The Best of Jack Vance (1976) SSC

by Jack Vance

  Juvenal Aquister surveyed Runy sternly. “Have you lost your mind, taking Lamster Ullward’s air-car without his permission?”

  “I asked him last night,” Runy declared indignantly. “He said yes, take anything except the volcano because that’s where he slept when his feet got cold, and the swamp because that’s where he dropped his empty containers.”

  “Regardless,” said Juvenal in disgust, “you should have had better sense. Where have you been?”

  Runy fidgeted. Iugenae said, “Well, we went south for a while, then turned and went east—I think it was east. We thought if we flew low, Lamster Mail wouldn’t see us. So we flew low, through the mountains, and pretty soon we came to an ocean. We went along the beach and came to a house. We landed to see who lived there, but nobody was home.”

  Ullward stifled a groan.

  “What would anyone want with a pen of birds?” asked Runy.

  “Birds? What birds? Where?”

  “At the house. There was a pen with a lot of big birds, but they kind of got loose while we were looking at them and all flew away.”

  “Anyway,” Iugenae continued briskly, “we decided it was Lamster Mail’s house, so we wrote a note, telling what everybody thinks of him and pinned it to his door.”

  Ullward rubbed his forehead. “Is that all?”

  “Well, practically all.” Iugenae became diffident. She looked at Runy and the two of them giggled nervously.

  “There’s more?” yelled Ullward. “What, in heaven’s name?”

  “Nothing very much,” said Iugenae, following a crack in the terrace with her toe. “We put a booby-trap over the door—just a bucket of water. Then we came home.”

  The screen buzzer sounded from inside the lodge. Everybody looked at Ullward. Ullward heaved a deep sigh, rose to his feet, went inside.

  That very afternoon, the Outer Ring Express packet was due to pass the junction point. Frobisher Worbeck felt sudden and acute qualms of conscience for the neglect his business suffered while he dawdled away hours in idle enjoyment.

  “But my dear old chap!” exclaimed Ullward. “Relaxation is good for you!

  True, agreed Frobisher Worbeck, if one could make himself oblivious to the possibility of fiasco through the carelessness of underlings. Much as he deplored the necessity, in spite of his inclination to loiter for weeks, he felt impelled to leave—and not a minute later than that very afternoon.

  Others of the group likewise remembered important business which they had to see to, and those remaining felt it would be a shame and an imposition to send up the capsule half-empty and likewise decided to return.

  Ullward’s arguments met unyielding walls of obstinacy. Rather glumly, he went down to the capsule to bid his guests farewell. As they climbed through the port, they expressed their parting thanks: “Bruham, it’s been absolutely marvelous!”

  “You’ll never know how we’ve enjoyed this outing, Lamster Ullward!”

  “The air, the space, the privacy—I’ll never forget!”

  “It was the most, to say the least.”

  The port thumped into its socket. Ullward stood back, waving rather uncertainly.

  Ted Seehoe reached to press the Active button. Ullward sprang forward, pounded on the port.

  “Wait!” he bellowed. “A few things’s I’ve got to attend to! I’m coming with you!”

  “Come in, come in,” said Ullward heartily, opening the door to three of his friends: Coble and his wife, Heulia Sansom, and Coble’s young, pretty cousin Landine. “Glad to see you!”

  “Oh, come now! It’s not so marvelous as all that!”

  “Not to you, perhaps—you live here!”

  Ullward smiled. “Well, I must say I live here and still like it. Would you like to have lunch, or perhaps you’d prefer to walk around for a few minutes? I’ve just finished making a few changes, but I’m happy to say everything is in order.”

  “Can we just take a look?”

  “Of course. Come over here. Stand just so. Now—are you ready?”

  “Ready.”

  Ullward snapped the wall back.

  “Oooh!” breathed Landine. “Isn’t it beautiful!”

  “The space, the open feeling!”

  “Look, a tree! What a wonderful simulation!”

  “That’s no simulation,” said Ullward. “That’s a genuine tree!”

  “Lamster Ullward, are you telling the truth?”

  “I certainly am. I never tell lies to a lovely young lady. Come along, over this way.”

  “Lamster Ullward, that cliff is so convincing, it frightens me.” Ullward grinned. “It’s a good job.” He signaled a halt. “Now—turn around.”

