He stood in front of Thirty-five Maple Street. The silence which surrounded that plain white-shuttered house struck him as ominous. He took the needlebeam out of his pocket, looking for a reassurance he knew he could not find. Then he walked up the neat flagstones and tried the front door. It opened. He stepped inside.
He made out the dim shapes of lamps and furniture, the dull gleam of a painting on the wall, a piece of statuary on an ebony pedestal. Needlebeam in hand, he stepped into the next room.
And came face to face with the informer.
Staring at the informer’s face, Barrent remembered. In an overpowering flood of memory he saw himself, a little boy, entering the closed schoolroom. He heard again the soothing hum of machinery, watched the pretty lights blink and flash, and heard the insinuating machine voice whisper in his ear. At first, the voice filled him with horror; what it suggested was unthinkable. Then, slowly, he became accustomed to it, and accustomed to all the strange things that happened in the closed schoolroom.
He learned. The machines taught on deep, unconscious levels. The machines intertwined their lessons with the basic drives, weaving a pattern of learned behavior with the life instinct. They taught, then blocked off conscious knowledge of the lessons, sealed it—and fused it.
What had he been taught? For the social good, you must be your own policeman and witness. You must assume responsibility for any crime which might conceivably be yours.
The face of the informer stared impassively at him. It was Barrent’s own face, reflected back from a mirror on the wall.
He had informed on himself. Standing with the gun in his hand that day, looking down at the murdered man, learned unconscious processes had taken over. The presumption of guilt had been too great for him to resist, the similarity to guilt had turned into guilt itself. He had walked to the robot-confessor’s booth, and there he had given complete and damning evidence against himself, had indicted himself on the basis of probability.
The robot-confessor had passed the obligatory sentence, and Barrent had left the booth. Well-trained in the lessons of the classroom, he had taken himself into custody, had gone to the nearest thought-control center in Trenton. Already a partial amnesia had taken place, keyed and triggered by the lessons of the closed classroom.
The skilled android technicians in the thought-control center had labored hard to complete this amnesia, to obliterate any remnants of memory. As a standard safeguard against any possible recovering of his memory, they had implanted a logical construct of his crime beneath the conscious level. As the regulations required, this construct contained an implication of the far-reaching power of Earth.
When the job was completed, an automatized Barrent had marched out of the center, taken a special expressway to the prison ship depot, boarded the prison ship, entered his cell, and closed the door and Earth behind him.
Then he had slept until the checkpoint had been passed, and the guards awakened the prisoners for disembarkation on Omega . . .
Now, staring at his own face in the mirror, the last of the unconscious lessons of the classroom became conscious:
The lessons of the closed classroom must never be consciously known by the individual. If they become conscious, the human organism must perform an immediate act of self-destruction.
Learned behavioral patterns intertwined with the basic life drive forced Barrent to raise the needlebeam, to point it toward his head. This was what the robot-confessor had tried to warn him about, and what the mutant girl had skrenned. The younger Barrent, conditioned to absolute and mindless conformity, had to kill himself.
The older Barrent who had spent time on Omega fought that blind urge. A schizophrenic Barrent fought himself. The two parts of him battled for possession of the gun, for control of the body, for ownership of the mind.
The gun’s movement stopped inches from his head. The muzzle wavered. Then slowly, the new Omegan Barrent, Barrent, forced the gun away.
His victory was short-lived. For now the lessons of the closed classroom took over, forcing Barrent, into a contra-survival situation with the implacable and death-desiring product of conditioning, Barrent.
CHAPTER 30
CONDITIONING took over and flung the fighting Barrents backward through subjective time, to those stress-points in the past where death had been near, where the temporal life fabric had been weakened, where a predisposition toward death had already been established. Conditioning forced Barrent, to re-experience those moments. But this time, the danger was augmented by the full force of the malignant half of his personality—by the murderous informer, Barren.
Barrent, stood under glaring lights on the bloodstained sands of the Arena, a sword in his hand. It was the time of the Omegan Games. Coming at him was the Saunus, a heavily armored reptile with the leering face of Barrent. Barrent, severed the creature’s tail, and it changed into three trichometreds rat-sized, Barrent-faced, with the dispositions of rabid wolverines. He killed two, and the third grinned and bit his left hand to the bone. He killed it, and watched Barrent’s blood leak into the soggy sand . . .
Three ragged men sat laughing on a bench, and a girl handed him a small gun. “Good luck,” she said, “I hope you know how to use this.” Barrent nodded his thanks before he noticed that the girl was not Moera; she was the skrenning mutant who had predicted his death. Still, he moved into the street and faced the three Hadjis.
Two of the men were mildfaced strangers. The third, Barrent, stepped forward and quickly brought his gun into firing position. Barrent, flung himself to the ground and pressed the trigger of his unfamiliar weapon. He felt it vibrate in his hand and saw Hadji Barrent’s head and shoulders turn black and begin to crumble. Before he could take aim again, his gun was wrenched violently from his hand. Barrent’s dying shot had creased the end of the muzzle.
