaison thing that’s bothering you, I—”

  “I didn’t say a word about liaison, did I?”

  “It was in your tone. You were starting to feel sorry for yourself. Please don’t. You know I hate it when you start dumping guilt on me.”

  He had sought an official liaison with her for months, almost since the day they had met in Contrapuntal 301. He had been fascinated by her, amused by her, and finally had falle
n quite hopelessly in love with her. Still she kept just beyond his reach. He had had her, but had never possessed her. Because he did feel sorry for himself, and she knew it, and the knowledge put him, for her, forever in the category of men who were simply not for long-term liaison.

  She stared down past the railing. Waiting. Taut. A slim girl, honey-colored hair, eyes the lightest gray, almost the shade of aluminum. Her fingers lightly curved as if about to pounce on a keyboard. Music uncoiling eternally in her head.

  “They say Bekh was brilliant in Stuttgart last week,” Jirasek said hopefully.

  “He did the Kreutzer?”

  “And Timijian’s Sixth and The Knife and some Scarlatti.”

  “Which?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember what they said. But he got a ten-minute standing ovation, and Der Musikant said they hadn’t heard such precise ornamentation since—”

  The houselights dimmed.

  “He’s coming,” Rhoda said, leaning forward. Jirasek slumped back and gnawed the chocolate bar down to its wrapper.

  Coming out of it was always gray. The color of aluminum. He knew the charging was over, knew he’d been unpacked, knew when he opened his eyes that he would be at stage right, and there would be a grip ready to roll the ultracembalo’s input console onstage, and the filament gloves would be in his right-hand jacket pocket. And the taste of sand on his tongue, and the gray fog of resurrection in his mind.

  Nils Bekh put off opening his eyes.

  Stuttgart had been a disaster. Only he knew how much of a disaster. Timi would have known, he thought. He would have come up out of the audience during the scherzo, and he would have ripped the gloves off my hands, and he would have cursed me for killing his vision. And later they would have gone to drink the dark, nutty beer together. But Timijian was dead. Died in ’20, Bekh told himself. Five years before me.

  I’ll keep my eyes closed, I’ll dampen the breathing. Will the lungs to suck more shallowly, the bellows to vibrate rather than howl with winds. And they’ll think I’m malfunctioning, that the zombianic response wasn’t triggered this time. That I’m still dead, really dead, not—