by Damon Knight
Erring stood up and said, “End of our first week on Kona, folks! Three weeks today, and we could be off it, and going back to Terra!” and the sense of longing anticipation went round the cabin almost as palpably as a breeze.
That night, when Hanna took over the watch, Alissin, who had preceded her, did not go back to sleep but set up her bench for work. “Got to prepare some experiments,” she said in answer to Hanna’s enquiring look.
“What on?”
“A type of alga. I found it in a puddle out there, and it looks as if it could be a colony food source, except that it reproduces damn slowly, even with all the accelerators that I can put on it. I’m trying a few different environments now.” There was a pause, while she adjusted the settings on an environment hemisphere; then she said, “Marginal work, really, but I can’t do much else without tissue samples from higher life forms.”
Hanna said, with ill-concealed frustration, “We probably won’t be here long enough to get them. Look at the way Gerold’s rushing to get out his preliminary report tomorrow.”
Alissin had turned to her algae samples again. She said drily, “It seems that the only quick way to test out Konan immortality would be to try to kill some, and see how difficult it is.”
It was the day on which Gerold proposed to send out his report, and Hanna wanted to spend the morning with the Konans, in the faint hope that some knowledge would arrive to clarify decision. Rather surprisingly, Jon seemed eager to come too. Alissin also volunteered; but they all knew that this was a strategic retreat from Gerold’s attempts to bully both her and Hanna into writing reports.
“Very stable weather here,” said Alissin as they set off; and it was true. The breeze was still blowing cold and steady from the mountains, the sky had never varied from its perfect steel blue, the unending ripples of grass were the same yesterday, today, and most likely tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
Hanna said bitterly, “We hardly know a thing about this place. We should spend two hundred years just studying it; and we have to leave it in three weeks because the government wants to shove colonists out here as fast as they can go.”
Jon said “Hurry up, can’t you?” He seemed impatient to get to work.
The Konans had changed no more than the weather. They still sat their horses apparently unwearying, and the horses themselves were as tall and white and lovely as ever. Every time it is a shock to see them, thought Hanna. I can’t even carry their image in my mind. Like trying to mount a 3-D projection on a 2-D screen. It suddenly seemed immensely frustrating that even in this, the Konans defeated her; she could not even make her ideals surpass their reality.
Still, she worked away steadily, eliciting small shreds of information from the group, and trying (in case Gerold’s preliminary report did its work too well) to explain the aims of Terran colonization to them. The latter attempt was not successful. The Konans listened, politely, but it made no impression on them.
Once Alissin said, “Jon’s group are moving off a bit.” Hanna, deep in the intricacies of Terran colonial policy, hardly heard her. After some time, Alissin said, “We should get back soon, and we have to call Jon. He’s breaking rule as it is, going so far from us.”
That made Hanna look round; and it was true. Jon’s group was now moving rapidly over the plain towards the shuttle.
“Where is Jon?” said Hanna. “I can’t see him.”
“He must be there, he was there just before.”
“I can’t see—”
Then suddenly the tight group broke into a ragged cluster, and the cluster into a line; and both Hanna and Alissin could see clearly a rider in the middle, looking small and out of place, bumping a little to the long stride of his horse. Behind him, another horse bore two Konan riders.
“The fool, the blasted fool! He’s gone and tried out his stupid Dixon-Ehrmann method—” Hanna turned to run after them.
“He may be all right. They’re only walking.”
“Oh, come on!”
Their own group was showing signs of moving in the same direction. Hanna began to run; the horses’ walk was a strenuous jog-trot for her and Alissin. Hanna felt her face stiffen with dried sweat.
But Jon rode on, not easily, but at least safely. His companions seemed in high spirits; Hanna could see some of them urging their horses to jump and rear, and sweated again to think that Jon’s mount might follow suit. But it continued to walk.
They were halfway to the shuttle by now, and Hanna could see Gerold and Erring and Biren come out to watch the approach. She saw, with alarm, that Gerold carried two pistols. She saw Jon wave to them, with proud affected carelessness, and cursed him more than ever.
All the horses began to trot, and then to canter. Hanna shouted, “Drop off you fool, get off while you can!” (knowing all the time that to fall from even a cantering Konanhorse would be very dangerous). But Jon, sliding and bumping perilously, took no notice; and Hanna saw suddenly that he had tied his right wrist to the mane of his horse, evidently to help him keep his grip. She felt her stomach muscles clench with panic.
Erring was shouting now, too: “Jon, are you all right?” Now they were all near enough to the shuttle for Gerold to see Jon’s tied hand, and Hanna heard him say, “They’ve tied him up—the bastards have tied him up!” and he raised one of his pistols. Hanna cried breathlessly, “No, they didn’t, Gerry, he did it himself—it’s his blasted Dixon-Ehrmann method.” But Gerold said, “How do we know that?”