Desperately he dived for the gun, and as he rolled toward it he saw the second man, now wearing the Barrent, face, take careful aim. Barrent, felt pain flash through his arm, already torn by the trichometred’s teeth. He managed to shoot this Barrent, and through a haze of pain face the third man, now also Barrent,. His arm was stiffening rapidly, but he forced himself to press the trigger . . .
You’re playing their game,
Barrent, told himself. The deathconditioning will wear you down, will kill you. You must see through it, get past it. It isn’t really happening, it’s in your mind . . .
But there was no time to think about that. He was in a large, circular, high-ceilinged room of stone in the cellars of the Department of Justice. It was the Trial by Ordeal. Rolling across the floor toward him was a glistening black machine shaped like a half-sphere, standing almost four feet high. It came at him, and in the pattern of red, green and amber lights he could see the hated face of Barrent,.
Now his enemy was in its ultimate form: the invariant robot consciousness, as false and stylized as the conditioned dreams of Earth. The Barrent, machine extruded a single slender tentacle with a white light winking at the end of it. As it approached the tentacle withdrew, and in its place appeared a jointed metal arm ending in a knife-edge. Barrent, dodged, and heard the knife scrape against stone.
It isn’t what you think it is, Barrent, told himself. It isn’t a machine, and you are not hack on Omega. This is only half of yourself you are fighting, this is nothing but a deadly illusion.
But he couldn’t believe it. The Barrent machine was coming at him again, its metal hide glistening with a foul green substance which Barrent recognized immediately as Contact Poison. He broke into a sprint, trying to stay away from the fatal touch.
It isn’t fatal, he told himself.
Neutralizer washed over the metal surface, clearing away the poison. The machine tried to ram him. Barrent tried half-heartedly to push it aside. It crashed into him with stunning force, and he could feel ribs splintering.
It isn’t real! You’re letting a conditioned reflex talk you to death! You aren’t on Omega! You’re on Earth, in your own home, staring i
nto a damned mirror!
But the pain was real, and the clubbed metal arm felt real as it crashed against his shoulder. Barrent staggered away.
He felt horror, not at dying, but at dying too soon, before he could warn the Omegans of this ultimate danger planted deep in their own minds. There was no one else to warn them of the catastrophe that would strike when they recovered their memories of Earth. To his best knowledge, no one had experienced this and lived. If he could live through it, counter-measures could be taken, counter-conditioning could be set up.
He pulled himself to his feet. Coached since childhood in social responsibility, he thought of it now. He couldn’t allow himself to die when his knowledge was vital to Omega.
That is not a real machine.
He repeated it to himself as the Barrent machine revved up, picked up speed and hurtled toward him from the far side of the room. He forced himself to see beyond the machine, to see the patient droning lessons of the classroom which had created this monster in his mind.
This is not a real machine.
He believed it . . .
And swung his face into the hated face reflected in the metal.
There was a moment of dazzling pain, and then he lost consciousness. When he came to, he was alone in his own house on Earth. His arm and shoulder ached, and several of his ribs seemed to be broken. On his left hand he bore the stigmata of the trichometred’s bite.
But with his cut and bleeding right hand he had smashed the mirror, shattering it and Barrent, utterly and forever.
THE END
1962
THE JOURNEY OF JOENES
bubble of blood at the corner of your mouth. It is no mean book that you are about to begin for the first time. We envy you.
INTRODUCTION
Joenes’s fabulous world is over a thousand years behind us. We know that Joenes’s Journey began around the year 2000, and ended in our own era. We also know that the age through which Joenes travelled was remarkable for its industrial civilizations. 21st century mechanical articulation gave rise to many strange artifacts which no present-day reader has ever encountered. Still, most of us have learned at one time or another what the ancients meant by “guided missile,” or “atom bomb.” Fragments of some of these fantastic creations can be seen in many museums.
Beyond a doubt, Joenes himself was an actual person; but there is no way of determining the authenticity of every story told about him. But even those which are considered allegorical are still representative of the spirit and temper of the times.
Our book, then, is a collection of tales about the far-travelling Joenes and about his marvellous and tragic century. A few of the tales are from written records. But most of them come to us through the oral tradition, handed down from storyteller to storyteller.
Aside from this book, the only written account of the Journey appears in the recently published Fijian Tales, where, for obvious reasons, Joenes’s role is rendered secondary to that of his friend Lum. This is quite untrue to the spirit of the Journey, and false to the content of the stories themselves. Because of this, we have felt the necessity of this book, in order that the entire body of Joenes Stories may be rendered faithfully in written form, to be preserved for future generations.
This volume contains all of the 21st century writing concerning Joenes.
LUM’S MEETING WITH JOENES, from the Book of Fiji, Orthodox edition.
HOW LUM JOINED THE ARMY, also from the Book of Fiji, Orthodox edition.
