Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  You point out that this situation renders our situation unique, which is to say, paradoxical. Somehow we must imagine our planet engaged at all points with a destructive substance, nothingness. Since no point is free of the onslaught of nothingness, from whence comes renewal, the continual regeneration of Wormworld, and, perhaps, of the entire universe? From within. The within is everywhere, just like the without. The within is the point furthest from the destniction of the surface. Without a within a surface could not be maintained.

  You maintain that worms are conditioned to seek outward, since life must express itself outwardly rather than inwardly. This is the direction in which sure death lies.

  You think that the way to the unwormholed density of safety and beauty lies inward.

  Not too far inward, you point out. Perhaps the very core of Wormworld is crystalline, and that matter expands from it and begins to undergo transformation into organic substance.

  Still, an area should exist, you believe, if one could only find a route through all the ancient wormhole mazes, an area that is untouched, virgin territory. In our special situation, the search physically inward would correspond elsewhere to the search outward.

  You’ve solved it for me, Robert! But perhaps not quite as you expected. The way out lies inward, you say, and as far as you and your world goes, you may be right. And I wish I could do it, travel inward, into the unwormed interior frontier, Beulah, the promised land.

  And I’d like to get as close as I could to that ultimate crystalline perfection, into perfect symmetry, all points, all angles, faces aligned, in the cosmic explosion of the creation of the interior that goes on forever.

  But that’s not where I’m going. I’m going outward and upward to where I can inscribe the Great Figure. I know it’s an absurd enterprise, and Jill points out that all I can hope to do is break through the surface and die. She may be right. But I believe a worm should do with his life the greatest deed he can imagine.

  I don’t claim to be a hero-worm. I don’t expect to die. I believe that when I break through the surface, nothing is going to end. Nothingness itself will turn out to be just another partial truth, another illusion. As for me, I will be light, all light.

  Here ended the communication of Ron the Worm.

  THERE WILL BE NO WAR AFTER THIS ONE

  Earth is now well known for her peaceful ways. She is a model of good behavior, though she is an extremely impoverished civilization. She has eschewed war forever.

  But some people do not realize that it was not always so. There was a time, and not too long ago, when Earth was dominated by some of the worst military badasses to be found anywhere. The armed forces, which held power in the last days before The Great Awakening, were almost unbelievably inept in their policies.

  It was at this time that Earth, achieving single rule at last under General Gatt and his marshals, entered interstellar civilization, and, a few short years later, went through the famous incident with the Galactic Effectuator that led them to put war behind them forever. Here is the true story of that encounter.

  At dawn on September 18, 2331, General Vargas’ Second Route Army came out of the mists around Redlands, California, and pinned down Wiedermayer’s loyalist troops on the San Francisco Peninsula. Wiedermayer, last of the old democratic regime generals, the appointee of the discredited Congress of the United States, had been hoping to get his troops to safety by ship, perhaps to Hawaii. He did not know at that time that the Islands had fallen to military rule. Not that it mattered; the expected transports never arrived. Realizing that further resistance was futile, Wiedermayer surrendered. With him fell the last military force on the planet which had supported civilian rule. For the first time in its history, Earth was utterly and entirely in the hands of the war lords.

  Vargas accepted Wiedermayer’s surrender and sent a messenger to the Supreme Commander, General Gatt, at his North Texas headquarters. Outside his tent, the men of Vargas’ army were camped in pup tents across two grassy fields. The quartermasters were already getting ready the feasts with which Vargas marked his victories.

  Vargas was a man somewhat shorter than medium height, thickset, with black curly hair on a big round skull. He had a well-trimmed black mustache, and heavy black eyebrows that met in a bar above his nose. He sat on a campstool. A stubby black cigar smoldered on a corner of the field table beside him. Following long-established practice, Vargas was calming himself by polishing his boots. They were genuine ostrich, priceless now that the last of those great birds had died.