  The group turned. They looked out across a great golden savannah, dotted with groves of blue-green trees. A rustic lodge commanded the view, the door being the opening into Ullward’s living room.

  The group stood in silent admiration. Then Heulia sighed. “Space. Pure space.”

  Ullward smiled, a trifle wistfully. “Glad you like my little retreat. Now what about lunch? Genuine algae!”

  Sometimes the source of a story is a mystery even to the writer himself: a seepage from his subconscious. Other times the derivation is clear and direct. In the case of “The Last Castle,” both situations are equally true.

  The germ of the story was contained in an article dealing with Japanese social interactions. As is well known, Japanese society is highly formalized—much more thoroughly so in the past than during the relatively egalitarian times since the last war.

  During the nineteenth century, when a samurai deigned to converse with a person of lower rank, each used markedly different vocabularies, with honorifics precisely calculated to the difference in status. When the person of lower degree discussed the samurai’s activities or intentions, he used a special convention. Never would he pose a simple question such as: “Will your lordship go boar-hunting tomorrow?” This would impute to his lordship a coarse and undignified fervor, a sweating, earnest lip-licking zeal, which his lordship would have found offensively below his dignity. Instead the underling might ask: “Will your lordship tomorrow amuse himself by trifling at the hunting of a boar?”

  In short, the aristocrat was conceded sensibilities of such exquisite nicety, competences of such awful grandeur, that he need only toy with all ordinary activities, in a mood of whimsy or caprice, in order to achieve dazzling successes.

  So, “The Last Castle” concerns a society of somewhat similar folk, and examines their behavior when the society is subjected to great stress.

  THE LAST CASTLE

  I

  1

  Toward the end of a stormy summer afternoon, with the sun finally breaking out under ragged black rain-clouds, Castle Janeil was overwhelmed and its population destroyed. Until almost the last moment factions among the castle clans contended as to how Destiny properly should be met. The gentlemen of most prestige and account elected to ignore the entire undignified circumstance and went about their normal pursuits, with neither more nor less punctilio than usual. A few cadets, desperate to the point of hysteria, took up weapons and prepared to resist the final assault. Still others, perhaps a quarter of the total population, waited passively, ready — almost happy — to expiate the sins of the human race. In the end, death came uniformly to all, and all extracted as much satisfaction from their dying as this essentially graceless process could afford. The proud sat turning the pages of their beautiful books, discussing the qualities of a century-old essence, or fondling a favorite Phane, and died without deigning to heed the fact. The hotheads raced up the muddy slope which, outraging all normal rationality, loomed above the parapets of Janeil. Most were buried under sliding rubble, but a few gained the ridge to gun, hack and stab, until they themselves were shot, crushed by the half-alive power-wagons, hacked or stabbed. The contrite waited in the classic posture of expiation — on their knees, heads bowed — and perished, so they believed, by a process in which the Meks were symbols and human
sin the reality. In the end all were dead: gentlemen, ladies, Phanes in the pavilions; Peasants in the stables. Of all those who had inhabited Janeil, only the Birds survived, creatures awkward, gauche and raucous, oblivious to pride and faith, more concerned with the wholeness of their hides than the dignity of their castle. As the Meks swarmed down over the parapets, the Birds departed their cotes and, screaming strident insults, flapped east toward Hagedorn, now the last castle of Earth.

  2

  Four months before, the Meks had appeared in the park before Janeil, fresh from the Sea Island massacre. Climbing to the turrets and balconies, sauntering the Sunset Promenade, from ramparts and parapets, the gentlemen and ladies of Janeil, some two thousand in all, looked down at the brown-gold warriors. Their mood was complex: amused indifference, flippant disdain, and a substratum of doubt and foreboding — all the product of three basic circumstances: their own exquisitely subtle civilization, the security provided by Janeil’s walls, and the fact that they could conceive no recourse, no means for altering circumstances.