The horses were very near to the shuttle now, and suddenly they began to gallop, past it and in a wide curve around it. They all saw Jon nearly slip, and he screamed. His head whipped back and forth, hitting his hands clenched in his horse’s mane; then in a moment the whole mass of horses had gone, streaming past like snowflakes in the wind.
Panic exploded like a bomb among the little group of Terrans. Gerold raised his pistol, and Erring knocked it out of his hand, crying, “You’ll hit him, he’ll be killed!” Biren and Alissin ran futilely after the horses, and back. Hanna dived for the pistol, and Gerold punched her away. “When they come back again I’m shooting them!” he yelled.
The thunder of hooves approached the shuttle again, and they all ran out to meet it. The Konans were leaning forward, shouting to each other, bringing their horses in a circle round the shuttle. For a moment they could not see Jon; then one horse ran by apparently riderless, but for two hands clasped in his mane, and they saw him dangling like a doll, with his feet rhythmically hitting the ground and bouncing crazily off it again.
A babble of voices. Gerold lifted his pistol and fired, but Jon’s horse was past, and the beam tore strips off the next horse and rider. Hanna found herself shouting, “They made us not to be and they are not!” in Konan, again and again. Gerold aimed his pistol once more, and Biren seized the other one; but the race of horses and riders never ceased, and Jon’s horse was untouched. Alissin cried, “They don’t know they’re going to die!” and the tears ran down her face. Some of the horses were slowing now, some running on three legs, and some riders were down. But their pale handsome faces never changed, and none of them cried out, and none fell over. “You can’t kill the bloody things,” panted Gerold desperately; and at the same time, Hanna heard the roar and whistle of a shuttle landing, and Erring called gladly, “They’ve come!” and waved wildly. The door of the relief shuttle opened, and a group of Terrans ran out, all armed with pistols, and deployed themselves neatly over the plain. Completely businesslike, they began firing into the mass of Konans, steadily and efficiently saving the stranded shuttle from attack.
Hanna sat down, because her knees folded up. It seemed as if a switch clicked in her brain, so that time went very slowly, and any number of images could parade through her mind simultaneously and without hurry. She saw the Konans galloping to meet them, white horses on a dark plain; and saw too a Konan in front of her stagger forward with half his leg shot off, and lose his other leg to a stray beam, and continue to crawl forward until another s
hot carved his chest open, all with no expression on his face. She saw gunfire arcing across the plains like flaming swords, a hundred and fifty years ago, and Jon as a little boy saying, “I can! I am big enough!” and the guarded words of the old report: “indigenous humanoids appeared nonaggressive.” She heard the Konans saying to her, “It is not to be understood,” Alissin commenting, “Try to kill some and see how difficult it is,” and heard, too, Gerold cry in anguish, “You can’t tell when the bastards are dead, they won’t die—” but many of them were dead, caught in crossbeams, and chopped into heaps.
Then the switch clicked back again, and she saw the last of the Konanhorses suddenly double their speed, with no visible effort, so that they raced across the plain faster than the mind could follow, the riders calling to each other in great echoing cries, and were gone behind the bluff like ships gone into hyper-space.
Erring and Alissin were bending over Jon, who lay wounded near what had been his horse.
One of the second shuttle crew came over and said to Gerold, “Too close for comfort. Thought the locals weren’t supposed to be dangerous?”
Hanna said, with a hysterical travesty of patience, “No, no, you’ve got it wrong. No one said they weren’t dangerous, they said they weren’t aggressive, and that was right, wasn’t it? Erring, wasn’t it? Gerold?”
Erring said, taking no notice, “He’s alive, anyway. I should think Medcom can deal with him. At least we saved him.” Hanna started to laugh, and Alissin said sharply, “At a cost of how many indigenes, and how much trust? Do you really think his life was worth it?”
Still whooping with laughter, Hanna said, “What did we save him from? For? We haven’t got him. He’ll die anyway, you know.”
SEVEN AMERICAN NIGHTS
Here is Gene Wolfe’s most powerful novella since “The Fifth Head of Cerberus”: a phantasmagoria of life and death, truth and madness in the ruined continent of North America, seen through the eyes of a visitor from the civilized East.
Gene Wolfe
* * *
ESTEEMED AND LEARNED MADAME:
As I last wrote you, it appears to me likely that your son Nadan (may Allah preserve him!) has left the old capital and traveled—of his own will or another’s—north into the region about the Bay of Delaware. My conjecture is now confirmed by the discovery in those regions of the notebook I enclose. It is not of American manufacture, as you see; and though it holds only the records of a single week, several suggestive items therein provide us new reason to hope.
I have photocopied the contents to guide me in my investigations; but I am alert to the probability that you, Madame, with your superior knowledge of the young man we seek, may discover implications I have overlooked. Should that be the case, I urge you to write me at once.
