It was nice to live with Miranda. Sometimes Mika stayed over, too. There was a little bed out back in the shed. The weather was mild, so it never bothered Mika to sleep out back. But Aaron preferred it when it was just him and Miranda. Then she would sing him those strange, sad old songs of hers. Sometimes she recited poetry to him in a language he did not recognize. Sometimes they went to the woods beyond the city for nuts and mushrooms. There were squirrels in the woods and bright yellow pumpkins in the fields. There was something strange about it all, but Aaron wasn’t sure what it was. Whenever he tried to think about it, his head started to hurt.
He wondered sometimes if he was going crazy. But that was so unpleasant a thought that his mind quickly veered away from it. He thought, if I’m crazy, it’s best not to know.
“Miranda,” he said one day, “when do I get to see my son?”
She looked at him, startled. “What are you talking about?”
“My son, Lawrence. He’s in Alien City. I want to see him.”
“You must have it wrong, Aaron. You’re too young to have a son.”
He stared at her. He understood that if he agreed with her, it would be true. He was tempted. Imagine being able to regain all those lost cycles! But he couldn’t let himself do it.
“I have a son, Miranda. He must be older than you.”
She flashed him a look. “That shows how much you know about it!”
“When can I see him?”
“Aaron, I must warn you, you’re ruining everything.”
“I don’t see how. I’m just asking about my son.”
“Reality is not what we deal with around here,” Miranda said. “Is love so meagre, then, that you give it up in order to ask foolish and mundane questions? Where’s Uncle Mika? He could explain it to you better than I.”
“Yes, where is Mika?” Aaron asked.
“Oh, I’m here, I’m here,” Mika said, appearing suddenly in a corner of the room and hastily buttoning up his fly. “Do I never get a moment’s peace, not even for a naturalistic bit of business like this?”
“What’s going on here?” Aaron asked him. “Who are you people?”
“He’s seen through us,” Mika remarked to Miranda.
Now that he looked more closely, there was something curious about both of them. Maybe it was the way the dancing candlelight of the little cottage seemed to seek them out, as though those fiery points of light loved them.
Perhaps it was because they seemed so perfect, yet perfect in a nonhuman way, like something that lacks the flaws that would make it truly loveable; perhaps it was the way their figures wavered in the flickering lights, Miranda in her long peasant skirt, Mika in his blue serge pilot coat. The light from the fireplace danced around diem, and then Aaron noticed that he could see through them, as though they were figures on an isinglass screen.
He mused about the strangeness of that time, when the thought of unreality first came on him, when he realized that perhaps he was not well yet. It seemed to him that he had to get out of there.
He had to leave the cottage, which had been more homelike than home itself, far behind.
And what was more horrible than that was the fact that this did not even dismay him. It seemed to him perfectly right and proper that Miranda and Mika should have something otherworldly about them. This feeling on his part alarmed him even more than his insight as to their transparency. It opened up many possibilities: that he was going crazy, or had gone; or worse, that he wasn’t crazy, and that in some incomprehensible way, Miranda and Mika were as they were meant to be. For it seemed to him now that they might not even be humans. All the evidence at this point seemed to say that they were aliens, perhaps the original inhabitants of the city, and that they had taken this way to present themselves to him, so as not to alarm him and bring him slowly into their construct.
He began to search for ways of getting out. He didn’t let on to them, but it seemed to him now that there was something horrible about the cottage, something distressing and unfamiliar about its inhabitants. He found himself wanting to study their faces more closely. He began to detect a faint wavering of their outlines when he glanced at them out of the corners of his eyes. But he couldn’t be sure.
He decided he would have to be guileful, indirect. In the morning he began extending his habitual walks. Always going a little farther. It was important to do it this way if he were to ever hope to get away. And at the same time he knew that he was acting thoroughly crazy; there might be nothing in this; he might be making it all up.
Nevertheless, he continued extending his walks, and nobody commented on it. And then, one morning, when his walk had brought him to a little bridge across a stream, he crossed it. Looking back, the landscape seemed in some subtle manner to have changed. He knew then that it was time to continue, away from the cottage, on to what lay ahead.
Aaron walked across the fields. He wasn’t sure in what direction Alien City lay, but he had an intimation that this was the right direction. After a while the fields gave way to second-growth woodland. Thin shoots of young trees stretched ahead of him interminably. He could hear the scolding sound of crows in the branches. They peered down at him with an air of indifferent evil. The day seemed to extend forever, low sun white in a white sky, black branches cutting across his vision, tangling his thoughts. He became very tired but he knew he mustn’t stop. Not here, not now. His feet sank into the thin mud which the trees sat upon, and sometimes he could feel something below him, something lumpy and unmentionable. He didn’t care to investigate, to see what it was, but hurried on. And the sun sank no lower in the sky. He could feel the presence of an ancient evil, or so it seemed to him. This was an accursed land. He wondered from time to time where he was, then reminded himself not to ask that question. He must not give up his certainties, even if he was wrong. Especially if he was wrong. He had to go on, and he did go on, until suddenly it was all over and he had arrived at the place he had been going to.
