Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  In this place of big trees and dense shrubbery all directions seemed the same. I moved, instinctively as it were, in the direction of greatest light, though it was not an easy thing to distinguish even that. The gray twilight of the forest wrapped everything in a pall of obscurity.

  I pushed on, wading through the shrubbery and low clinging plants. This seemed to me a place of evil omen. How had I gotten here? I had no patience to consider that, not now, not with the feeling that something was closing in on me from behind. I had no idea what it might be. The main noises were of my passage, and now and then a little flaw of wind came through and ruffled the branches overhead.

  I remembered now that I had not eaten in a very long time, and I decided to stop and rummage through my knapsack. I didn’t think I had packed anything edible, but you could never tell, sometimes you drop in something; a half-finished sandwich, a piece of cheese, a box of crackers, anything would do.

  I put my knapsack on a little rise of ground and crouched down beside it. The light was failing. Soon it would be full dark.

  And I had no idea where I was or where I was going.

  I knew, of course, in a general sort of way, that this was one of the tricks they play on you in Phocis, one of their celebrated illusions, here in this place where nothing is as it seems. But that knowledge did me no good now, because it is generally true of every situation, it is always difficult to discern the truth from the illusion, even in hindsight, when it can do you no good. I cursed Llew for abandoning me, for so it seemed now. A breakdown could not account for his long absence.

  In my bag I found a package of nuts, a free gift they had given me on the transporter, and which I had not eaten at the time. I started to eat the nuts, but realized I would need water soon, for the stuff was very dry. Water is a commonplace miracle, only to be considered when you have it not. That was the case now. I got up again and looked around, with the vague idea of finding lower ground, where, I’ve been told, water collects. Wearily I packed up my knapsack again, slipped my arms into the straps. As I did so, I heard a voice, but I couldn’t make out what it said.

  “Who is there?” I called out.

  “A guide,” the voice replied. I turned, trying to place its direction. It seemed to be near me, yet I could see nothing but the dense green-gray of the forest, and the gathering dim shadows as night fell.

  “Come out and let me see you,” I said.

  There was no answer for a while. Then I heard a noise in the underbrush to my right and I turned. There was some sort of animal standing there, and it turned its head to look at me. I think it was a deer of some kind, colored mouse-gray, with sensitive ears that twitched in the mounting breeze, as though trying to listen to the message brought by the wind.

  “You have chosen a poor way to go,” the deer said.

  “Me? I didn’t choose anything!”

  “I’m not here to argue,” the deer said. “But it has been my experience that anyone who comes here does so through his or her own choice.”

  “I suppose that’s true, in a general sense,” I replied. “And I suppose also you are not a real animal.”

  “Perhaps not,” the deer said. “Does it matter?”

  “Real animals don’t talk, not in the general run of things.”

  “No. But men do not walk into portraits, in the general run of things, as you say. Have you not noticed that general rules are only for contemplation after the fact, when one can engage in comfortable generalizing, while what happens at first hand is invariably exceptional and specific?”

  “You’ve got a point there,” I said. “But I’m not here to argue discursive philosophy with you, especially since what you say is mundane in the extreme. Can you get me out of here?”

  “Perhaps,” the deer said. “Where do you wish to go?”

  “I had hoped to reach Phocis Central,” I told him. “I have friends waiting for me there.”

  “Then you are expected?”

  “Well, not really. I didn’t have time to tell anyone my plans before my hurried departure from Point Zero. The communication devices from solar point to point are difficult to manage, and I had thought to save time by merely coming. Sometimes it’s easier to send yourself than to send a message.”

  “True, enough,” the deer said. “But then you must suffer the consequences of being yourself your own message presaging your coming.”

  “What consequences?”

  “Messages are frequently disregarded. But I can see you have no wish to discuss these matters. Follow me, we’ll see what we can do for you.”

  The deer trotted off into the underbrush and I followed.

  Twilight was falling fast. The trunks of the trees were becoming indistinct. My throat was very dry, and after a while I asked, “Is there something to drink around here?”

  “Oh, yes, there’s something to drink, though I don’t think I would recommend it.”

  “I need water!”

  “Then of course you must drink. Come this way.”

  We had gotten onto a little path now, and it proceeded downward at no very steep angle. There were fireflies in the gloom, and they sparkled prettily. The forest had grown very still. After a while we came to a dark little pool lying in a declivity at the foot of large trees. I walked to its edge, bent down and with cupped hands brought up water. As soon as I had sipped, I greedily wanted more, and then still more. The deer stood very still as I drank, and I thought there was something judgmental in his attitude.

  “Is there anything wrong in what I’m doing?” I asked. “Surely the water is free for everyone?”

  “Oh, it’s free enough,” the deer said. “That’s the difficulty. It stays free inside just as it did on the outside.”

  That made no sense. And yet, I could feel the water in my stomach, and I bent to drink more. With interlocked fingers I drew it up to me. The water seemed to form a little transparent ball. I had to eat it rather than drink it. I stopped hastily and moved back from the edge of the pool. The deer was watching me curiously. I felt something peculiar going on in my stomach. I had a sense of inner expansion. It was as though the small amount of water I had drunk, surely no more than half a pint or so, were expanding. I felt the presence of water within me, not a part of me, separate, free, as the deer had said.