Though I hesitate to mention it in connection with so encouraging a finding, your most recently due remission has not yet arrived. I assume that this tardiness results from the procrastination of the mails, which is here truly abominable. I must warn you, however, that I shall be forced to discontinue the search unless funds sufficient for my expenses are forthcoming before the advent of winter.
With inexpressible respect,
HASSAN KERBELAI
* * *
Here I am at last! After twelve mortal days aboard the Princess Fatimah—twelve days of cold and ennui—twelve days of bad food and throbbing engines—the joy of being on land again is like the delight a condemned man must feel when a letter from the shah snatches him from beneath the very blade of death. America! America! Dull days are no more! They say that everyone who comes here either loves or hates you, America—by Allah I love you now!
Having begun this record at last, I find I do not know where to begin. I had been reading travel diaries before I left home; and so when I saw you, O Book, lying so square and thick in your stall in the bazaar—why should I not have adventures too, and write a book like Osman Aga’s? Few come to this sad country at the world’s edge after all, and most who do land farther up the coast.
And that gives me the clue I was looking for—how to begin. America began for me as colored water. When I went out on deck yesterday morning, the ocean had changed from green to yellow. I had never heard of such a thing before, neither in my reading, nor in my talks with Uncle Mirza, who was here thirty years ago. I am afraid I behaved like the greatest fool imaginable, running about the ship babbling, and looking over the side every few minutes to make certain the rich mustard color was still there and would not vanish the way things do in dreams when we try to point them out to someone else. The steward told me he knew. Golam Gassem the grain merchant (whom I had tried to avoid meeting for the entire trip until that moment) said, “Yes, yes,” and turned away in a fashion that showed he had been avoiding me too, and that it was going to take more of a miracle than yellow water to change his feelings.
One of the few native Americans in first class came out just then: Mister—as the style is here—Tallman, husband of the lovely Madam Tallman, who really deserves such a tall man as myself. (Whether her husband chose that name in self-derision, or in the hope that it would erase others’ memory of his infirmity; or whether it was his father’s, and is merely one of the countless ironies of fate, I do not know. There was something wrong with his back.) As if I had not made enough spectacle of myself already, I took this Mr. Tallman by the sleeve and told him to look over the side, explaining that the sea had turned yellow. I am afraid Mr. Tallman turned white himself instead, and turned something else too—his back—looking as though he would have struck me if he dared. It was comic enough, I suppose—I heard some of the other passengers chuckling about it afterward—but I don’t believe I have seen such hatred in a human face before. Just then the captain came strolling up, and 1—considerably deflated but not Battened yet, and thinking that he had not overheard Mr. Tallman and me—mentioned for the final time that day that the water had turned yellow. “I know,” the captain said. “It’s his country” (here he jerked his head in the direction of the pitiful Mr. Tallman), “bleeding to death.”
Here it is evening again, and I see that I stopped writing last night before I had so much as described my first sight of the coast. Well, so be it. At home it is midnight, or nearly, and the life of the cafes is at its height. How I wish that I were there now, with you, Yasmin, not webbed among these red- and purple-dad strangers, who mob their own streets like an invading army, and duck into their houses like rats into their holes. But you, Yasmin, or Mother, or whoever may read this, will want to know of my day —only you are sometimes to think of me as I am now, bent over an old, scarred table in a decayed room with two beds, listening to the hastening feet in the streets outside.
I slept late this morning; I suppose I was more tired from the voyage than I realized. By the time I woke, the whole of the city was alive around me, with vendors crying fish and fruits under my shuttered window, and the great wooden wains the Americans call trucks rumbling over the broken concrete on their wide iron wheels, bringing up goods from the ships in the Potomac anchor* age. One sees very odd teams here, Yasmin. When I went to get my breakfast (one must go outside to reach the lobby and dining room in these American hotels, which I would think would be very inconvenient in bad weather) I saw one of these trucks with two oxen, a horse, and a mule in the traces, which would have made you laugh. The drivers crack their whips all the time.
The first impression one gets of America is that it is not as poor as one has been told. It is only later that it becomes apparent how much has been handed down from the previous century. The streets here are paved, but they are old and broken. There are fine, though decayed, buildings everywhere (this hotel is one— the Inn of Holidays, it is called), more modern in appearance than the ones we see at home, where for so long traditional architecture was enforced by law. We are on Maine Street, and when I had finished my breakfast (it was very good, and very cheap by our standards, though I am told it is impossible to get anything out of season here) I asked t
he manager where I should go to see the sights of the city. He is a short and phenomenally ugly man, something of a hunchback as so many of them are. “There are no tours,” he said. “Not any more.”
I told him that I simply wanted to wander about by myself, and perhaps sketch a bit.
“You can do that. North for the buildings, south for the theater, west for the park. Do you plan to go to the park, Mr. Jaffar-zadeh?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“You should hire at least two securities if you go to the park —I can recommend an agency.”
“I have my pistol.”
“You’ll need more than that, sir.”