Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  The camera swings into view again and considers for our delectation the mechanism of temptation. We dolly back to Tantulus in the nicest way we know how.

  We get serious for a moment. We know—what need to tell us again?—that the earthly vision consisted of fruits and roasted meats and other good things dangled from the branches of trees above Tantulus’ head—tantalizingly—which they jerked back out of his reach when he reached for them. So of course after a while he didn’t reach for them any more. But no one thought about that.

  In any event, all that food had to be renewed almost daily, just the same as if he had made a meal of it. Because you can’t tempt a man with a moldy roast and a bunch of rotten grapes. So you could say that in order for there to be a punishment, Tantulus, though he never tasted a morsel, still went through a hell of a lot of food.

  And as times changed, and new certainties came and went, the style of his meals changed, also.

  In the beginning they tempted him with simple fare: oat cakes, radishes and onions, and an occasional bit of roasted lamb. When a new administration came in, some thinking was done about all this.

  “This classical hell of ours,” one of the chief administrators pointed out at a recent meeting, “is an important interstellar tourist attraction. Millions of people come here nightly in their dreams. Millions more are brought here in one way or another. Even alien peoples come to visit us. We are an important exhibition, I could almost say a diorama of man’s spirit. And it is necessary for us to put on a good show.”

  This became law and there was a great hustle and bustle in the halls of the administration of ancient halls and monuments. Everything had to be refurbished. In Tantulus’ case, the whole exhibit was to be spruced up and this meant new menus. Cooks were trained to prepare the newer more modern meals that the menus called for; volunteers were not in sufficient supply so some people who were not actually cooks by any stretch of the imagination were especially condemned to do this work. But after a while the job acquired some panache and the finest chefs in the world vied to cook for Tantulus.

  Tantulus found hanging from the branches of his tree items that he had never dreamed of before. In fact, special guides had to be assigned to explain to him what the offerings were; otherwise he wouldn’t know what he was missing and his punishment would lose both efficacy and symbolic value. So they told him, “This is smoked boar in aspic, and this is pears bel Helene, and this is a compote of rare fruits.” And so on and so on. And they waited anxiously to see how he responded to all this, and took notes, because Tantulus, after all, was the standard by which temptation was judged.

  Tantulus quickly got into the spirit of connoisseurship that his work required. He knew he was an important cultural artifact. It was not small potatoes to realize that all temptation was to be judged by the effect it had on him. He was like the Smirnoff Man of the ancient world. He grew captious and difficult to please. With the succession of feasts that were put in front of him day after day, he became very knowledgeable in the preparation of foods. He didn’t have to taste to know good from bad. He would complain bitterly when he detected by some means known only to himself that a spice was missing. “This turbot is entirely too peppery. This lamb, too bland by half, and adorned with the wrong kind of honey. This sauce, it has a bitter taste underneath it.”

  The cooks used to grow very angry at Tantulus. How, they asked, could he judge the food without tasting it? For of course the hellish mechanism made sure he never tasted anything. And Tantulus told them he did it first of all by the aroma, which he made sure to sniff, and secondly by the sheer powers of discrimination which had developed in his mind. “For look you, gentlemen, actually tasting these foods dulls the senses. I wouldn’t taste your food if I were able to! But what I’m here for is to judge it, and I have to tell you that this meal was not up to snuff.”

  And that was the end of Persephone’s reply to Hades, and she got back into the bullock wagon and let Demeter carry her back to the upper world. No eyewitnesses exist who can tell us what happened to the pomegranate seed she had had in her hand. But it is a fact that she returned to hell and to her spouse, Hades, every fall, just as the world was turning dark and cold. Winter with tiny snowflakes came and went and soon the hounds of spring appeared in the upper valleys. I sat on my throne in hell and had dinners with Achilles and Helen and waited for Persephone to return. What was she doing, I wondered. What about that pomegranate seed? And just before she came back, at the very last possible instant, when I had used up all my hope and I had grown tired of thinking about the inhabitants of hell, I thought to myself, what I want is my Persephone. It’s the beginning of winter now, and as I sit there on my iron throne, the taste of ashes in my mouth, I hear the faint sound of bells. And I know it heralds a blessed event, the arrival of my beloved, though you can never be sure.

