by Damon Knight
We came down a narrow dirt path, moving fast, I waving my arms, he his staff, to adjust our balance; the old man leading the way, hopping and prancing from rock to rock, shortcutting the path wherever he could, until we landed on flat ground at the bottom, with a minor army of little stones and pebbles following us.
Here we caught our breath, deliberately (under his critical eye) breathing in huge gulps of air, ending with shallow, swift hyperventilation.
Then we proceeded leisurely along the road that led to the great lake.
At first I thought there were many-colored flags waving in the wind. The voices were like the plaintive cries of gulls. Then I began to recognize, with my eyes: silk scarves, turbans, bright yellow turmeric-dyed cotton robes waving in the wind. With my ears: “Fresh fruit, wine, beer, meat—step this way, gentlemen— fish, I have fish.” And later with my nose: strong perfume, strong wine, human sweat. And with some other sense I felt an all-pervading spirit of drunkenness and exhilaration, the raw soul of festival. What faces, 1 thought, what bodies. With a giddy flush I pushed the whores away from me, the bold ones who strove to push their ripe breasts up against my bare chest and shoulders; but gently, gently, for the daughters of our golden lady are sacred.
Ancient ruins lined the roads. They were chipped and broken, filled with rubble, and yet they stood, they still stood.
“What do they suggest to you, master?” I gestured toward the broken buildings.
He shrugged noncommittally. “Things change; life goes on.”
“Could we have built them, could we possibly have built them?”
“Why not?” He increased his stride a trifle, to discourage my questioning.
The crowds became thicker, the voices louder, brasher. Suddenly we beheld an incredible sight: the street of the trappers and sellers of wild birds.
A fusillade of color, a blaze of song. Endless rows of woven straw baskets of beautiful birds.
Their calls filled the air: some sharp and grating, some clear, some full, and some sad and distant as a dream.
“I’ve never seen such a beautiful sight,” I said.
Something strange was in the master’s expression, something I had never seen before.
“You know not how to look,” he said, “and nothing I can teach will ever show you how to look at these exotic birds, these beautiful free spirits sold into slavery, betrayed by the caretakers of this beautiful planet, Earth.”
Now we continued in silence, into the crowd.
We passed by the park of the temple of Our Lady. The groves of trees were etched clear, but strangely two-dimensional against the oncoming night. It was as if the light were being drained from the sky swiftly and suddenly; the torches were lit, the lamps of colored paper hung, the dancing and drinking had begun in earnest.
It was well after dark when at last, in the heart of the city, we asked directions to the cheaper inns and restaurants, frequented by gladiators.
The next morning I fought my preliminary bout. I almost felt sorry for him. He pawed the air helplessly, frantically. His balance was absurd. I avoided him until he tired somewhat, and swatted him a few light blows, careful not to bruise my knuckles; I was saving my kicks for someone else.
The crowd went wild. It was easy to see I was to be their favorite.
I was tall and fast. A smooth classical boxer, and quite handsome, I thought to myself. But I was young, oh I was young.
“Not a bruise on me.” I was jumping up and down, swatting invisible flies in the air. “I can’t lose, I just can’t lose, with a teacher like you how could I?”
But he was paying no attention to me. To my annoyance I saw that he was staring fixedly at something beyond me. I turned, and caught my breath.
“What a freak,” I said.
He was a short man, a broad man, a mutant. He had reddish skin and dark curly hair. His face was jagged and lonely, somber and strong, his bone structure grotesquely thick and square. His arms were short and muscular, all four of them. His eyes were used to pain.
Now I noticed the girl at his side. The astonishing contrast somehow seemed right: the princess and the caveman, Beauty and the beast. It was one of those paradoxes which forever seem to remind us that we didn’t invent the world out of our logical mind, that it invented us out of the unfathomable depths of its crazy nature.
