Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Rosel G Brown

The really important question is, am I edible.

  He looked at his arms and they were foreign. The hairs on his arms were inhabited with dust or parasites—not saffron, not indigo, but wrong-colored—and he couldn’t help wondering if he were being absorbed. He brushed at it and it didn’t come off like dust (but then this wouldn’t be normal dust). It could be scraped away with the knife from his pack, but then it stuck on the knife and more collected on his body.

  It didn’t hurt. It just sat there.

  He was getting heavier all the time, and it was much more comfortable than free fall. He liked, too, to think that he was attracting the planet, instead of the planet attracting him.

  He started back for his ship, because he suddenly realized he should not have taken his eyes from it, and then he stopped.

  Something was talking to him. No, at him. Insistently and in whispers and mutters and murmurs and occasionally a slightly angry emphasis, sounding like the clearing of a throat. So he stood stock still, as a child would when he can hear from the next room the murmur of conversation which is no doubt about him, but can’t make out the separate words. And he tensed his lips across his teeth, which is a marvelous way to improve the hearing, and concentrated all of his energies into his ears.

  It was coming through. Yes. He was beginning to under . . .

  “God damn it, you’re standing on my head!” it said. (It didn’t actually say it in Terran words like that, of course, and it wasn’t actually a head, but this is the sort of phrase that can be made comprehensible even in a foreign language. And even if the other thing isn’t a language, but more an agitation of the motes of the air and a teasing of the prickle cell layer of the skin.)

  Quant jumped to one side quickly, which sent him sprawling not quite to the ground (he wasn’t heavy enough to have much balance yet).

  The thing drew itself around into a circle and said reproachfully, “Why did you hurt me if you didn’t want to eat me?”

  “I didn’t know you were there,” Quant answered. “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s nice for you, but it doesn’t help me. You have no consciousness?”

  “Of course I have consciousness. I just wasn’t noticing where I was walking.”

  “Mutually exclusive statements,” the creature stated. “Well, what’s wrong with me? Why aren’t you eating me?”

  “Eat you!” cried Quant, regarding the set of iridescent blisters with whom he was conversing.

  “I know I can’t eat you because you popped two of my blebs when you stepped on my head and you were no more absorbable than dirt and now you say that you don’t want to eat me. You can’t eat me! That’s what it is.” The creature retreated and extended its blistered surface into a unresolvable ellipse which set Quant’s teeth on edged. “You’re not human!”

  ‘I’m not human.” But of course, Quant thought, I’m only translating what the creature is obviously trying to say into words and they can’t be expected to match very well.

  “ ‘The One remains,’ ” the creature quoted, or so it came out in Quant’s neural response, “ ‘the many change and pass;’ But you can’t change and pass.”

  “You mean you all eat each other and change form but retain some central consciousness so you don’t really die? It sounds very comforting. You see, I’ve never been really satisfied by the thought that I would turn into grass and flowers when I die, because I won’t know I’m grass and flowers. It would make a big difference if I thought a flower knew it was a flower, and particularly if it also knew it Was me. It was I, I mean.”

  “I don’t absorb you,” the creature said. “And I mean that was a double entendre. And there’s something else wrong with you. You lean at odd angles. It’s not just unrhythmic, it’s . . . eerie.”

  “I’m nongravitic,” Quant said. “You see, where I come from, the planet furnishes the gravity. I mean, I’ve got the same amount of gravity I thought all matter was supposed to have, but no more. I depend on the planet to keep me in the proper position. Whereas gravity seems to be a property of you instead of your planet.”

  “You’re dirt!” the creature coughed in a sursurrated scream. “You’re a great, big walking blob of dirt!”

  “No, no,” cried Quant, forgetting to whisper, and to his horror the creature popped all its blebs and a mournful liquid poured out into the ambient atmosphere, and it shuddered and streamed away from him.

  The vegetation round about sank into the ground or slid away or floated off, each to its nature.

  “I must go and warn the Others,” the dying (Changing and Passing) creature hissed. “Who’s hungry?” Quant heard it broadcasting. “I’ve got something important to be absorbed. Who’s hungry?” And it blew away.

  Which left Quant to clamber up his ship to the port, wondering if he were going to be attacked by the creatures of Chromata.

