T’silla let the blurred bells come to rest. She looked up at Tybalt questioningly.
“Nowhere,” he said. “The ball is in your hand.”
With no sign of irritation, she dropped the ball on the table and covered it with a bell, then brought the two others around.
“Then do you not return to the Museum of Man?” asked Tybalt, adjusting his frogskin cap.
“Perhaps after this harvest season is over, many months from now. Perhaps not.”
T’silla moved the bells again.
From far away on the slide-hill, an idiot screamed and belly-flopped into the cloaca at its bottom.
“Give the people what they want,” said Rogol Domedonfors Jr. “and they’ll turn out every time.”
The way southward had been arduous, though most of the country people were in an especially good, generous mood because of the signs of a bumper harvest. They invited him to sleep in their rude barns and to partake of their meager rations as if it were a feast,
It was at a golden glowing sunset after many months of travel that he came within sight of the green porcelain palace that had to be the Museum of Man.
From this distance, it looked to be intricately carved from a single block of celadon, its turrets and spires glowing softly green in the late afternoon sun. He hurried his steps while the light lasted.
A quick inspection revealed it to be everything he’d hoped for. Tome after tome in many languages; charts and maps; plans of cities long fallen to ruin. In the longer halls, exhibit after exhibit of the history of the progress of the animal and vegetal kingdoms, and of Mankind. There were machines designed for flying through the air; others seemingly made for travel beneath the seas. There were men of metal shaped like humans whose purpose he could not fathom. He had time before darkness to discover that the northenmost tower was an observatory with a fine giant spying-glass.
He found a hall of portraits of former Curators of the Museum. Just before he had parted company with Rogol Domedonfors and T’silla months ago, she had handed him a folded and sealed paper.
“What’s this?” he had asked.
“There will come a time when you will need it. Open it then,” she said. All these months, it had been a comforting weight in his pocket.
He travelled up the hall of portraits, pausing at the one of the original Rogol Domedonfors from long ages past. He came up the hall as if transgressing time itself, noting changes in the styles of costuming in the portraits, from the high winged collars to the off-the-shoulder straps. The last full portrait outside the curator’s door was of Rogol Domedonfors Jr. Tybalt noted the faint resemblence of the features shared by he and the original—the wayward cowlick, the frown-line on one side of the mouth, the long neck. Almost impossible that the same features would skip so many generations, only to show up later in the namesake.
Last outside the door was an empty frame with four pins stuck at its center.
Tybalt reached in his pocket, took out the folded and sealed paper, broke its waxen seal, and unfolded it.
It was a drawing of himself, done in brown pencil, wearing his frogskin cap. The legend below said: “Tybalt the Scientist. ‘Frogskin Cap’ The last Curator of the Museum of Man.” It was an excellent likeness, though the words uneased him. When had T’silla had time between the game of the bells and the ball, and early the next rainy morning when they parted, to do such a good drawing?
He pinned the drawing within the frame—it fit perfectly. It made him feel at home, as if he had a place there.
He noticed, too, that as the night had darkened, the walls of the room had begun to glow with the faintest of blue lights, which intensified as the outside grew blacker. He looked from the office-room, and the whole museum glowed likewise.
He found a writing instrument and pages of foolscap, cleared a space on the desk, and began to write on the topmost sheet:
THE TRUE AUTHENTIC HISTORY OF OUR SUN
By Tybalt, “Frogskin Cap”
Curator of the Museum of Man
He had worked through most of the night. The walls were fading as a red glow tainted eastwards.
Tybalt stretched himself. He had barefly begun outlining the main sequence of the birth, growth, senescence, and death of stars. Enough for now; there were books to consult; there was food to find. He was famished, having finished some parched corn he’d gotten at the last farmhouse before coming to the woods that led to the Museum of Man, late the afternoon before. Surely there was food somewhere hereabouts.
He went outside the green porcelain museum and turned to face the east.
The darkened sun rose lumpy as a cracked egg. Straggly whiskers of fire stood out from the chins of the sun, growing and shortening as he watched.
A curl of fire swept up out of the top of the sphere, and the surface became pocked and darkened, as if it had a disease.
The sun was having one of its bad days.
Afterword Frogskin Cap
All the while I’m in the VA joint and not able to do much work, George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois are waiting for a story from me, for what is the marketing coup of the century.
Jack Vance, venerable writer and dreamer, wrote The Dying Earth, a novel in linked stories, on various leaky tubs he served on in WWII. It was published by the publisher of Airboy Comics (in a stab at respectability) in 1950, and was an instant classic.
Since then, he’d resisted all but one attempt (see A Quest for Simbalis, by Michael Shea, 1976) by others to play in his world. Since then, not again, though Vance himself set several later works in The Dying Earth milieu.
He’d granted Martin and Dozois the right to an original anthology set on the Dying Earth. It was the hot book to be in that year, and I’d wanted to be in it before the Unpleasantness of 2008.
Well, it was a race between my failing body and a deadline George and Gardner were holding for (over?) me.