  Part II—Weather Sirens

  Odysseus, the man of infinite wiles and complex stratagems, had offended Poseidon, and the god was relentless in his pursuit of the heroic survivor of the Trojan war. Poseidon followed Odysseus across Attica and through the Dodecanese. Whenever Odysseus turned inland away from the islands, hoping to find a place where the sea and its ways were unknown, the sea god sent up powerful winds to drive him back down to the sea’s edge. Nor was this all. He also sent dunning thoughts, which pleaded with Odysseus as if they were himself rather than outside intrusions sent by the angry god, and over and again they led him back to the water’s edge. Here he was again—exactly where he would rather not be, on the strip of sand between the mountains and the water. It was here that Odysseus was to play out his final game. For the god of the sea had postponed swatting this presumptuous mortal long enough. It was time to press on with the actual killing.

  Shipwrecked on the beach at Phaecea, Odysseus sat and listened to the boom of the surf on the lonely sea beach. He gazed out at the lilac-line where sea and sky met, and wondered if he would ever be able to die.

  Our most recent snapshot of Odysseus shows him just getting out of the sea with limbs dripping water, hair in his eyes, head bent, with the wind ruffling his hair. A little rough-hewn, perhaps, but as appetizing a sight as Nausicaa had ever seen.

  Apparition at noon on the lone sea beach. Nausicaa and her maidens. Stopped dead in their tracks. Staring at the naked man.

  “Where am I?” Odysseus said.

  “This is Phaecea,” Nausicaa said.

  God, she was cute.

  And deadly, Odysseus thought, unless I miss my guess.

  Just the way I like them.

  Odysseus shook his head irritably. Another romance shaping up—just what he didn’t need! And anyway, hadn’t all this happened before? Hadn’t his whole life happened before? Hadn’t everything happened that could happen? Odysseus tried to remember, but all he could bring to mind were vague presentiments of the time to come. His future possibilities rushed past his eye like albino bats flapping through a thin turpentine solution. Then there was a sound behind him. The man of infinite wiles turned, and his body stiffened. His will inflated with the power derived from his thumos. He considered quickly who he should be this afternoon.

  Dimly, through the coils of his self-preoccupation, came the knowledge, ineluctable, and strangely cold; he was in a Situation.

  And the situation called for Instant Response.

  He was not . . .

  Yet he was! But what? Words were incumbent upon him. Indeed, he had known no extremity so extreme as this need to set forth his identity.

  But the woman beat him to the question.

  “What’s your name, stranger?” Nausicaa asked.

  “Irving Spaghetti, at your service,” Odysseus replied instantly. And then could have bit his tongue. But the habit of evasion was hard to drop. Even when conversing with this pretty and guileless maiden, the habit of concealment died hard. Ridiculous, but perhaps it would work out all right.

  Odysseus reflected, not for the first time, that playing the game wasn’t so difficult.
It was having to play the game again and again, with imperfect knowledge of the results from previous times. What on earth had happened that first time? He assumed he had gotten it more or less right, the requirement, whatever it was, though he couldn’t remember. Gotten it right more or less. Or had that been the second time?

  Nausicaa. Still standing there. Terminally cute. But what was he supposed to do with her?

  Married life with Nausicaa came faster than he had expected. A small tastefully furnished apartment in downtown Phaecea. Use of Dad’s second-best chariot. He supposed he would be able to recapitulate the in-between at some later date. It usually worked that way. The courtship, for example. Had they gone on dates? What had he said to her? And what about Penelope?

  A sudden alarm filled his head. He was safe. Here inside the warm little apartment with Nausicaa. But that wasn’t what he was being paid for. He had taken a wrong turning somewhere.