  What I should do now, Quant thought, is I should go home, provided my ship will fly. It was odd to remember, but he really did have a home. A wife who, by now, was really a good deal older than he, because of the time he’d spent in hiberno, but whom he still loved when he was around her—partly because Quant had never sat a set of values that required women to be young, and partly because she kept having this or that plasticized and she gave fair to die young no matter how long she lived.

  Yes, there was Annamarie, who was always glad to see him, and perfumed the bed when he came home, and who was also a little glad when he left, for she had arranged her life without him and while of course she loved him, it was easier and less confusing to love him at a distance and devote Sunday afternoons to writing him long letters. But if he took off now and went home she’d be very glad to see him and so would the children—no, they were no longer children—still, they’d always been fond of him and Annamarie had done such a good job they really thought he was a marvelous father, which of course he wasn’t.

  He had responsibilities, which were well covered by insurance.

  And a responsibility to science, which he found he really didn’t care about.

  After all, Quant thought, entering his ship and finding it distasteful, what does science care about me? And besides, Chromata had something Arts and Sciences could speak about only in vague generalities.

  Immortality.

  Quant ran his tongue over his lips and came away with a taste like . . . not like anything else. Like the float of a bubble, perhaps. Or air where the wind has been.

  I’m eating things and breathing things, he thought. Will I change?

  But he had already changed.

  The inside of the ship was the wrong shape and there was no voluptuousness in even the softest of the cushions, or the small supply of aged brandy, or the tapes of magnificent music, or any of the other few human pleasures which are small and portable.

  Whereas Chromata . . .

  Quant went outside again, climbed down and planked out on the ground, leaning on his elbows and watching an incredible sunset stretch up from the horizon and around the levels of life that floated in conscious peace over Chromata.

  Was he sliding or were the tetragonous growths over there moving? There is no proper human organ to tell us were moving, which can be confusing in train stations.

  It was the ground beneath him, Quant found, as his elbow slid away. It was coming alive with the sunset.

  A nocturnal creature, he thought, rolling over and getting up quickly, in case he were on somebody’s head again.

  The ground shifted and moved about him and softened and Quant found himself wondering how deep it was.

  And wondered if this indicated a strong death wish, and if so, whether it could really be counted a death wish, since Chromata held in its digestive system the juices of immortality.

  The more Quant thought about it, the less patient he felt with his mortal coil. For he would like to be a glinting sheet blowing in the wind, or a collapsable lattice, or a floating cloud, or even a sluggish marsh flowing over the earth, spread for whatever moons might rise.

&
nbsp; Quant hadn’t even checked to see what moons the planet had.

  Darkness rushed out at him, but it was not the night, it was the earth, or the ooze of the earth, beneath which he sank and his eyes were gone and his mouth was stopped.

  It really doesn’t matter, he thought. I’ve got my oxygen capsule and I don’t need to breath. Not for a little while.

  Besides that, it really didn’t matter anyway.

  He wasn’t actually sinking. He was moving with voluptuous tides that caressed him and took him in and felt him with new senses. Something bubbly about it. He felt as water must feel when it’s mixed with wine (or used to when the ancients did this with regularity.)

  And the reason such a simile occurred to Quant was that he was mixing. Racial intermixture, he thought. Something even sexual, he thought, but he didn’t think it very much because it sounded perverted. What he was having was a previously unknown emotion.

  But what am I losing? he thought. Maybe myself. Maybe I won’t stay myself and then it’ll all be for nothing and I’ll be gone like a popped balloon.

  “My name is Quant Aut!” he shouted. He was holding on to it. “My name is Quant Aut!”

  “So your name is Quant Aut,” said the Ooze, which had begun to tremble violently at the noise. “Here out of the kindness of my heart I’ve got you half digested and what do you do? You throw pointed sounds at me. How do you do that, anyway?”

  “With my voice,” Quant whispered. “No, I guess I’m doing it some other way now, but the principle is the same. I’ve got pointed thoughts. I can’t help it. I’m from another world.”

  “Ridiculous. The rumor was that you’re dirt. You’re not. You’ve got nocturnal chemistry but—God damn it, you taste terrible.”

  “I’m sorry. Look, you can’t go off and leave me half-digested. You can’t imagine what a mess I’d be.”