All of the other stories are from the oral tradition, deriving from Joenes or his followers, and handed down from generation to generation. The present collection puts into written form the words of the most famous present-day storytellers, without any alteration in their various viewpoints, idiosyncrasies, moralities, style, comments, and so forth. We would like to thank those storytellers for graciously allowing us to put their words upon paper. These men are:
Maubingi of Tahiti
Ma’aoa of Samoa
Paaui of Fiji
Pelui of Easter Island
Teleu of Huahine
We have used the particular tales or group of tales for which each of these men is most acclaimed. Credit is given at the beginning of each story. And we make our apologies to the many excellent storytellers we have been unable to include in this volume, and whose contributions will have to await the compilation of a variorum Joenes.
For the reader’s convenience these stories are arranged sequentially, as continuing chapters of an unfolding narrative, with a beginning, a middle and an end. But the reader is warned not to expect a consistent and rationally ordered story. Your editor could, of course, have taken from or added to the various parts, imposing his own sense of order and style upon tire whole. But he thought it best to leave the tales as they were, in order to give the reader the entire unexpurgated Journey. This seemed only fair to the storytellers, and the only way to tell the whole truth about Joenes, the people he met, and the strange world he travelled through.
Aside from taking down the exact words of the storytellers, and copying the two written accounts, your editor himself has invented nothing, and has added no comments of his own to the tales. His only remarks are in the last chapter of the book, where he tells of the Journey’s end.
Now, reader, we invite you to meet Joenes, and travel with him through the last years of the old world and the first years of the new.
JOENES BEGINS HIS JOURNEY
(As told by Maubingi of Tahiti.)
OUR HERO, JOENES, lived upon a small island in the Pacific Ocean, an atoll which lay 200 miles east of Tahiti. This island was called Manituatua, and it was no more than two miles long by several hundred yards in width. Surrounding it was a coral reef, and beyond the reef lay the blue waters of the pacific. To this island Joenes’s parents had come from America, to tend the equipment which supplied most of Eastern Polynesia with electrical power.
When Joenes’s mother died, his father labored alone; and when his father died, Joenes was requested by the Pacific Power Company to continue in his father’s place. And this Joenes did until his twenty-fifth year, when circumstances forced a change.
These circumstances were formed in the executive office of the Pacific Power Company, which was situated in San Francisco, on the Western Coast of America. Here, pot-bellied men wearing suits, neckties, shirts and shoes had gathered around a circular table made of gleaming teak. These men of the Round Table, as they were called, had much of human destiny in their hands. Chairman of the Board was Arthur Pendragon, a man who had inherited his position, but had been forced to wage a grim proxy fight before he could take his rightful place. Once established, Arthur Pendragon had fired the Old Board of Trustees, and had appointed his own men. Present were Bill Launcelot, a man of vast financial strength; Richard Galahad, well-known for his charitable works; Austin Modred, who had political connections throughout the state; and many others.
These men, whose financial empire had been hard-pressed of late, voted for a consolidation of their power, and an immediate disposition of all unprofitable holdings. This decision, simple as it seemed at the time, had far-reaching consequences.
In distant Manituatua, Joenes received word of the Board’s decision, which was to cease operation of the Eastern Polynesian power station.
Thus Joenes was out of a job. Worse still, he had lost an entire way of life.
During the next week, Joenes gave considerable thought to his future. His Polynesian friends urged him to stay with them on Manituatua; or, if he preferred, to go to one of the larger islands such as Huahine, Bora Bora, or Tahiti.
Joenes listened to their proposals, and then went to a private place to think. He emerged from this place in three days and announced to the waiting populace his intention of going to America, his parents homeland, there to see with his own eyes the wonders about which he had read, to discover if his destiny lay there; and if not, to return to the people of Polynesia with a clear mind and open heart, ready to perform wh
atever services they required of him.
There was consternation among the people when they heard this, for the island of America was known to be more dangerous than the unpredictable ocean itself; and the Americans were reputed to be sorcerers and warlocks, who, through subtle enchantments, could change the entire way of a man’s thinking. Nevertheless, Joenes was determined to go.
He was affianced to a Manituatuan girl of golden skin, almond eyes, black hair, a figure of the greatest piquancy, and a mind wise in the ways of men. Joenes proposed to send for this girl, whose name was Tondelayo, as soon as he had established himself in America; or, if fortune did not favor him, to return to her. Neither of these proposals met with Tondelayo’s approval, and she spoke to Joenes in the following fashion, and in the local dialect then prevalent:
“Hey! you foolish popaa fella want one time go Melica? For why, hey? More coconut in Melica, maybe? Bigger beach? Better fishing? No! You think maybe better chumbi-chumbi, hey? I tell you no. More better you stay alongside here me one time, my word!”
In this fashion the lovely Tondelayo reasoned with Joenes. But Joenes answered:
“My darling, do you think it pleases me to leave you, the epitome of all my dreams and the crystallization of ray desires? No, my darling, no! This departure fills me with dread, for I do not know what fate awaits me in the cold world to the east. I only know a man must go, must look at fame and fortune, and if need be, at death itself. For only in an understanding of the great world to the east, which I have heard of only through my departed parents and their books, can I ever return and spend my life here in these islands.”
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