  All of this, of course, was just before the stranger moved into town. Because once he was there, that sinister figure with his fiddle and his faddle and his fiddle, fiddle! faddle!!! I’m sorry, I’m trying to be a reliable narrator, but my blood boils when I think of the stranger and I’m not to be blamed for what I say—and everything changed and nothing was ever the same again. Not that we expected it. Not after the curse of the woodland pygmies was uttered, bringing its curious aftermath. But I’m getting slightly ahead of myself.

  First there was Odysseus. It is not generally known that Nausicaa was Odysseus’ mother. That was why the romance between them was never consummated.

  Oedipus had that territory all sewed up. Odysseus wasn’t anywhere as clever as men say he was. Odysseus sold the Olympians a bill of goods. Athene wasn’t anywhere near so austere as people say. They just didn’t dare tell stories about her. And Charon, he’s the central figure to everything. People spend most of their time with him.

  “Charon? Are you there?”

  “I’m here. I see that you’re still here, too, still trying to find out about the gods.”

  “Is there any reason I shouldn’t do that?”

  “You can do what you please. There’s no question about that. But some questions are more profitable than others.”

  “This questioning of the gods?”

  “It’s what they want you to do, of course.”

  “They do?”

  “Of course. The gods are personifications of self-consciousness. They examine you for hidden motives. They don’t expect you to ever know what you’re really up to. And we doubt if they know anything about themselves, either.”

  There’s something very attractive about the land of the dead, isn’t there? How nice to pine away in some beautifully melancholy box.

  Is your tone of voice sardonic?

  No, merely classical. When you live in the ancient world, you have no tv with which to beguile your time. We have a tv in the cardroom of the houseboat in which we transport the dead. It’s always tuned in on famous deathbed scenes.

  The central drama of a dead man’s life is how he died. It’s all he’s interested in. You can keep his attention while you tell him how you died—he’s more than a little interested in that. But what really captures his attention is the story of how he died. And the irony is, he can’t remember. All that time alive, and you can’t remember. What was it like back then, when I breathed air?

  But we want to talk about love and jealousy. That’s more to the point, isn’t it? Or do we tell the other truth, that no one’s concerned about all that in the apres-vie?

  The weather comes to me first, then it reaches the rest of my people. “Rest of my people” is a hazy concept, but I think I know what I mean. The Observer sights the conditions that will make up the mood, and is present not only at the mood’s creation, but at the creation of the component elements from which it was synthesized.

  He surveys the hot dry wind from nowhere which suddenly starts up and brings ennui in its wake. Talk about the proud man’s scorn! That’s what the observer does, he observes, and works the keys of his short wave radio to transmit the news to the world, his world, himself—that’s what he’s actually scouting for, isn’t it?

  Odysseus makes his camp on the edge of the beach, where he can keep an eye on the straits. When the Japanese fleet sails past, he cranks up his radio and reports it to the world. “Trouble on its way! I see four battleships, and lots of smaller ones.”

  He reports danger when there is danger, and when there is none, he taps out his thoughts on the keys of his wireless, with the battery turned off to save power; it’s only himself he’s talking to.

  If it’s all feedback anyway, why does he continue to broadcast the shipping news? Because he’s made a vow not to let go of reality entirely, that’s why.

  Imagine a godlike observer watching the weather, only it’s not weather; he’s watching the visions that accompany the weather. It’s like he’s the last man alive and he’s scouting for the future. For those yet to come.

  Or is he?

  There’s at least one more possibility. Maybe he’s just all alone and crazy, at his lonely Western outpost; the army sends no help. For all we know, there is no army, there’s nothing, only one lonely grunt out there—alone, dreaming, enmeshed in fantasies. The sirens are a kind of weather.

  When siren weather comes, you have to tie yourself to the mast, if you have one—or to a stove if you have no mast, or to the outrigger if there’s nothing else.

