Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  PERSEUS: How bored I am! Life is just a constant round of privilege and dissipation. As king’s son, no one dares tell me what I don’t want to hear. None except my father, Thespis, and his brother, the sinister Jeremiah. I may well kill Jeremiah one day. I’m not entirely sure. My character is not yet fully formed. But what can you expect? I’m only eighteen years old.

  MARY JANE (Entering from a peristyle to the left) What ho, ye little doves and lilacs, sun beating down on western hill, and the son of the deformed freak of a woman who calls herself our friend—(She stops, seeing Perseus.) Hello, Perseus! I didn’t see you! I was singing a song I heard yesterday in the agora.

  Chorus in background sings: “Agora! agora! They say such things and they do such things at the agora! the agora! I’ll never go there anymore!”

  PERSEUS: Must you bring your chorus? I’m trying to brood.

  MARY JANE: Actually I just came from the oracle. PERSEUS: Are you still wasting your time on that nonsense?

  MARY JANE: She had a message for you.

  “What did she say?”

  “She said to tell you that Burnout is the Decay of Ambition when Greed Rides the Bare Back of History on her way to the Ultimate Possessiveness.”

  Perseus said, “She said that, did she?”

  “Word for word,” said Mary Jane.

  “If you’re so smart, what did it mean?”

  “Goodness, I don’t know that!” Mary Jane said. “But she said it was important, and you should remember it in some important moment ahead.”

  “What sort of important moment?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “What else did she say?”

  “Something about it’s about time you started learning a profession or career.”

  “I can’t stand the way that stupid old seer-lady is always trying to second-guess me,” Perseus said. “I was just about to think about a career myself.”

  “Well, I gotta run along,” Mary Jane said. “Beware the dangerous waters.” And she skipped off.

  Perseus shook his head. What a spooky little kid Mary Jane was! Lucky for him she wasn’t in the story, otherwise they’d have to find out how she got that way and other introspective stuff, all of it about Mary Jane. Perseus wasn’t interested in Mary Jane. He was interested in himself.

  That’s why his parents called him a selfish little brute.

  He didn’t care.

  Much.

  All this was taking place just after the autumnal Equinox, at a time when graybacked rain clouds lay low over the land, and the ragged whitestreaked gray sea thrust itself up into a thousand shapes as they might appear to a young man’s fancy. Himself sitting on the shore there—this Perseus fellow—and looking out toward the rocks.

  The sea cast its squalor of foam upon the shore. Seabirds were returning to their nests while the young man, alone and disconsolate, wandered along the shore, internalized monologue waxing eloquent. Rusty ravens, beating their wings in a wild paroxysm of desire, flew past stony headlands with outlines rendered vague and ominous by long lines of rain, as a lone hermit crab stood abandoned on the long sea-beach, brooding on the bitter destiny of stone and sand. That’s what Perseus saw that day.

  That evening, something different happened. Perseus went on a blind date. During the course of it he committed a crime . . . accidentally. He was able to conceal it for the most part, but it still resulted in his being blackmailed, in the course of which he acted out of anger. We have already mentioned that he was prone to violence. In his subsequent attempts to escape his past, he met and tried to win the only woman in the world for him, Andromeda, the one who was forever getting herself stuck on rocks. But once again, we get ahead of ourselves. Let’s go back to Perseus at the palace, slicking down his hair preparatory to going on a blind date. Mary Jane was there, of course, making fun of him.

  “Perseus got a date!”

  “Shut up, squirt,” Perseus said. His tone of voice was not unkindly. Neither was it gruff. It was an OK tone of voice, and Mary Jane basked in the absence of diatribe, which is what you have to do when you’re a younger sister and your adored elder brother is going out on a blind date and your heart is breaking but, what the hell, you have to keep up your side of things; keep it light, keep on kidding. That’s what Mary Jane thought. She was no fool. She knew she had been saddled with an unworkable name. She wondered why she didn’t have a classy Greek name like the others. She thought that some day she’d like to find out; that, and other stuff—stuff the adults tried to keep secret.