  Sitting on the cot across the tent from him was his common-law wife, Lupe. She was red-headed, loud-mouthed, with strong features, a strident voice, and an indomitable spirit. They had been fighting these wars together for most of their adult lives. Vargas had risen from the lowly rank of Camp Follower’s Assistant to General in command of Supreme General Gatt’s Western Forces. He and Lupe had campaigned in many parts of the world. The Second Route Army was highly mobile, able to pack up its weapons one day in Italy and appear the next day in California or Cambodia or wherever needed.

  Now at last Vargas and his lady had a chance to relax. The troops were spread out on the big plain near Los Gatos. Their campfires sent thin wavering streamers of gray smoke into the blue sky. Many of Wiedermayer’s surrendered troops had joined the victors. The campaign was over. Maybe all the battles were won; for as far as Vargas could remember, they seemed to have run out of opponents.

  It was a good moment. Vargas and Lupe toasted each other with California champagne, and then pushed their gear off the folding double bed in preparation for more earnest celebrating. It was just then that the messenger arrived, tired and dusty from many hours in the helicopter, with a telegram from General Gatt.

  Gatt’s telegram read, The last opposition to our New Order has collapsed in North America. Final resistance in Russia and Asia has ended. At last, the world is under single unified command! Loyal General and Dear Friend, you must come to me at once. All the generals are coming here to help me celebrate our total victory over all those who opposed us. We will be voting on our next procedures and course of action. I very much want for you to be here for that. Also I tell you in strictest confidence, there has been a surprising new development. I cannot even talk about it over the telegram. I want to discuss it with you. This is of greatest importance! Come immediately! I need you!

  When the messenger left, Vargas turned to Lupe. “What could be so important that he can’t even entrust it to a telegram? Why can’t he give me a hint?”

  “I don’t know,” Lupe said. “But it worries me that he wants you to come to him.”

  “Woman, what are you talking about? It is a compliment!”

  “Maybe it is, but maybe he simply wants you in where he can keep an eye on you. You command one of the last of the independent armies. If he has control of you, he has everything.”

  “You forget,” Vargas said, “he has everything anyway. He has personal command of five times as many men as I do. Besides, John Gatt is my friend. We went to school together in East Los Angeles.”

  “Oh, I know all that,” Lupe said. “But sometimes friendship doesn’t last long when it’s a question of who’s going to have the supreme power.”

  Vargas said, “I have no ambitions for any more power than I got.”

  “But does Gatt know that?”

  “He knows it,” Vargas said, and he sounded sure, but not absolutely sure.

  “But maybe he doesn’t believe it,” Lupe said. “After all, power changes a man. You’ve seen how it’s changed some of the other generals.”

  “Yes, I know. The Russian and Vietnamese independents. But they can’t hold out against Gatt. This time the world is going to be under a single command. John Gatt is going to be the first supreme ruler of Earth.”

  “Is he worthy of that?” Lupe asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Vargas said, annoyed. “It’s an idea whose time has come. Life has been too crazy with everybody fighting everybody
else. One supreme military commander for all Earth is going to work a lot better for everyone.”

  “Well,” Lupe said, “I hope so. So are we going?”

  Vargas thought about it. Despite the brave front he had shown to Lupe, he was not without his doubts. Who could tell what Gatt might do? It would not be the first time a victorious general made sure of his position by executing his field generals under pretext of throwing a party. Still, what was the alternative? The men of the Second Route Army were personally loyal to Vargas, but in a showdown battle, Gatt and his five-fold superiority in men and material would have to prevail.

  And Vargas had no desire for the supreme command. He was a good field general. But he was not cut out for supreme command and had no desire for it. Gatt ought to know that about him. He had said it often enough.

  “I will go see Gatt.”

  “And me?” Lupe asked.

  “You’ll be safe here with my troops.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Lupe said. “Where you go, I go. That’s what a Camp Follower does.”