When he finally came to the alien city itself, he didn’t recognize it at first. His mind was full of how other illustrious cities of the past have looked after excavation. Ur of the Chaldees, Babylon, Knossos, Thebes, Karnak, these were on his mind. Ruins give a feeling of antiquity and strangeness, and he had expected to find this in the alien city on Myryx, too.
And of course it was like nothing he had seen before. It didn’t even seem strange. What was strange about this alien city was its familiarity.
He only began to know about this after establishing his second house. This was the ramshackle little hut on the edge of the swamp. He could look across the swamp and see the spires and towers of the alien city. Sometimes he could see people moving down the streets. But that was on the far side of the bog. There seemed no way to get there. The bog was treacherous; a pole pushed into it would continue down, finally getting lost in the muck that formed the bog’s bottom. Aaron didn’t like to think about what might be buried in the bog. He thought of skeletons with grasping fingers, corpses with dripping hands and mouths livid and set awry, and he stayed far from the swamp. From time to time he would put himself together and try to march around the bog. But he always gave up after an outing of half a day or less, around one side of the shore or the other. It seemed to him that he wasn’t intended to go to the city at this time. Why else would it be so difficult? He had to wait, that much was obvious, or that much he could talk himself into. And all the time he was ashamed of himself as a quitter. But he also knew that profound changes were taking place in him, and that he couldn’t hope to understand what had happened until it was finished happening.
And then there was a certain darkness, a wavering wall of uncertainty. It had been interesting, living here for a while in the limbo. The limbo was a good place.
After a while the problem came to consume all his waking thoughts. How was he to cross the bog and get to the alien city? He couldn’t think of anything else. It became necessary to concentrate all thoughts on that one thing. And therefore i
t was not surprising that his world temporarily fell apart when something happened to vary the routine. He wasn’t sure when he first heard the noise. He was too busy thinking about how to get across the bog to worry much about what sounds might mean in the little hut where he resided. Given his circumstances, it was both easy and accurate to lump all sounds together under the heading, “alien sounds.” And then to ignore these.
But certain sounds are difficult to ignore. Dry scratching sounds in the walls, for example, and the scurrying of some dry-skinned creature in the crawl space of the ceiling. He found after a while he was reacting to the sound without actually registering it. Somebody was putting him to a great deal of trouble. It occurred to him to trace out the sounds, but he didn’t think, not at this point, that there was any point to it. Why bother to learn the meaning of sounds in a place you are about to vacate, as soon as you figure out how to cross the bog?
Time passed, there in the little hut. The waters of the bog reflected steely clouds in the sky. In the evening there was rarely a true sunset. But sometimes the sky would light up with neurotic oranges and dubious purples. The light here was not on a human scale. It could even be considered pretentious. But he grew quickly to love it, so that, for years after, it would remain the signature of this place.
“Mr. Aaron? Are you awake?”
Aaron sat up. Somebody had whispered to him, there in the dark, in the small hours of the night, in his hut on the edge of the alien city.
“Who is it?” Aaron asked.
“You don’t know me,” the voice said. “But I’m a friend.”
It was a firm, deep voice, and it led Aaron to think that it belonged to a large, burly man. Or possibly some other species. What did it want?
“What is it?”
“We have something to show you.”
“What is it?”
“Come this way; see for yourself.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Aaron said, “until you explain what you’re talking about.”
“You are here to investigate the Samians,” the voice said. “Is that not correct?”
“Yes. But I don’t see—”
“I can show you things that will tell you volumes about the Samians. Don’t waste this opportunity. Come with me.”
That let a lot of things open, and Aaron would have liked to pursue a few of the avenues which the voice had opened up. But there had been a certain urgency in this voice. On the other hand, Aaron was full sick of the bog, which rarely changed and had little wildlife around it to keep the gaze entertained.
Aaron stood up cautiously in the dark. The lights didn’t seem to be working. A very small hand crept into his own. It was like a child’s hand.
Except that it seemed to have too many fingers. Not that he was prejudiced. It was simply something to note. He turned and followed the gentle tug of the fingers, toward a wall which dissolved and became a long corridor, dark but not quite so dark as the room had been earlier. He continued down it. It was a long time before he saw a dot of light at the end of it. He continued to walk and the dot grew in size. Far ahead he could see a glowing rectangle of light. This would have to be a doorway. He wondered if he had gotten through into the alien city after all. Could this have been his guide? He looked down and saw a very small rectangular figure. It looked a great deal like a Samian, only much smaller, and it had tiny arms and legs. Each leg terminated in a foot with seven toes, and each hand terminated likewise in a hand with six fingers.
“Who are you?” Aaron asked. “And where are you taking me?”
“This is the inspection,” the small parallelepipedon said. “You should know that. You are the inspector.”
“I am?” Aaron said.