  “What is happening?” I asked. “What have you done to me?”

  “There are many keys to this place,” the deer replied. “I have merely provided what you claim to have needed. The rest is up to you, and to it.”

  I didn’t know what it was talking about. No, I did know, but I didn’t want to. Something was going to happen, and again I was not ready for it. The water in my stomach was expanding. It wasn’t water, it was acid. It seemed to be dissolving me into it.

  “Help me!” I said.

  “I’m afraid I’ve already done so,” the deer said. And then the water rose within me, and I was a paper man dissolving into myself.

  The image made no sense to me, but there it was. Water was rising, and I fell to the forest floor, dropping with a squish. I was all water, held together by surface tension. It seemed to me most unfair, the way they ring these changes onto you. Whatever happened to the stable old world? Or had that always been a myth, a dream of order in an impossible world?

  I felt myself dissolving into myself. I felt the surface tension break, and I was water, flowing back down the forest into the little pool. I was aware of the deer, watching, and then moving away. There was something sorrowful about the set of his head, his large luminous brown eyes. I thought he felt sorry for me. God knows he had company, because I was sufficiently sorry for myself.

  But how can water be sorry? That question held my attention for a moment, then was gone. I was entirely of a liquid substance. I became aware that I was the pool of water. It would not be too far-fetched to say that it had drunk me. And now I was this and what was I to do next?

  “My sweetheart’s the man in the moon. I know I will marry him soon . . .”
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  I was listening to a thin, piping, childish voice that was somehow familiar. My head felt cloudy and full of cobwebs. Hadn’t I just been turned into water? What a relief to find that I was solid again, a man rather than a nature spirit or whatever it was I’d changed into. My relief was also accompanied by a sense of regret, however. Being in a dire situation is quite interesting!

  On second thought, however, I decided my relief was premature. I hadn’t yet received any visual information concerning my situation. Why was this? I could think of several reasons: first, that I had my eyes closed; second, that there was no light by which to see anything; third, that there was light, and that I did have visual perceiving apparatus, viz, eyes, but that my mind, brain, think-tank, whatever you want to call it, either wasn’t taking it in, or, was taking it in but was refusing to pass on results to other parts of the world-detecting system that was my mind/brain.

  It seemed to me there might be other possibilities. But I had no time to consider them. The first, the paramount question, was to explore the perceptual possibilities. This too could be narrowed down to one: should I be seeing anything or not? And if I should, should I take steps now to see what might be seen, so as to disabuse myself of the idea of complicity in what I was presently considering my own hysterical blindness? Or was I perhaps overstating the case?

  Because it seemed to me, even on the slightest reflection that I really didn’t have to force myself to see, it would either happen naturally or not at all. I thought of the evolutionary development of sight. Those early rudimentary creatures who are our ancestors seeing-wise, they surely did not have to apply will power to the matter of seeing, did they? They either saw or they did not see, and intentionality, that big soft plaything of the scientists, had little or nothing to do about it.

  Yet was it quite as simple as that? What had been the steps, the gradations, between seeing and not-seeing? At what point on the scale could a person be considered to be not seeing, and how did he cross the line, the great evolutionary line, into seeing? And, as far as that goes, were there other visionary senses beyond seeing, related to it, perhaps, but still distinct and different, of which seeing was but the first step? Might one say that visioning was to seeing as Hyperion to a satyr, to employ Shakespeare’s euphonious phrase?

  The more I thought of it the more I thought of it. This was serious stuff. One needs to decide things about the perceptual possibilities of a situation before going on. Until you know how you’re looking, how can you know what you’re looking for? Our ancestors were satisfied with much less, of course. Colored shadows on the walls of the caves, it makes one laugh now to consider it. But this was now, and the question, long deferred, needed dealing with. Or it needed not dealing with, but that too was a decision, and was based in turn upon a perceptual decision.

  “That’s certainly true enough,” Seligman said. “But have you considered the aura of comprehensibility that surrounds even the most unfamiliar proposition? We are unable to be taken completely by surprise, because the mind converts all precepts into the form of the familiar, of which the unfamiliar is but a part.”

  “By god, you’re right,” I said. “It’s difficult to pull off a good surprise, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. But you’ve done better than most. You have always been a good student. I have given you an A for your work in the aesthetics of self-deception.”

  The visual field had opened up just as suddenly as that. I was in a classroom. My only connection with what had come before was the knapsack. It was on the floor beside me, its mouth gaping open. Glancing down, I saw that someone had been rummaging through it. Myself, no doubt. I looked down and inspected. Yes, something was missing. It took me no more than a minute to ascertain that it was Glynnis’ clever pointy little machine that had been taken out by someone, very possibly me, and presumably put to work.

  I remember the charming smile on Glynnis’ face when he had given it to me. Or had he been a she that day? It’s so difficult to remember who is what at any one time in these times of easy sexual migration. But of course we don’t intend to open the question of sex here, no more than we would enquire as to what you had for breakfast. These are matters for individual conscience.