  The Janeil Meks had long since departed to join the revolt; there only remained Phanes, Peasants and Birds from which to fashion what would have been the travesty of a punitive force. At the moment there seemed no need for such a force. Janeil was deemed impregnable. The walls, two hundred feet tall, were black rock-melt contained in the meshes of a silver-blue steel alloy. Solar cells provided energy for all the needs of the castle, and in the event of emergency food could be synthesized from carbon dioxide and water vapor, as well as syrup for Phanes, Peasants and Birds. Such a need was not envisaged. Janeil was self-sufficient and secure, though inconveniences might arise when machinery broke down and there were no Meks to repair it. The situation then was disturbing but hardly desperate. During the day the gentlemen so inclined brought forth energy-guns and sport-rifles and killed as many Meks as the extreme range allowed.

  After dark the Meks brought forward power-wagons and earth-movers, and began to raise a dike around Janeil. The folk of the castle watched without comprehension until the dike reached a height of fifty feet and dirt began to spill down against the walls. Then the dire purpose of the Meks became apparent, and insouciance gave way to dismal foreboding. All the gentlemen of Janeil were erudite in at least one realm of knowledge; certain were mathematical theoreticians, while others had made a profound study of the physical sciences. Some of these, with a detail of Peasants to perform the sheerly physical exertion, attempted to restore the energy-cannon to functioning condition. Unluckily, the cannon had not been maintained in good order. Various components were obviously corroded or damaged. Conceivably these components might have been replaced from the Mek shops on the second sub-level, but none of the group had any knowledge of the Mek nomenclature or warehousing system. Warrick Madency Arban* suggested that a work-force of Peasants search the warehouse, but in view of the limited mental capacity of the Peasants, nothing was done and the whole plan to restore the energy-cannon came to naught.

  * Arban of the Madency family in the Warrick clan.

  The gentlefolk of Janeil watched in fascination as the dirt piled higher and higher around them, in a circular mound like a crater. Summer neared its end, and on one stormy day dirt and rubble rose above the parapets, and began to spill over into the courts and piazzas: Janeil must soon be buried and all within suffocated. It was then that a group of impulsive young cadets, with more élan than dignity, took up weapons and charged up the slope. The Meks dumped dirt and stone upon them, but a handful gained the ridge where they fought in a kind of dreadful exaltation.

  Fifteen minutes the fight raged and the earth became sodden with rain and blood. For one glorious moment the cadets swept the ridge clear and, had not most of their fellows been lost under the rubble anything might have occurred. But the Meks regrouped and thrust forward. Ten men were left, then six, then four, then one, then none. The Meks marched down the slope, swarmed over the battlements, and with somber intensity killed all within. Janeil, for seven hundred years the abode of gallant gentlemen, and gracious ladies, had become a lifeless hulk.

  3

  The Mek, standing as if a specimen in a museum case, was a man-like creature, native, in his original version, to a planet of Etamin. His tough rusty-bronze hide glistened metallically as if oiled or waxed; the spines thrusting back from scalp and neck shone like gold, and indeed were coated with a conductive copper-chrome film. His sense organs were gathered in clusters at the site of a man’s ears; his visage — it was often a shock, walking the lower corridors, to come suddenly upon a Mek — was corrugated muscle, not dissimilar to the look of an uncovered human brain. His maw, a vertical irregular cleft at the base of this ‘face’, was an obsolete organ by reason of the syrup sac which had been introduced under the skin of the shoulders; the digestive organs, originally used to extract nutrition from decayed swamp vegetation and coelenterates, had atrophied. The Mek typically wore no garment except possibly a work-apron or a tool-belt, and in the sunlight his rust-bronze skin made a handsome display. This was the Mek solitary, a creature intrinsically as effective as man — perhaps more by virtue of his superb brain which also functioned as a radio transceiver. Working in the mass, by the teeming thousands, he seemed less admirable, less competent: a hybrid of sub-man and cockroach.

  Certain savants, notably Morninglight’s D.R. Jardine and Salonson of Tuang, considered the Mek bland and phlegmatic, but the profound Claghorn of Castle Hagedorn asserted otherwise. The emotions of the Mek, said Claghorn, were different from human emotions, and only vaguely comprehensible to man. After diligent research Claghorn isolated over a dozen Mek emotions.

  In spite of such research, the Mek revolt came as an utter surprise, no less to Claghorn, D.R. Jardine and Salonson than to anyone else. Why? asked everyone. How could a group so long submissive have contrived so murderous a plot?