No problem there, I thought. The mutant moved in a surly, awkward manner, bobbing and weaving like a duck. He took too many blows to get inside, where he could work his short arms, and yet he was impressive in his clumsy way. He was thorough and decisive, and he was accurate with his hands.
“He can’t even kick,” I said. “He’s already got his face bruised up and it’s only the first prelim.”
The old man shook his head. For the second time that day he said, “You know not how to look.”
The days of the festival fell by, light and swift. I won my preliminaries effortlessly, careful not to take any chances or injure my hands. Each night after a simple meal and a short walk, I went to bed early, my frantic mind filled with the color and excitement of festival.
The night of the semifinal a change was made in the schedule. The two finalists were given the next day off to rest for the final event, a brutal fight in a roped-off area, broken into rounds and rest periods, but fought to the finish. We would wear no padding on hands or feet. I would bruise my knuckles on that one, I thought to myself.
That night I went after dinner to the tavern where the gladiators went to drink and whore. A glass of wine or two wouldn’t harm me, with a day off before the fight, or so I told myself.
I saw them in the tavern, through the frenzied dancing couples, by the light of colored lanterns. She held a glass of red wine to her lips; she touched her hair; she smiled at something he said; and seeing me, was it because of seeing me? her smile blossomed. I should like to think that even if she gave her smiles freely, in that one instant, in the Tavern of the Red Lion, she smiled for me alone, before she looked away.
He was drunk, mean drunk. How grotesque he appeared in the muted light of the glowing colored lanterns! He was so broad and so short. The features of his face, already distorted by his twisted genes, were now beaten and bruised, swollen and lumpy. He had not won by the easy road I had taken, but he had won all the same.
When I sat down at their table his head was resting in his arms. He was either singing or crying in a low groaning tone.
“Well, since it’s me and you for the purse, I don’t see why we can’t be civil about it. I’d like to buy you and your lady a drink or two. I’d like to be friends.”
He raised his broad ugly face from his arms, and now I saw, with a suppressed shudder, a second pair of hands tensed gripping the table.
“You know how I beat them, pretty boy, how I’m going to beat you?” He spoke so quietly that I could barely hear him.
And now he held out his four arms in the air for my inspection.
“I beat them with these short thick arms, you think. But you’re wrong, I beat them because I was born mean. I was born to be hit and hit back. I beat them because I was born a mutant, and I hate every normal son of a bitch alive.
“And do you know, pretty boy, I hate you most of all. Because she smiles for you. Because they all smile for you, when they’re laughing at me, when they’re frightened of me.”
He was speaking softly, almost in a whisper; it was hard to follow him over the raucous dance music in the bar.
She held one of his arms, pleading with him in a soft, worried voice, until suddenly he slapped her viciously across the face.
Her eyes grew even larger in shock; her mouth was open and round, as if to say, “Oh,” with a thin trickle of blood from her ripe lower lip, to match the tears which slowly spilled and glistened on her cheeks.
His head slowly sank down, into the tangle of his arms, and he began to mumble once again to himself, in the darkness he had created.
She touched my arm as I rose to leave.
After
the fight, when I recreated it in my mind, it seemed that I had done everything with genius. I easily stayed away from him in the early rounds, while he threw frustrating, exhausting punches into the empty air; my footwork was superb. He was even easier to hit than I had imagined. I had my best round in the sixth, when I began to land a series of hard high kicks; it must have seemed only a matter of time until he sank under a sea of blows and exhaustion. At the end of the round they gave me a standing ovation; I already knew I had lost the fight.
I remember the relentless expression in his eyes, the inexhaustible energy expressed by the slope of his shoulders, the opening and closing of his four hands, as he sat across from me in his corner between rounds.
Later, when I could see anything, I could see her. There were many people in the ring but I could see her form, first as a misty ghost in a cloud of pain, then clear; like an angel she was etched against the sky, while I lay on the ground, on my back, defeated.
“He’s all right,” she said. “Oh, thank the Goddess, he’s all right.”