  Whatever you tie yourself to, you make the knots complicated enough so that it’ll take you a long time to undo them once the madness is on you and you have the desire to go to those beautiful ladies with fishy tails. But you can’t move, you’re tied down. Then you curse your former self who bound you here, whose rash caution a little while ago has tied you down now, at a time when you want, need, must get free and run with them, the beautiful ones, the sirens of the green and white sea. You pull and tear at the knots, you gnash and slash at them, or would if you could, but in your caution, your rash caution, you put all the knives out of reach, all the scythes and reaping hooks, the razor blades and sharpened darning hooks—even the bits of broken metal and jagged glass that usually litter up your yard.

  And now you have to untie the knots one by one. This is what happens during siren weather. There you are, and you have to watch for the ships and the weather. Storms come up, too, and sometimes these are about love and sometimes they are about money. Isn’t it odd that, no matter how far away you’ve gotten, no matter how abandoned you feel on this island at the end of nowhere, they still dun your bank balance?

  “Pay us! Pay us!” cry the hungry spirits.

  And then next to find a voice. For a voice tells a story. A voice is a story. There’s something seductively magical about a story. That’s why we can’t resist it.

  But I forgot to mention that my narrator in this story, Odysseus, suffers from a certain madness. He is quite an unreliable narrator. He is aware of his madness, to an extent; and he is also aware that he can never be fully aware of the full extent of his madness, since that is hidden from him. At least he won’t be guilty of that madness that knows no self-doubt. He has plenty of self-doubt. He uses it as a way of keeping an eye on himself, so that he will not sink into some sort of absolutistic mania, as happens to those who go to the sirens.

  I have been on the island for quite some time now, and kept my watch faithfully, only our generals have it wrong. It’s not the Persians out there, it’s the Japanese. I’ve been watching their battleships. Agamemnon needs to be warned of their movements.

  Should they come upon us before we’ve established our beachhead at Troy, while the fleet’s still to sea . . . well, as you can see, it’s big, it’s very big.

  I’m the weather observer. The first intimations of weather come to me first, and I send them on to Agamemnon telegraphically. We communicate in Morse.

  It’s common enough, but the Persians don’t know it. Morse, the language of the dead.

  We’re suppo
sed to keep it all couched in an artificial language. But I’m breaking into clear because this is urgent. It’s the Japanese out there, and I’m here with my radio trying to report to Agamemnon.

  Athene warned us all, you know. She told us that this war would be won by the side with the clearer heads. “It’s really the gods who are against you,” she told us. “The Trojans are just an excuse.”

  I think that’s what she said. That’s what I remember her saying. It was no more than a voice in my head; how can I prove anything? And yet, if I can’t believe a voice in my head, what can I believe?

  Odysseus met up with Charon several times in his career. He had always gotten along well with the boatman of the dead. They used to meet sometimes at a little tavern on the banks of the Styx. Have a couple of beers together. Talk about old times and new.

  Odysseus was always looking ahead to new adventures. One day he asked Charon, “Is it true that the Styx is a circular river? Or does it have an outlet somewhere?”

  Charon looked up from his bottle of beer. “The Styx,” he said, “is the most famous river in mythology.”

  “Whether it has an egress or not, depends on whether you think mythology has an end.”

  It was evening in the tavern on the side of the Styx. Big birds were flying overhead. Odysseus peered at them, but he didn’t recognize them. He asked Charon about them.

  “They’re swans,” Charon said. “And there’s something special about them. Shall I tell you a story?”

  “By all means,” Odysseus said.

  “The swan is generally considered an alluring creature,” Charon said. “But not all of them are like that.”

  “Swans have very peculiar reactions to shallow water, you know. It makes them feel restless and ill at ease, because they can’t paddle with their feet while flapping their wings, and hence find it very difficult to get into the air. Swans need water that’s at least as deep as they are tall, from the webbed feet to the soft little white feathers on top of their heads. Otherwise they can’t get out of the water. You can imagine the effect on the local yokels.”