  “Do I look all right?” Perseus said.

  “You look great,” his sister said. “You look like a demigod and a hero.”

  “I don’t feel like a hero,” Perseus said.

  “That’s because you haven’t done anything yet. You will, Perseus, don’t worry about it.”

  “It’s hard not to think about it,” Perseus said. “I’m eighteen. Theseus slayed the Hyrcanian boar when he was only sixteen.”

  “That’s a lot of baloney,” Mary Jane said, and so delicious were the implications of the double-entendre to these two young and relatively unsophisticated people that they both broke into peals of laughter, which was to be the last time they laughed together like that for quite a while. It cost me something to say it, but you could probably tell it was coming. Solemnity was written all over the youthful humor of this moment, as Perseus gazed at himself in the metal mirror, and Mary Jane held the oil lamp high so he could see, and behind them the classically appointed room receded into a tangle of acanthus patterns.

  Perseus straightened his tie, made sure he had his tunic on right side to, coughed once nervously, and walked down the hall toward the formal gardens where his date awaited him. Mary Jane watched him go, then took a sweet cracker out of her apron pocket and munched thoughtfully. When you’re a little kid, hunger is more important than where your big brother is going and how you feel about it.

  Being normally curious, Perseus paused on his way to the gardens when he spied a large wardrobe trunk set up in the middle of the hallway. Wardrobe trunks had been invented just a few years previously, and were to be seen only in the larger cities, so at first he wasn’t sure what it was. A doghouse, maybe? A linen closet? A basketball holder? The possibilities were endless. He looked at the trunk with curiosity.

  Just then, his sinister Uncle Jeremiah came strolling down the hall wearing his best chiton, humming to himself in a style that could only be described as ominous. Jeremiah was tall and had dark frizzy hair and a dark frizzy beard. He wore Assyrian headgear as was his custom. He was the first man in the ancient world known to have used the pocket. He had two on his cloak, and his thumbs were hooked in them farmer Brown style, as he came hurrying by, only to pull to a stop when he saw it was Perseus.

  “Perseus!” he said, thus confirming the suspicion that he knew him.

  “Uncle Jeremiah!” cried Perseus. “What are you doing here in the passageway that leads from my apartment in the palace to the formal garden where I’m to meet my blind date?”

  “Lurking about,” Jeremiah said. “Did you happen to notice the wardrobe trunk?”

  “Is that what it is?” Perseus said.

  “Yes. It’s a wardrobe trunk.”

  “I glanced at it,” Perseus replied.

  “But did you look inside?”

  “No, I did not,” Perseus admitted.

  “Pity,” said Uncle Jeremiah. “You might have learned several curious things.”

  “I didn’t think anything curious could hide in a wardrobe trunk,” Perseus said.

  “Too late now,” Jeremiah said. He gave the wardrobe trunk a push. Mounted on ballbearing wheels, it took up the imparted energy of Jeremiah’s push and started to roll down the hall, slowly at first then with increasing celerity, vanishing at last in the far distance.

  “Oh, well,” Perseus said.

  “Maybe you’ll come across it again,” Jeremiah said. “But now I must not detain you any longer.”

&nb
sp; He strode off down the hall and took a turning and was lost to sight.

  Perseus had never liked Jeremiah. The stuff with the wardrobe trunk had turned him off still more. It’s difficult to explain to modem audiences how great an insult it was in ancient Greece to roll a wardrobe trunk down a corridor in front of someone’s very eyes. Stuff like that had been known to get men killed, or worse.

  Now we must turn from Perseus to the young lady we have referred to as the blind date. The one we left sitting in a lyre-backed chair in the formal garden, gazing into the lily pond and wondering what lay ahead. She was a tall slender girl. She wore a long white kirtle and a semiprimand that covered the oval of her head and just allowed a pink glimpse of her fingernails. This was Lyra. Her parents were Cadillac and Hiero. She was a graduate of the Cretan School of Fine Arts, where she had majored in Intaglio and Gray Respectives. She’d had the usual sort of childhood, parents, aunts, uncles, siblings. She had had everything except an Orphan Annie ring, and she hadn’t even known that was a desideratum. Just kidding, of course. She was a good-looking young lady. Her straight hair was drawn tightly back and ingratiated with spring flowers. Her nose was small, her lips thin. Some might have said she looked snippy. Not her friends, the Agragonium Naiads, who used to come to visit, back in the days when Olympia was much closer to Crete than it is today.

  At the moment, there was an opacity upon Lyra, an impenetrable something, that rendered her just that much more attractive and gave her an air of mystery which the lack of eye-makeup rendered all the more imperative.

  She had come here to the formal garden, not for her own sake, but to aid someone else. That someone else was her father, the ruler of Far Thule. He was known to his people as Pneumopotamas,—great air-breathing dragon of the waves—an expression of respect.

  Her father was in dire need of something, but what that something was, he never mentioned, so afraid was he of being overheard and misunderstood. He was a tall man with wavy hair and he was very particular about his image. So when his daughter offered to fulfill his secret wish without knowing what it was, he was moved to tears. He clasped her by the shoulders, and said, “I remember when you were little, thinking to myself you were going to be a comfort to me. And now it proves to be the case!”

  “Father, I could ask no more than a chance to work off the special duty I owe to the Olympians, since it is my understanding that I wouldn’t even have been born if Zeus had not whispered in your ear, ‘ “Don’t kill her, she’s only a girl child, how could she hurt you?”

  “It is true that you owe Zeus something,” her father said. “But you owe even more to Athene who put that thought in his head and thus by a subtle indirection caused him to impart it to me.”

  “That’s interesting, father,” Lyra said. “But how did it come about that Athene concerned herself with me, since she is not generally known for taking an interest in girl babies of human stock?”

  “Indeed, she’s not,” her father said. “But as to her reasons, you’ll have to wait and learn that for yourself. For the gods do not put the answers in our paths, figuring we’re too busy following our pleasures to pay attention to what is supermundane and of spiritual delectability.”

  Lyra had to leave it at that. She had had her own reasons for agreeing to grant her father’s wish. There was a mystery about Lyra that few would have guessed. And yet, it was scarcely to be believed—that that straight brow could hide crooked motives! That those clear eyes could see such complications! These facts about her were not generally known. Or if they were, they were disregarded. It was difficult to tell which was worse, and Lyra didn’t even try. She was wise beyond her years in that.

  And now she sat in the formal garden. It disturbed her a little that the formal garden was still there. Well, if she had to do her number here, that’s just how it was. Looking in the little silver mirror, she soberly considered her advantages. Not so bad looking, pretty good scores on the SAT, and an empathy with small furry woodland creatures. Others had started with far less.

  It was just then that Perseus entered. Several oil lamps sitting on marble plinths illuminated the scene, which was strictly classical in the extreme. There was no disinterested observer present to throw a net of self-conscious irony on the scene. There were only the two of them, and the cat.

  The cat had crept in behind Lyra. We cannot tell at this point what thrust it into motion, but we are more than a little disturbed by its presence. Hadn’t we promised to stick strictly to the subject? Yet here is this cat inhabiting the landscape, and drawing the entire matter of attention to itself, short fur and all.

  Here started the matter again. A matter of intelligibility. Perseus entered the formal garden, but as he stepped into it, across the tile floor and into the cool moist well-watered place of fluted columns and formal flowers in fugacious bowls, something moved in the corridor behind him and he turned, swiftly but betraying no untoward panic, or indeed any other kind of panic. It had seemed to him that there might be someone out there, and that wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted to leave in doubt, not when you had been raised on tales of assassination and other forms of murder most foul. It had been the serving man, old Cato, who had put the idea in his head that a murderer lurked behind every bush, and was to be feared even indoors, where bushes were few and far between.

  “Whoosht,” he said, in a northern brogue that brought the taste of heather to the mouth and stirred several other flammables into sullen flame. But there was no one there, only a snuff-colored splotch on the wall as might have been left by some expectorating son of a bitch. Perseus turned back toward the garden again, aware as he did so that he was late for his appointment and that a cloud of meaning hung from that. Yet it wasn’t his fault if you wanted to infer stuff like that.

  “Hello,” Perseus said. “You are my blind date, true?”

  “No, I’ve come to arrange a human sacrifice. Just kidding.”

  They stared at each other. And in another part of the palace, Perseus’s mother, Marjory from Athens, was sitting at the seance which she held once a week every Wednesday, sitting there in the darkened room with her hand in the hand she fondly believed to be that of her husband, Dr. Archibald.

  “Listen,” the monster said—for there could be no other name for him—“I’m going to need a human sacrifice here. I don’t even like the stuff—human flesh, I mean—but it’s written in all the books that tell how to perform ceremonies like this.”

  A word of explanation is in order. Marjory brought the custom of seances with her from Athens. She and Archibald were both auslanders and took comfort from the performance of unusual and vaguely sinister rites.

  “No sense being too wholesome,” Archibald used to say, trying to look as sinister as Jeremiah. That were no easy task, for some have the gift of satirical self-defoliation, and they are apt quite naturally to impress those sort of folks who fly paper kites in a vain attempt to emulate heaven. There was ample precedent for the seance, and the fact that it was going on just as Perseus entered the formal garden where his blind date awaited him should not be taken as indicative of a general trend of causality. We think that should take care of any question that may come up concerning this.

  And so the seance was going on as the young prince was entering the formal garden where Lyra, his blind date, with her clear brow and her erect figure with the shoulders back, and her hair tied back in a ponytail, and her white linen dress with the many pleats, stood turning the pages of a newspaper, one of the first published in the ancient world, which, though a year or so out of date, still held more news than most people hear in a lifetime.

  Sorry, but we can’t go on. What is this, an interruption? No, it’s part of the story, silly. Then who’s speaking? Keep on typing and you’ll find out. This is Lemuel P. Blaggart here. Sorry, no room for new characters at this point, please go away. I’ll go away all right, and I’ll take the set with me. Why take that attitude? Perhaps, haughty spirit, you’d like to tell the story yourself.
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  Watch and see if I don’t. Perseus. That was his name. Went down to see this chick, Lyra, who’d just got a lot of money from her father’s estate in Sicily. Don’t know exactly what happened to the old man. They say there’s an entrance to the City of the Dead in Sicily. He might have gone through it in his absentminded way.

  Perseus thought that was quite enough. It was the work of a moment to get rid of the hostile narrator. That done, Perseus turned and said to her, “Do you want to go to a surprise party?”

  “Sure,” Lyra said. “As long as it gives me a chance to see someone I shouldn’t, and thus tear asunder the normal fabric of experience.”

  “You’ve got a lot of spirit,” Perseus said. “I’ve got this problem, you see. There’s something I’m supposed to do, but I dropped my reason somewhere.”

  “I think I know what the problem is,” Lyra said. “The body’s missing. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. And the quiver is empty of arrows.”

  They stared at each other. Hard.

  “And I’ll bet there’s no money left,” Lyra said after a while.

  “Yes, and I know why,” Perseus said. “It’s because our financial support has been suddenly and mysteriously withdrawn.”

  “I thought we had it invested in a safe fund,” Lyra said.

  “You can’t trust any of them,” Perseus said.

  “Broke!” Lyra marveled. “How squalid! How can they expect me to go on?” Lyra asked.

  “I suspect they don’t much care,” Perseus said.

  “But it’s unfair! I haven’t been given a chance!”

  “Do something quick,” said Perseus.

  Lyra broke into a tap dance. She followed that with a tape dance, moving gracefully among the measured cloths. This was followed by a drape dance with hanging fabrics of lustrous hue. And she closed with the inevitable grape dance.