And then she was gone, and there was the old man, methodically cleaning my face with a wet cloth, his expression as calm and distant as ever.
“You fought very well,” was all he said.
Later that night I was awakened by a pounding on the door. I dragged my aching body out of bed, and through my swollen eyes I made out the form of one of the boys who worked at the tavern across the street.
“The old man’s in the tavern and he’s pushing the mutant hard, looking for trouble,” he told me.
For a while I just stood there, and thought about going back to bed and pretending it was all a bad dream. I felt as if I had been trampled by a horse. Then I ran down the stairs and across the street.
“You’re not actually much of a fighter,” was the first thing I heard as I opened the door. “You’re too stupid,” the old man continued loudly. “Oh, it’s all right in a ring where they keep inside the rules and someone tells you what to do. But outside the ring you’re too stupid to adjust adequately to your environment.”
The girl had one of the mutant’s four arms, struggling with him, no doubt to save the life of a worthless old fool. The other people in the tavern were silent with shock. They didn’t know the old man.
“If you want to wager your purse,” he went on, “against this modest purse of mine, and learn, as well, as valuable a lesson as you have taught my young protege, I will show you the difference between the martial arts and playing games in the ring. I must warn you, though, it will be rough.”
The mutant hurled the girl aside and lurched to his feet. He fumbled at his belt and threw his purse on the counter where the old man had set his.
“Where? Where do you want it, old man, here or outside?”
The old man sprang to the counter, scooped up an enormous pitcher of wine and threw it on the mutant’s feet, which were, I noticed, encased in new sandals made of slippery leather. Then he tossed a bowl of pepper in his face.
It was brutal and quick. The mutant was coughing and choking from the cloud of pepper, slipping and sliding on the wet floor in his wet shoes, while the old man hopped about like a cricket. He was in rare form, and he fought a brutal fight.
He snatched up a tall stool and prodded the mutant gingerly a couple of times with it to put him further off balance, and then quite suddenly, he struck him a terrible snapping blow on the knee. Almost before the mutant struck the ground, the old man dropped the stool, sprang to him and snatched one of his four wildly Bailing arms out of the air. This he whipped viciously in a circle, then let go, and ran back to pick up his stool again.
“Have you had enough,” he asked cheerfully, “or must I strike you again with this stool?”
The mutant sat up with an expression of agony. I don’t think the leg was broken, but I know the arm was. His other three hands were clenched into fists, his short, massive arms pulsing with muscle. My God, I thought, he’s going to try to fight on.
I suppose I intended to come between them, somehow to stop them, and all she saw was me running to aid the old man. I don’t know. I only know the mutant’s woman lunged at me from the side, and I felt a sharp pain in my arm.
She held the dagger high to show me my own blood.
“I’ll kill anyone who touches him. I’ll kill you both. Take the purse and get out. Get out.” And it seemed to me, with all the pain I felt, the pain from the knife wound, the aching from my beating, the agony of being misunderstood, that on some deeper level of my being I felt a thrill of giddy awe. Somewhere inside my mind the puzzle fell in place, and I knew fully, for the first time in my life, woman in all her mysterious glory.
From then on my memories are like disjointed dreams. My mind was swimming from loss of blood, exhaustion, the beating in the ring, or just the confusion of too much color and too much noise.
Someone, I don’t know who, tied up my arm with a scarf; the wound was shallow but painful.
With a strange urgency, I followed a form through the streets. At times I vaguely knew who I followed, at others he was only a shadow. And yet I found him where I somehow knew I would find him, all alone in the middle of that street. The cages were open, empty. Some of the astonished merchants were still counting their coin.
“Is the money all gone, old man?”
Later on, when I thought about him, I liked most to remember him then. He seemed filled with an inexpressible mixture of wild joy and grief. His eyes, I realized with astonishment, were filled with tears. It was the only emotion I had ever seen him show.
“The birds are free,” was all he said.
Moments later he seemed to have forgotten them, and he reminded me in his dry voice about the list he had given me.