  The splitup, the convergence—these are matters to avoid, if it becomes possible. Put in its most simple form, Glynnis and I were not having sex that day so long ago when Glynnis gave me the little machine and said, “I will miss you,” calling me by name, whatever name I was going by then, and doing something else, too, making some gesture, poignant, unrepeatable. And then she gave me the machine.

  I looked around to see what had happened to it. The elg, as they call those small machines that converse in the Linshiean tongue, the language of sexual commerce, was resting on the floor near my feet. It was still moving in circles which were diminishing in speed and amplitude, following the well-known dictates of Rosko’s Law, that what was going on just before you perceived the situation cannot be safely inferred from what is going on now. The machine is difficult to speak about because of that. At this particular time when I was looking at it, it looked heavier than usual, more consequential, and worthy of a certain wary respect.

  I picked it up, thanking my lucky stars that I was no longer in the aqueous state, because I’d had a feeling that was going to be a difficult one, descriptionwise. I mean, after you say, I spread, what else is there to say?

  Luckily, this situation was quite different, leading me to think that the deer had not been entirely forthright when he warned me of . . . But I couldn’t quite remember what it was. It’s hard enough to figure out what is coming up next, without having to think a lot about what has just gone before. And as for the passing states, those without enough perseverance to be worthy of describing, well, what can we say about them except full speed ahead and let every man watch out for himself.

  “Are you quite finished rambling?” Llew said to me.

  I shook my head and rubbed my eyes. After a moment things swam back into focus. There was Llew, still as an introprojected form, standing in front of me and surveying me with signs of a certain anxiety. I remembered that Llew had always been subject to concerns.

  “I’m alright,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  “We’re trying to get you to Phocis Central,” Llew said. “I do wish you’d cooperate.”

  “I think I am cooperating!”

  “No, really, you must pay attention and not go along with everything that comes up. You know what it’s like in Phocis, the place has myriad attractions, one can go astray, in fact, going astray is the epitome of the Phocis experience, but it is also a sort of self-indulgence and you can’t afford that now, not if you want to get where you’re going.”

  “But where am I going?”

  And then it happened. I scarcely dare tell what, so momentous was that moment. As it seemed to me then, I looked up. I stared into the visual field, which is the only place to which you can direct your attention, normally, that is. On my right I saw the forest, lying out before me like a dragon, sunning itself on the main street of some hapless town in the unsure month of August, in Phocis of my direst predictions.

  And then I looked to my left, and saw there another sight, this one a city, a towering place of many metallic complications, running toward the dawn light with a faint trepidatious coloring. Insects moved in the forest, metallic bugs crawled in the city. I couldn’t quite believe it. Not really. There seemed to be a choice.

  I could go right, back into the forest, or left, into the city.

  As I looked at this split vision, I saw that the two, city and forest, were not truly contemporaneous. They seemed to be butted against one another in an imperfect joint. They were not coexistent. They were differently formed and strangely put together. There were details in the one not consonant with the details in the other.

  I did not know what to do, and decided to take the civilized way out. This was no time to get hung up in a disparity, if there ever is such a time. I turned my
back on the forest, which promptly winked out of existence. I advanced toward the city.

  Other sights came into play at the corners of my vision. I saw shooting stars, and big, slowly turning spheroids of an imperturbable grey color. I saw men and women dancing in the streets, under the blinding arc lights. I saw the haunted face of a young girl, her eyes turned toward me in grief. I looked further and saw something else. A trail, a road that mounted into the sky.

  Then to me so lying asleep a vision came without hands and touched me. It was none other than a pointy little machine, which had made its way out of my knapsack and was clinging to my shoulder.

  “What’s happening?” it asked me.

  “That’s a silly thing to ask me,” I said. “Where is Llew? He was just here a moment ago, unless I miss my guess.”

  “I’m afraid you do miss it,” the machine said. “That was not Llew.”

  “But how could that be?”

  “Easily enough, given the ever-present possibility of illusion, deception, and the gullibility of the multitudes.”

  I twisted my neck to look at this machine sitting on my neck, partially supported by my shoulder. He (as I eventually came to think of him) was a dull gunmetal green, exactly as I remembered. Little lights winked on and off across his surface. He resembled a rather large lump of metal that has lain for a long time in a river bottom. Yet his voice was seductive. I turned away from him quickly, because I did not want to lose sight of the city. Yes, it was still there. The forest was fading out of my split vision. My split vision was almost healed. If only I could keep my attention on the main chance: the city, food, comfort, sex, and movies!

  “Do you really think it’s as easy as that?” the machine asked.

  “What’s the trouble? Isn’t the city real?”

  “Sometimes it is and sometimes it’s not.”

  “What about this time?”

  “It depends on your frame of reference, old boy.”

  “I don’t like to hear talk like that.”

  “But hear it you shall. You need a good talking to, my lad. This nonsense has gone on long enough. What are you trying to do, start a revolution? Haven’t we enough trouble around here without you adding to it?”