  The most reasonable conjecture was also the simplest: the Mek resented servitude and hated the Earthmen who had removed him from his natural environment. Those who argued against this theory claimed that it projected human emotions and attitudes into a non-human organism, that the Mek had every reason to feel gratitude toward the gentlemen who had liberated him from the conditions of Etamin Nine. To this, the first group would inquire, “Who projects human attitudes now?” And the retort of their opponents was often: “Since no one knows for certain, one projection is no more absurd than another.”

  II

  1

  Castle Hagedorn occupied the crest of a black diorite crag overlooking a wide valley to the south. Larger, more majestic than Janeil, Hagedorn was protected by walls a mile in circumference and three hundred feet tall. The parapets stood a full nine hundred feet above the valley, with towers, turrets and observation eyries rising even higher. Two sides of the crag, at east and west, dropped sheer to the valley. The north and south slopes, a trifle less steep, were terraced and planted with vines, artichokes, pears and pomegranates. An avenue rising from the valley circled the crag and passed through a portal into the central plaza. Opposite stood the great Rotunda, with at either side the tall Houses of the twenty-eight families.

  The original castle, constructed immediately after the return of men to Earth, stood on the site now occupied by the plaza. The tenth Hagedorn, assembling an enormous force of Peasants and Meks, had built the new walls, after which he demolished the old castle. The twenty-eight Houses dated from this time, five hundred years before.

  Below the plaza were three service levels: the stables and garages at the bottom, next the Mek shops and Mek living quarters, then the various storerooms, warehouses and special shops: bakery, brewery, lapidary, arsenal, repository, and the like.

  THE CLANS OF HAGEDORN

  Their colors and associated families:

  Clans -- Colors -- Families

  XANTEN -- yellow; black piping -- Haude, Quay, Idelsea, Esledune, Salonson, Roseth.

  BEAUDRY -- dark blue; white piping -- Onwane, Zadig, Prine, Fer, Sesune.

 
OVERWHELE -- gray, green; red rosettes -- Claghorn, Abreu, Woss, Hinken, Zumbeld.

  AURE -- brown, black -- Zadhause, Fotergil, Marune, Baudune, Godalming, Lesmanic.

  ISSETH -- purple, dark red -- Mazeth, Floy, Luder-Hepman, Uegus, Kerrithew, Bethune.

  The first gentleman of the castle, elected for life, is known as ‘Hagedorn’.

  The clan chief, selected by the family elders, bears the name of his clan, thus: ‘Xanten’, ‘Beaudry’, ‘Overwhele’, ‘Aure’, ‘Isseth’ —both clans and clan chiefs.

  The family elder, selected by household heads, bears the name of his family. Thus ‘Idelsea’, ‘Zadhause’, ‘Bethune’ and ‘Claghorn’ are both families and family elders.

  The remaining gentlemen and ladies bear first the clan, then the family, then the personal name. Thus: Aure Zadhause Ludwick, abbreviated to A.Z. Ludwick, and Beaudry Fer Dariane, abbreviated to B.F. Dariane.

  The current Hagedorn, twenty-sixth of the line, was a Claghorn of the Overwheles. His selection had occasioned general surprise, because O.C. Charle, as he had been before his elevation, was a gentleman of no remarkable presence. His elegance, flair, and erudition were only ordinary; he had never been notable for any significant originality of thought. His physical proportions were good; his face was square and bony, with a short straight nose, a benign brow, and narrow gray eyes. His expression, normally a trifle abstracted — his detractors used the word “vacant” — by a simple lowering of the eyelids, a downward twitch of the coarse blond eyebrows, at once became stubborn and surly, a fact of which O.C. Charle, or Hagedorn, was unaware.

  The office, while exerting little or no formal authority, exerted a pervasive influence, and the style of the gentleman who was Hagedorn affected everyone. For this reason the selection of Hagedorn was a matter of no small importance, subject to hundreds of considerations, and it was the rare candidate who failed to have some old solecism or gaucherie discussed with embarrassing candor. While the candidate might never take overt umbrage, friendships were inevitably sundered, rancors augmented, reputations blasted. O.C. Charle’s elevation represented a compromise between two factions among the Overwheles, to which clan the privilege of selection had fallen.