After the hospital stay, as I said, I lived for two months with my sister Mary and her husband, Danny Hodnett, in Mississippi. About halfway thru, they went on a cruise Mary had won on an Internet sweepstakes.
I was taken down to Starkville, Mississippi, to stay with my niece Nikki and her husband (and some big woolly dogs and a dachshund) while Mary and Danny were off whooping it up and shooting skeet off the port bow, etc.
I’d tried to start The Dying Earth story while in the hospital, buying a batch of legal pads and some fairly pen-like felt-tip markers. I got around 100 words a page in writing I could see and gave it up as a bad idea around September 30th.
Back to Starkville, November 2008. I sit down at a desk in Nikki’s house and wrote the sumbitch in three days, the first writing I’d done in six months. George and Gardner bought it, of course.
I’d had someone bring my copy of The Dying Earth up to the VA hospital earlier, and read it with a big magnifying glass, for the second time since 1962.
I’d read it in the same Lancer SF Classics paperback edition then, sitting at the time under a magnolia tree, between ninth grade and sophomore year of high school.
The book I reread in 2008 was a different book than in 1962 (I like to think I had matured in the intervening years). But I think The Dying Earth had become a better, denser work with the passage of half a century or so.
The one element I couldn’t find was the “frogskin cap” that gave me my title, which had stuck in my mind since the 1962 reading. I added some stuff Vance couldn’t have known about in 1950 (and before)—the extinction of many frog species, etc., and tied them in with the far future of a senescent Earth Vance had pictured.
I also tied him in with H. G. Wells’ vision of the far future from The Time Machine (“the green porcelain palace”—why not have it be the Museum of Man?).
I was proud of the story, and pleased that I could still write AT ALL.
Ninieslando
The captain had a puzzled look on his face. He clamped a hand to the right earphone and frowned in concentration.
“Lots of extrane
ous chatter on the lines again. I’m pretty sure some Fritz’s have been replaced by Austrians in this sector. It seems to be in some language I don’t speak. Hungarian, perhaps.”
Tommy peered out into the blackness around the listening post. And of course could see nothing. The l.p. was inside the replica of a bloated dead horse that had lain between the lines for months. A week ago the plaster replica had arrived via the reserve trench from the camouflage shops far behind the lines. That meant a working party had had to get out in the night and not only replace the real thing with the plaster one, but bury the original, which had swelled and burst months before.
They had come back nasty, smelly, and in foul moods, and had been sent back to the baths miles behind the lines, to have the luxury of a hot bath and a clean uniform. Lucky bastards, thought Tommy at the time.
Tommy’s sentry duty that night, instead of the usual peering into the blackness over the parapet into the emptiness of No Man’s Land, had been to accompany the officer to the listening post inside the plaster dead horse, thirty feet in front of their trench line. That the l.p. was tapped into the German field telephone system (as they were into the British) meant that some poor sapper had had to crawl the quarter-mile through No Man’s Land in the dark, find a wire, and tap into it. (Sometimes after doing so, they’d find they’d tied into a dead or abandoned wire.) Then he’d had to carefully crawl back to his own line, burying the wire as he retreated, and making no noise, lest he get a flare fired off for his trouble.
This was usually done when wiring parties were out on both sides, making noises of their own, so routine that they didn’t draw illumination or small-arms fire.
There had evidently been lots of unidentified talk on the lines lately, to hear the rumours. The officers were pretty close-lipped (you didn’t admit voices were there in a language you didn’t understand and could make no report on). Officers from the General Staff had been to the l.p. in the last few nights and came back with nothing useful. A few hours in the mud and the dark had probably done them a world of good, a break from their regular routines in the chateau that was HQ miles back of the line.
What little information that reached the ranks was, as the captain said, “Probably Hungarian, or some other Balkan sub-tongue.” HQ was on the case, and was sending in some language experts soon. Or so they said.
Tommy looked through the slit just below the neck of the fake horse. Again, nothing. He cradled his rifle next to his chest. This March had been almost as cold as any January he remembered. At least the thaw had not come yet, turning everything to cold wet clinging mud.
There was the noise of slow dragging behind them, and Tommy brought his rifle up.
“Password” said the captain to the darkness behind the horse replica.
“Ah—St. Agnes Eve . . . ,” came a hiss.
“Bitter chill it was,” said the captain. “Pass.”
A lieutenant and a corporal came into the open side of the horse. “Your relief, sir,” said the lieutenant.
“1 don’t envy you your watch,” said the captain. “Unless you were raised in Buda-Pesh.”
“The unrecognizable chatter again?” asked the junior officer.
“The same.”
“Well, I hope someone from HQ has a go at it soon,” said the lieutenant.
“Hopefully.”
“Well, I’ll give it a go,” said the lieutenant. “Have a good night’s sleep, sir.”
“’Very well. Better luck with it than I’ve had.” He turned to Tommy. “Let’s go, Private.”
“Sir!” said Tommy.
They crawled the thirty feet or so back to the front trench on an oblique angle, making the distance much longer, and they were under the outermost concertina wire before they were challenged by the sentries.