“The festival’s over: one, we went to the festival; two, you fought for the championship; three, we gained the purse; four, if you were alert you should have learned much; of course, the mutant learned much also, I didn’t foresee that,” he said, apparently worried by this lack of foresight.
When we came to the edge of the city, where the fires died out, where the music of the people gave way and the music of crickets held forth, he turned toward the mountains; but I was young, and I had caught my first glimpse of woman in all her glory.
The last time I saw him, he was moving up the mountain as slender and spry as a youth, and I remember with some bitterness and with some sadness that he never looked back to where 1 watched him from the road.
A RIGHT-HANDED WRIST
If thy right hand offend thee . . .
Steve Chapman
Artie stood at the staple press in the warehouse, yanking open cardboard boxes and loading them on the press, folding in the bottom flaps; then he slammed down his shoe on the trigger pedal, the pneumatic armature banged the pedestal and rammed brass prongs through dusty cardboard. Pshkkk. In the warehouse, Artie was standing, folding the flaps, pressing down his dusty shoe on the leaky pedal, holding each box while the machine slammed in staples, throwing the stiff boxes onto a pile. Pshkkk. Artie was standing up, stapling boxes at the warehouse, holding down the bottom flaps while the pneumatic press blew dusty air in his face and rammed staples through cardboard. Pshkkk. Artie stood working in the warehouse, throwing empty boxes onto a pile.
The portable radio that hung from the New Kid’s belt announced his approach. Artie looked up at him, strolling down the H-500-H-900 aisle. His eyes, under a red bandana, shot to Artie before he even got to the concrete column at the end of the aisle.
He ducked under the steel beams of the shelf and stepped right over to Artie, slinging a pink sheet from inside his belt. The Kid rattled the paper and said, “Your phone’s ringing.”
“Why is it my phone?”
“You work here.”
“You also. You answer it. I answered it twice today. You know what it said? It tapped.”
“Bad connection?”
“A tapping noise. You listen.”
“Maybe it’s Morse code.”
“I happen to know Morse code.”
The Kid hooked a strand of hair out of his mouth and pushed it over his ear, grinning. “Skilled labor. Am I ever suitably impressed.” College punk. “Hey, maybe it’s a radio contest. I bet if you say the right words, you win a vacation.”
The armature punched four staples through four cardboard Baps. Artie swung a box up onto the pile.
“Art, you made that box upside-down.”
The phone stopped ringing.
“Art, if that was the freight manager calling, your ass is plastic grass. Speaking of whom, have a pink slip. Sample order. All that diddley-shit is supposed to be pulled by noon. All for you.” The spring-loaded staple magazine was running low. The air pressure was uneven. A staple jammed up and twisted sideways, wedged all wrong. Pshkrk.
“Why me?”
“Years with the firm. You’re indispensable. Take the pink slip before my arm falls off.”
Artie took the order in his left hand and reached his right arm into the box to unbend the staple from the inside. His index finger snagged on a sharp prong. He couldn’t work it loose. He whipped the box to and fro on his arm, tried to shake it loose. Wouldn’t shake loose.
“Art, is that your latest attachment? I wish my right arm was so versatile.”
Artie grabbed the box under his left elbow and yanked it loose. His right hand gave a sickly whimper through its punctured cuticle. He pulled it out and checked it over. It had self-sealed with no fluid leakage.
“That’s real authentic, Art. You know, not every prosthetic gets hangnails. I remember this rubber hand I bought at a novelty shop. . . .”
Artie’s plastic third finger was still in fine form hydrodynamically. He held it under the Kid’s nose. Vertical.
The Kid laughed and walked to the stencil cutter for a cigarette.
The very first item on the pink slip was a problem, SERIAL # 0,-14738 ’ product description hobbyist models, Glo-Dark Super-Shark Strato-Monitor. Artie had never seen a five-digit item number before, let alone a Q, series.