“Of course. You were told by the Council to keep your eyes on the Samians, lest they prove a threat to the future of the humanoid race. Is that not so?”
“It’s so,” Aaron said, “but how did you know?”
“Our spies are everywhere,” the parallelepipedon said. “Come, we have put out all the evidence for you.”
“Evidence? What evidence?”
“Evidence as to the true intentions of the Samians.”
Aaron could see hundreds of the little parallelepipedons. It was evident at once that they were closely related to the larger Samians.
As their spokesman, P. Samuelson, said, many ages ago the two races had been unified. Then the winds of change came. Separate religious holidays were declared. After that, the smaller pipedons found that a decree passed in the dark and sub rosa had declared the smaller ones second class citizens, to be known hereafter as the Underclass. Some of the smaller pipedons thought it was a pretty-sounding name, but the more intelligent among them soon put them straight. “Can’t you see what they’re trying? They want us to do all the work. That’s why they’re growing themselves without limbs!”
The larger pipedons were elusive when asked why they were breeding a generation without arms or any means of manual dexterity. The depth of their plot began to show itself when a warehouse full of indentured smaller pipedons, stacked one atop the other like leathery pancakes, was found, all awaiting their being sent to suburbs for indentured servanthood. They had been drugged. Upon revival, they said they had been promised a trip to a beautiful country where all living things lived together in peace. This was naive of them, but not criminally so. They mentioned a certain stranger who had made these promises—a big fellow the size of a rack of bacon, with a shifty expression. Since no one could prove that the larger pipedons were capable of any expression whatsoever, the case was dismissed.
Yet the trend was clearly established. The larger pipedons, actuated by whatever obscure survival energy, continued to breed out the use of limbs in favor of the new doctrine of psychic homogeneity. And more and more favor came to be found in the doctrine of spiritual immobility.
This was a time of great enthusiasm among the Samians. It seemed to them that willingly giving up the use of limbs was a great step toward true spirituality. It didn’t occur to them, however, that all that they used to do for themselves was now done by the humble small parallelepipedons, who, more and more, were relegated to a backstage existence.
In vain did the smaller parallelepipedons point out that they had all the attributes of Samianhood. Nobody was listening. The Samians declared that the smaller Samians were “parts of the Samian body” and not autonomous creatures at all. According to this doctrine, anywhere a Samian found a smaller Samian he could claim him or her as his or her property, an autonomous part of his or her body that had somehow gotten loose.
Since the Samians knew this wouldn’t go down well with the other civilized races, they bent every effort to keep anyone from finding out the Samian-Samian situation.
“As a rule,” Samuelson said, “they don’t let us off the home planets. But when this expedition to the alien city on Myryx came up, the Samians knew they would have to make an effort. In order to safeguard the future, you see.”
The parallelepipedons had to be brought along by the big Samians in order to perform all the tiny functions that their hereditary drive toward immobility made impossible. The little fellows could scratch obscure itches. And do many other things. They had, unique among living species, two opposable thumbs. Nature had given them profligate dexterity.
Aaron felt like hell for the little oblongs, but it was difficult to figure out what to do for them. The Samians’ doctrine of primo inter pares seemed only sound to groups which held on to their hegemony by a thread. Suppose all the organs could have a local intelligence and a way to express it? It has been an old humanoid fear for years. How many fables there have been about old doctor stomach.
Aaron made the mistake of expressing some of these views. The atmosphere at once became unpleasant. The small parallelepipedons moved toward him, clicking their long nails together in a menacing manner. Their very smallness, which had rendered them helpless before the larger Samians, like Pygmies encountering Watusi in a surrealistic replay of K
ing Solomon’s Mines, at this moment rendered them dangerous in the extreme to Aaron. He backed away, breathing shallowly to avoid taking one up the windpipe. It was just at this moment that the rescue team, headed by his buddy the Samian, came breaking into the bunker and set Aaron free.
“It’s a crude attempt at blackmail,” the Samian said. It was several hours later. Both man and Samian were taking their ease in a small audience chamber. The Samian listened as the man told his tale.
Aaron was a member of the Third Exodus. The first, the Jews from Egypt; the second, the Earthians from Earth; the third, the Erthumoi from Earth’n. It was the Third Exodus that Aaron belonged to. His parents had lived all their lives on Artemis V. Nothing changed much there. Not even the arrival of the six civilized species changed the level tenor of Artemis life. Aaron was eager to get away from the planet. His father was a religious man, but it never took on Aaron.
The early history of humanoid expansion was dictated by the convenience of setting up hyperjump points. It became increasingly difficult to set these up in the intense galactic core. As new worlds were discovered, the Erthumoi spread out to occupy them. This proved impossible, however, since the demands for new world populations far exceeded the ability of the species to breed sufficient volunteers. Sometimes whole worlds were occupied by only a single family or two, in an attempt to establish an Erthuma presence and legal claim upon those worlds, and in hopes that a population would be attracted.
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