Tommy went immediately to his funk hole dug into the wall of the sandbagged parapet. There was a nodding man on look-out; others slept in exhausted attitudes as if they were, like the l.p. horse, made of plaster.
He wrapped his frozen blanket around himself and was in a troubled sleep within seconds.
“Up for morning stand-to!” yelled the sergeant, kicking the bottom of his left boot.
Tommy came awake instantly, the way you do after a few weeks at the Front.
It was morning stand-to, the most unnecessary drill in the army. The thinking behind it was that, at dawn, the sun would be full in the eyes of the soldiers in the British and French trenches, and the Hun could take advantage of it and advance through No Man’s Land and surprise them while they were sun-dazzled. (The same way that the Germans had evening stand-to in case the British made a surprise attack on them out of the setting sun.) Since no attacks were ever made across the churned and wired and mined earth of No-Man’s Land by either side unless preceded by an artillery barrage of a horrendous nature, lasting from a couple, to in one case, twenty-four hours, of constantly falling shells, from the guns of the other side, morning stand-to was a sham perpetrated by long-forgotten need from the early days of this Great War.
The other reason it was unnecessary was that this section of the Line that ran from the English Channel to the Swiss border was on a salient, and so the British faced more northward from true east, so the sun, instead of being their eyes, was a dull glare off the underbrims of their helmets somewhere off to their right. The Hun, if he ever came across the open, would be sidelit and would make excellent targets for them.
But morning stand-to had long been upheld by tradition and the lack of hard thinking when the Great War had gone from one of movement and tactics in the opening days to the one of attrition and stalemate it had become since.
This part of the front had moved less than one hundred yards, one way or the other, since 1915.
Tommy’s older brother, Fred, had died the year before on the first day of the Somme Offensive, the last time there had been any real movement for years. And that had been more than fifty miles up the Front.
Tommy stood on the firing step of the parapet and pointed his rifle at nothing in particular to his front through the firing slit in the sandbags. All up and down the line, others did the same.
Occasionally some Hun would take the opportunity to snipe away at them. The German sandbags were an odd mixture of all types of colors and patterns piled haphazardly all along their parapets. From far away, they formed a broken pattern, and the dark and light shades hid any break, such as a firing slit, from easy discernment. But the British sandbags were uniform, and the firing and observation slits stood out like sore thumbs, something the men were always pointing out to their officers.
As if on cue, there was the sound of smashing glass down the trench and the whine of a ricocheting bullet. A lieutenant threw down the trench periscope as if it were an adder that had bitten him.
“Damn and blast!” he said aloud. Then to his batman “Requisition another periscope from regimental supply.” The smashed periscope lay against the trench wall, its top and the mirror inside shot clean away by some sharp-eyed Hun. The batman left, going off in defile down the diagonal communication trench that led back to the reserve trench.
“Could have been worse,” someone down the trench said quietly. “Could have been his head.” There was a chorus of wheezes and snickers.
Humour was where you found it, weak as it was.
Usually both sides were polite to each other during their respective stand-tos. And afterwards, at breakfast and the evening meal. It wasn’t considered polite to drop a shell on a man who’d just taken a forkful of beans into his mouth. The poor fellow might choke.
Daytime was when you got any rest you were going to get. Of course there might be resupply, or ammunition, or food-toting details, but those came up rarely, and the sergeants were good about remembering who’d gone on the last one, and so didn’t send you too often.
There was mail call, when it came, then the midday meal (when and if it came) and the occasional equipment inspection. Mostly you slept unless something woke you up.
/> Once a month, your unit was rotated back to the second trench, where you mostly slept as well as you could, and every third week to the reserve trench, far back, in which you could do something besides soldier. Your uniform would be cleaned and deloused, and so would you.
In the reserve trench was the only time your mind could get away from the War and its routine. You could get in some serious reading, instead of the catch-as-catch kind of the first and second trenches. You could get a drink and eat something besides bully beef and hardtack if you could find anybody selling food and drink. You could see a moving picture in one of the rear areas, though that was a long hike, or perhaps a music-hall show, put on by one of the units, with lots of drag humour and raucous laughter at not very subtle material. (Tommy was sure the life of a German soldier was much the same as his.)
It was one of the ironies of these times that in that far-off golden summer of 1914, when “some damn fool thing in the Balkans” was leading to its inevitable climax, Tommy’s brother, Fred, who was then eighteen, had been chosen as a delegate of the Birmingham Working-Men’s Esperanto Association to go as a representative to the 24th Annual Esperanto Conference in Basel, Switzerland. The Esperanto Conference had been to take place in the last days of July and the first days of August. (Fred had been to France before with a gang of school chums and was no stranger to travel.)
The Esperanto Conference was to celebrate the 24th anniversary of Zamenhof’s artificial language, invented to bring better understanding between peoples through the use of an easy-to-learn, totally regular invented language—the thinking being that if all people spoke the same language (recognizing a pre-Babel dream), they would see that they were all one people, with common dreams and goals, and would slowly lose nationalism and religious partisanship through the use of the common tongue.
Horse of a Different Color Page 14