  Vargas had been fighting in Italy before Gatt ordered him to airlift his army to California for the showdown with Wiedermayer, so he hadn’t much idea of the level of destruction of America. His flight by Air Force jet from San Francisco to Ground Zero, Texas, showed him plenty of burned-out cities and displaced populations.

  But Ground Zero itself looked all right. It was a new city which Gatt had created. In the center of it was a big sports palace, larger than the Coliseum or the Astrodome or any of those old-world sports palaces. Here warrior-athletes and cheerleaders from all over the world could assemble for the sports rituals of the military.

  Vargas had never seen so many generals (and generals’ ladies) in his life. All of General Gatt’s field commanders were there, men who had been fighting the good fight for military privilege all over the world. Everybody was in a good mood, as may be imagined.

  Vargas and Lupe checked into the big convention hotel which had been especially built for this occasion. They went immediately up to their hotel room.

  “Eh,” Lupe said, looking around at the classy furnishings of their suite, “this is ver’ nice, ver’ nice.”

  Actually she could speak perfectly good English, but in order to be accepted among the other Camp Followers who hadn’t been raised with her advantages, she had decided that she had to speak with a heavy accent of some sort.

  Lupe and Vargas had had to carry up their own luggage to the room since the hotel was so new that the bellboys didn’t have security clearances yet.

  General Vargas was still dressed for combat. He wore the sweat-stained black khaki uniform of the 30th Chaco campaign, his most famous victory, and with it the lion insignia of a Perpetual Commander in the Eternal Corps.

  He set down the suitcases and dropped into a chair with a moue of annoyance: he was a fighting general, not a luggage-carrying general. Lupe was standing nearby gaping at the furniture. She was dressed in her best pink satin whore’s gown. She had a naughty square crimson mouth, a sexy cat’s face, snaky black hair, and legs that never stop coming above a torso that would not let go. Yet despite her beauty she was a woman as tough in her own way as the general, albeit with skinnier legs.

  Vargas was heavyset, unshaven, with a heavy slouchy face and a small scrubby beard that was coming in piebald. He had given up shaving because he didn’t think it looked sufficiently tough.

  Lupe said to him, “Hey, Xaxi (her own pet name for him), what we do now?”

  Vargas snarled at her, “Why you talk in Russian accent? Shut up, you don’t know nothing. Later we go to meeting room and vote.”

  “Vote?” Lupe said. “Who’s going to vote?”

  “All the generals, dummy.”

  “I don’t get it,” Lupe said. “We’re fascists; we don’t need no stinkin’ votes.”

  “It’s lucky for you that I love you,” Vargas said, “because sometimes you’re so stupid I could kill you. Listen to me, my baby vulture, even fascists have to vote sometime, in order to arrive fairly at the decision to keep the vote away from everyone else.”

  “Ah,” Lupe said. “But I thought that part was understood.”

  “Of course it’s understood,” Vargas said. “But we can only count on it for sure after there’s been a vote among ourselves agreeing that that’s how things are going to be. Otherwise we might lose everything we’ve worked for. The vote is necessary to secure our beloved revisionist counterrevolution.”

  “I guess that’s true,” Lupe said, scratching her haunch, then, remembering her manners, quickly scratching Vargas’ haunch. She went to the refrigerator and got herself a drink of tequila, champagne, and beer, her favorite mixture.

  “Is that all this vote’s about?” she asked Vargas.

  Vargas was sitting in the living room with his spurred heels up on the coffee table. The coffee table scratched nicely. Vargas knew that they probably put in new coffee tables for each new group of generals who came through. But he enjoyed scratching it anyway. He was a simple man.

  “We got also other things we got to vote about,” he told her.

  “Do I have to vote too?” Lupe said.

  “Naah,” Vargas said. “You’re a woman. Recently we voted to disenfranchise you.”

  “Good,” Lupe said, “voting is a bore.”

  Just then there was a knock at the door.