  “I didn’t know you’d be so loathsome. Besides, it’s taking too long and I find you dull.”

  “Please,” said Quant, who wondered, sweating, how it would feel to be left out half digested—how he would look and how revolting the pain would be and how long it would take him to die, particularly if he’d lost the use of his limbs and couldn’t dispatch himself quickly. “Please. Maybe you’ll learn to like me. And what makes you think I’m dull? What do you like to do while you’re eating?”

  “I like stories,” the Ooze said. “But it’s too much to expect that you’ll know any good stories.”

  “Do they have to be funny?” Quant couldn’t think of a joke to save his life. And he recalled times in bars when he’d finally remembered a joke but the punch line had left him at the last minute.

  “No. Life is real, life if earnest. Do you have any earnest stories?”

  “Ernest and Frank,” said Quant “I can tell you my life story.”

  The Ooze groaned.

  “But this is different,” said Quant hastily. “I come from another world and I’ve had many interesting adventures.”

  “Embroider a little.”

  “I don’t need to embroider. I . . .” Quant racked his brains. There was the planet Erx, for instance.”

  “O.K. for instance . . . what’s that scratchy stuff?”

  “My beard. I didn’t depilate when I came out of hiberno but there isn’t much of it. The planet Erx is invisible.”

  “Silly. If there’s no way to perceive it then it doesn’t exist.”

  “Wrong! It wasn’t visible to ordinary Terran senses—Terra is the planet I’m from—but I don’t seem to have ordinary human senses. Or more likely, my mind didn’t set in ordinary Terran patterns. I used to consider it a defect, but . . .”

  “I loath self-analysis. What about the planet Erx?”

  “Well, the planet Erx is an enormous, very tenuous disk, like an overgrown cr. (I’m being assimilated, Quant thought. I didn’t used to know what a cr was). It is so large and so attentuated that you would normally go right through it, only when I picked it up on the ship’s TV—I saw it, you understand—it immediately struck me that it showed that something besides nature had been tampering with it. Not that the mind isn’t part of nature but—an excessive tendency to reverse the second law of thermodynamics usually has some intelligence behind it. And so, approaching slowly and keeping my mind open, I stopped at the planet Erx and wandered freely among the inhabitants.”

  “Indigestible?” asked the Ooze with the shudder reserved for aliens and ghouls.

  “Yes. No. That is, I didn’t try. They were so tenuous I could wander in and out of them. Anyway, they were not, as you might be thinking, amorphous, but very rigid in shape and in fact fitted into each other like a jigsaw puzzle. This is the way they slept or banded together in times of panic or sat and watched public spectacles—not all the inhabitants of the planet at once, you understand. They had separate patterns by family groups.”

  “This was their form of feeding on each other?”

  “No, no. They had a repulsive custom but that wasn’t it.”

  “What’s repulsive about feeding on each other?”

  Quant went to bite his tongue, and found he didn’t have one. He could do it figuratively, which turned out to be fully as satisfactory, and he realized then that he was going to go through life—eternity (which is not, after all, forever)—with his homosapient habits. And ooze though he was now, undulating to double moonlight, he was also a mental structure as stiff with lines and angles as an implanted sd. I only thought I had a flexible mind, Quant decided. Or only relatively flexible.

  It was an odd reverse. Quant was used to thinking of himself—when he did think of himself, which hadn’t happened much until lately—as having a shaped body and an amorphous mind. And here he was with an amorphous body and a shaped mind.

  Well, anyway I’m getting to know myself, he thought.

  “Was it sexual?” the Ooze (the part of the ooze which Quant was not) asked. “This is how they merged to divide?”

  “No, no. It was much more disgusting than that.”

  “You find an awful lot of things disgusting, for someone distasteful himself. I’m beginning to get bored and I’ve hit a pocket of little rocks. I can’t manage them.”

  “Just let them go. That must be my fillings. It’s a plastic compound of some sort. No, this jit-saw business was just a matter of custom reinforced by evolution. It happened that on the planet Erx, acquired characteristics were inherited.”

  “Of course.”

  “No. Here you acquire a whole body. I mean, when the physical individual . . .”

  “Get on to the disgusting habit.”

  “Well, there was of course intra-familial interlocking and along with it intrafamilial mating (though the two are not to be confused.) