Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  “That was great,” said Perseus, applauding.

  “Thank you,” Lyra said. “But now I need a shower and a change of clothing.”

  “We’re in the formal gardens of the palace,” Perseus said. “There’s no shower here.”

  “In an adjoining room?” Lyra asked hopefully.

  Perseus looked around. “We don’t seem to have any adjoining rooms.”

  “Then we’re trapped.”

  “I’m afraid we are,” said Perseus.

  Just then there was a grinding sound from the roof. “Maybe we should keep our insights to ourselves,” Perseus said. “We seem to have scared up some trouble.” Both young people stared at the roof. Cracks appeared in it. They were small ones at first, but slowly, slowly, they grew larger.

  And larger.

  And larger still.

  “How long do we have to stand around watching those cracks grow larger?” Lyra asked.

  “Don’t ask me, I’m not the stage director,” Perseus said.

  Just then the horse came in. And shortly after that, pregnancy was discovered. It was about as bad a time as you were going to find in the ancient world. It was about as inconclusive as Trimalchio’s feast. There was a lot of clowning around in the wings, and Perseus looked to see a new illusion. He didn’t know what to do about Lyra. The blind date hadn’t worked out too well. Funny, that’s how it was, sometimes. And Mary Jane, hiding behind a drape in the classical corridor that recessed endlessly to a sunless sea bit her thumb and giggled, a bit of local color we bring you, care of your friendly grapefruit manufacturers, who bring you what you need, so you’ll buy what they’ve got.

  Because a moment of waking up seemed in order. And so the being on the bed opened his eyes, blinked once or twice, rolled over, tried to gather his senses, searched for a way to identify himself.

  A voice said to him, “In retrospect it’s all going to make sense.”

  “Fine,” he said, “but that’s not doing me a lot of good now.”

  “Let me tell you about the houses of the bardo,” she said. “Not that it’s going to do you a lot of good. But a good case of goosebumps is always worth holding on for, don’t you think?”

  He forced himself to sit upright. Naked to the waist. Gleaming with sweat. Lit by a burnt-orange light. And the man in uniform was bending over him, cigarette in mouth, grip extended and turned slightly sideways, hands locked together—or at least nearby—there in the dark room with the single floodlight and the obligatory sneer of fear in the air. Yes, he was in that place again. And wasn’t that a shame. Because now, it was going to be the nightmare journey of eating worms and stuff like that, before something else happened. Or so they’d have him believe.

  1995

  SEVEN SOUP RIVERS

  There were two doors, and at first I thought I would go through the one on the right, for no special reason, just because you have to pick one if you are to go through at all, and the two doors seemed to me equal in appeal and promise. But as I approached them, and as the angle of perspective changed, I noticed a third door, previously concealed behind the curving wall in which the doors were set, and this door was to the right of my original choice, making my choice now the center door.

  This third door, appearing so suddenly, disturbed me. I was feeling out of sorts anyhow. It had been a long and tedious trip since leaving Colomb, after the ill-fated affair with Morth. The signs I had encountered along the way had been ambiguous; you never understand what anything means until it’s too late to do anything about it. And my knapsack was heavy, filled with necessities of the journey, as well as a dozen or more things I would probably never need but could not easily procure elsewhere should they prove necessary.

  When you travel, you pack your whole life in miniature into your knapsack, not just what you really need—for who can know for sure what that is?—but what you might need, or hope to need, or fear you will need. No wonder the straps bit into my shoulders from the sagging weight on my back.

  And Glynnis’ clever pointy little machine, which I had included at the last minute, had worked itself free of its padding and was digging me just above the hip. But I didn’t want to stop and rearrange the load now—not with the entrance to Phocis just ahead of me, behind one of the three doors.

  Coming up to the doors now, I looked and didn’t much like what I saw. There seemed no difference in the two doors. Perhaps it wouldn’t matter which I went through. Did it matter? I remembered Sicelle’s advice: Beware the obvious! I had nodded sagely at the time, but now that I thought about it I realized it wasn’t so easy to tell what the obvious was, or, having discovered it, to avoid its allure. My decision to walk boldly through the center door began to waver, and I cursed the irresolute quality of mind that made me think and think again whenever a choice had to be made. Something like this had occurred during my brief time with Morth, and I had sworn to learn from it. But what bearing did that have on the three doors?

  I suppose I could have spent quite a long time in that dilemma, standing irresolutely in front of the three doors, backpack pulling on my shoulders, Glyn’s little machine digging into my hip, my stomach making feed-me noises. Perhaps it was hunger that decided me. Some primitive part of my brain knew unequivocally that it would never get fed as long as I hesitated here on the threshold to Phocis. So I lunged toward the center door, deviating at the last moment for no apparent reason to pass through the leftmost door.

  The first thing I saw after passing through were the flamingoes. There were three of them, white and pink balls of feathers with long, skinny backward-hinged legs beneath, and long snakelike necks with flat small heads and curved black beaks below. Two of them were engaged in what I supposed was a standard sort of bird repartee, or perhaps a mating dance, squawking noisily at each other and darting their heads like duelists. The third bird, somewhat larger and colored a deeper orange, paid no attention to any of this. He was holding his head upside down on the surface of the shallow water in which they were all standing, and he was making some kind of vibrating motion that sent out little ripples. I thought perhaps he was stirring up little creatures in the water, but I didn’t see him feed.

  A thousand thoughts crowded my mind, one more bizarre than the next, and I might have retreated back through the door if it had still been there. Of course it was not. These are one-way doors into Phocis, and you have to go through a complex and tedious procedure to find an exit.

  I was a long way from wanting to leave, since I had hardly arrived. I looked at the flamingoes again and in a moment the most probable explanation occurred to me: that this was a decorative aviary, of a sort that is used to enhance public spaces, and that the reason I had entered into the middle of it was due to my choosing the wrong door after all, for I seemed to have taken a service door that had brought me into the middle of the aviary. I had made a mistake, but not a serious one, I thought, because a few steps took me out of the birds’ vicinity (with my feet wet, of course) and onto the path that led to the interior of the reception area.

  As I recovered the correct path I looked around hastily to see if anyone had noticed my faux-pas, not that I was afraid of punishment, but simply because one hates to make a fool of oneself when entering a new place. But there didn’t seem to be anyone in my vicinity, just a long curving corridor with recessed lighting.

  And then there was a sound of music, bagpipes and drum, and down the corridor came a group of people in brightly striped costumes of black, red and green. One had a bagpipe, another a snare drum, and the others, to judge by the lightness and grace of their movements, were dancers. They were performing some sort of a circle dance, while all the time taking little skipping sidesteps that carried them down the corridor toward me. There were two men and two women dancers, and the men carried tambourines, while the women clicked away with castanets.

  I moved back to let them pass and the wall receded behind me and dissolved, and I found myself in a large open area without visible barriers, open to the sky
or its simulation. There was reddish earth under my feet, pounded to a dry, hard consistency. Several trees with spreading limbs and dusty greenish-brown foliage stood in the middle distance, and far away I could see a low jagged line of slate-blue mountains. I scarcely had time to remark to myself on the speed and precision of the simulation, when a large group of people entered from wherever it was they came from. They were darkskinned, and some wore leopardskin wraparound garments, while others were in shiny suits reminiscent of a previous age.

  The dancers had already begun their performance, and the newcomers looked at them in some amazement but without, I thought, much interest. From off to one side I could hear a further dull pounding noise, drums, I supposed, and some twittering flutelike instruments.

  And then Llew was standing beside me. He had come up so suddenly I hadn’t seen him approach. He was wearing an intensely patterned sports shirt and beige sharply creased slacks, and he had tasseled loafers on his small feet which I remembered now he was inordinately vain about.

  “Well, come on,” he said, “are you going to stand here gawking all day at the wedding party? I don’t believe you were invited, unless you have connections you never told me about. For your information, that’s the king of the Saloops, a purely hereditary post, no real power, and the fat man beside him talking in a rather vehement manner is his prime minister or whatever they call him in their own language. Kas-Desair, I think it is, I used to speak a bit of Gheul when I had the trading post on the Orimba. I told you about that, didn’t I? Never mind, a few of the young men are coming your way. I think it’s time to smile politely, make a cross with your arms over your head to show friendliness, and get the hell out of here.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “They’re not likely to object to me,” Llew said. “I’m not really here at all; what you see is an interprojection. Nothing much they can do about me except call the Comptroller of Privacy and tell him there’s a peeper in their midst.”

  Now that he mentioned it, I did notice the faint glimmer to Llew’s appearance. At first I had thought it was just a trick of the light, but now I realized that of course he was communicating with me by interpro.

  The two men approaching from the wedding party were very tall and strongly made. They were scowling, and they carried carved clubs with big knots on the end that looked like they could give quite a crack.

  “How do I get out of here?” I asked Llew.

  “Follow me,” Llew said. “We’ll double back around the flamingoes.”

  I turned hastily and followed as he glided up the path, around the flamingoes still doing their mating ritual or whatever it was, through the shallow water again, and then through an abrupt little dogleg of a turn.

  At first there was little to see; these exhibits usually have a fair amount of spatial extension, and so I was splashing through the water for entire minutes, with Llew, or rather his interpro projection, floating along beside me, very lifelike except that of course his feet weren’t getting wet. After a while we came to the end of the exhibit and moved abruptly into utter blackness. They do that in the in-between bits to save energy, except for the glowing yellow line at your feet which guides you to the next open station.

  Llew was chatting about some of our mutual friends, Laure and Dagon, who had recently made a one year affiliation; and Mauritia, who had taken a job at the Offworlds Agency, but was having trouble getting her documentation together.

  I hoped for the best for Laure, whom I hadn’t seen in some years, not since that summer in Green Island, back before the Trippies took it over and turned it into a rest home for followers of the New Gnosis. It was a pity, really, because places like Green Island don’t come up every day or year, places where nature catches ahold, so to speak, gets it right, and there is a miraculous balance between the force-implanted flora and the various physical aspects of the island. It’s very impractical, of course, setting up such a place, and usually it happens quite by accident.

  I had met Llew originally at Green Island, where he had been studying psychopainting and getting drunk every night, but in a refined way that was not obnoxious. What fun we had that summer! But that was then and now was now. Now I had the affair of Phocis to consider, and I was wondering already how matters would go for me here.

  Taking the big step and going to Phocis was no small matter. My reasons for coming here, which had seemed so sound when I left Earth, were beginning to seem to me vague in the extreme, and unfounded in reality. Already I had Glynnis’ little machine, which seemed almost to have a mind of its own.

  I had to face it: I must have made the mistake of coming in the wrong door. If I had selected the right one, whichever that one was, I wouldn’t be stumbling along in darkness now, in the network that linked together the exhibits, following a thin glowing yellow line which stretched on interminably into the impenetrable black. And of course I was still carrying the heavy knapsack, and I had not had a chance to readjust the position of its own. I was pondering these matters when there was a crystalline tinkle of bells in the air, an automatic signal set off by my approach, presaging an event of some sort about to happen. The Phocians are clever about that sort of thing, warning you in advance of an impending situation, though of course they don’t tell you just what it will be.

  “What do you suppose it is this time?” I asked Llew.

  There was no reply. I looked around, turning in a complete circle. Llew wasn’t there any more. Interruptions in intrabeam projection are fairly common, so I wasn’t worried, although it had come at an inconvenient time. Continuing my advance, I saw that the yellow line had changed into a squiggle, and that it was crossed by red and green lines. What the Phocians rather grandly call a conturbation of cross purposes.

  Well, I had been expecting something like that, and so I continued to advance with at least the outward signs of confidence; until once again the lights came up and I was set forth into another scene.

  This one was not immediately familiar. I seemed to have gotten myself into a dark little room, made of roughly dressed rock, with a ceiling not much above my own height. There was a plain wooden bed against one wall, a table and chair. There was a little partition, waist high, and behind it I saw a man in a blue and red uniform, some sort of soldier’s outfit, carrying what looked like an ancient musket. His hair was dark and long and gathered in back in a little ponytail. He was smoking a clay pipe, which he put down when he noticed me.

  “Good morning, citizen,” he said. “I am glad you have awakened. Your breakfast is under the napkin, on that plate on the little table. There is a Bible nearby for your morning devotions. An examiner will come speak to you presently. I am required to say these things to you to provide basic orientation, so you will not say this was omitted when the time of your judgement comes. I am not allowed further discourse. So if it is all perfectly clear, I will return to my newspaper.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, “nothing is clear at all. Where am I? What is this place? This appears to be a cell of some sort, is that correct? If so, what am I accused of?”

  “Citizen,” he said, “these are not matters for me to discuss with you. Save it all for the examiner.”

  “Just tell me what I’m doing here.”

  The guard stood up. He was a tall man, strongly made, and his face was rough and not friendly.

  “I have done my duty,” he said. “You will not require more of me. If you will not shut up, I will shut you up with this.” He brandished his musket like a club. “They will say I was within my rights if I knock you out to prevent further illegal interrogation.”

  His manner had changed to one of overt threat. I didn’t reply to him, for he looked ready to use his weapon. This was ridiculous, of course, and clearly the result of some misunderstanding. But it seemed I would risk a crack over the skull if I persisted in trying to clear it up now. I turned away from him and sat down on the chair and picked up the Bible. He watched me for a moment, then took a seat again and picked up
his newspaper. In a moment he had his pipe going and seemed contented.

  I was a long way from content, but what was I to do? The fellow’s hostility had been so evident, and had come on so quickly, that I thought it best not to provoke him. I leafed through the pages of the Bible. It was written in a language I did not understand. Even the alphabet was unfamiliar to me, so I could take no comfort even from mumbling the words. I put it down and eased the knapsack off my shoulders, glancing at the guard as I did so. He didn’t look up from his newspaper. Apparently this action, at least, was not forbidden.

  Opening the knapsack, I rummaged around for something to read. I badly needed to calm my nerves, for this was an uncanny situation.

  And where in hell was Llew? Surely he had had time to restore service to his projection by now? But Llew was nowhere around, and, looking around the cell, I could see no communication devices, unless they were concealed in the dim painting on the wall, which showed men and women in old-fashioned clothing taking a picnic in some idealized forest clearing. I wished I could join them.

  Again, keeping an eye on the guard, I stood up to examine the painting more closely. It seemed to draw me closer by some inherent magnetism. I studied it carefully. The bushes it portrayed looked artificial. Was that intentional? While I studied it, I could hear the sound of footsteps coming down from the corridor outside.

  The forest proved no real refuge. Once I was irrevocably within it, I saw it was an ominous place, full of toadstools and noxious plants with misshapen heads. Of the noble company from the picture on the wall I could see no sign. Where had they gone? Had I dallied too long in the prison cell? So it would seem. At least I still had my knapsack, though I couldn’t remember putting it on my back again.