  “Come in!” Vargas called out.

  The door opened and a tall goofy-looking guy, with droopy lips and narrow little eyes, wearing a gray business suit came in. “You Vargas?” he said.

  “Yeah,” Vargas said. “And try knocking before you come in next time or I break your back.”

  “This is business,” the guy said. “I’ve brought you a bribe.”

  “Oh, why didn’t you say so?” Vargas asked. “Sit down, have a drink.”

  The goofy-looking guy took a thick envelope out of an inside jacket pocket and handed it to Vargas. Vargas looked into the envelope. It was stuffed with a thousand eagle double simoleon bills.

  “Hell,” Vargas said, “you can barge in any old time. What is this for, or shouldn’t I ask?”

  “I told you; it’s a bribe,” the guy said.

  “I know it’s a bribe,” Vargas said. “But you haven’t told me what, specifically, I’m being bribed for.”

  “I thought you knew. Later, when the voting starts, we want you to vote yes on Proposition One.”

  “You got it. But what is Proposition One?”

  “That civilians should henceforth be barred from the vote until such time as the military high command decides they are reliable.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Vargas said.

  After the guy left, Vargas turned to Lupe, grinning. He was very happy about the bribe, even though he would have voted yes on Proposition One anyhow. But bribes were traditional in elections—he knew that from the history books, to say nothing of the oral tradition. Vargas would have felt unliked and neglected if General Gatt had not thought him worth the bother to bribe.

  He wanted to explain this to Lupe but she was a little dense, tending not to understand the niceties. But what the hell, she looked great in her pink satin whore’s nightgown.

  “Come in, old boy, come in!” That was Gatt’s voice, booming out into the anteroom. Vargas had just arrived and given his name to the prune-faced clerk in the ill-fitting Battle Rangers uniform, clerical division.

  It was gratifying to Vargas that Gatt asked for him so soon after his arrival. He would not have liked to cool his heels out in the waiting room, even though he would have been in good company. General Lin was there, having just secured China and Japan for Gatt’s All-Earth Defensive League. General Leopold was there, plump and ridiculous in his complicated uniform copied from some South American general’s fantasy. He had completed the conquest of South America as far south as Patagonia. Below that, who cares? Generalissimo Ritan Dagalaigon was present, the grim-faced Extremaduran whose Armada de Gran Destructividad
had secured all of Europe west of the Urals. These were famous men whose names would live in history. Yet he, Vargas, was ushered into Gatt’s private office before all the rest of them.

  John Odoacer Gatt was tall with flashing eyes and a charismatic manner. He showed Vargas to a seat and poured him a drink and laid out two lines for him without even asking. Gatt was known as an imperious entertainer.

  “We’ve won the war, buddy,” Gatt said to Vargas. “The whole thing. All of it. Everything. It’s the first time in the history of mankind that the entire human race has been under a single command. It is an unprecedented opportunity.”

  Vargas blinked. “For what?”

  “Well,” Gatt said, “for one thing, we are finally in a position to bring peace and prosperity to the human race.”

  “Wonderful ideals, sir.”

  “Actually,” Gatt said, “I’m not so sure how we can turn a profit on this.”

  “Why do you say that, mi general?”

  “It has been a long and costly war. Most countries’ economies are wrecked. It will be a long time before things can be put straight. Many people will go hungry, maybe even starve. It’ll be difficult even for the military to turn a buck.”

  “But we knew all this,” Vargas said. “We discussed this in detail during the war. Of course there will be a difficult period of recovery. How could it be otherwise? It may take a hundred years, or even longer. But we are humans, and under the stable rule of the military we will recover and bring universal prosperity to all.”

  “That, of course, is our dream,” Gatt said. “But suppose we could speed it up? Suppose we could go directly to the next stage? Suppose we could move directly from this, our victory, to prosperity for everyone on Earth? Wouldn’t that be splendid, Getulio?”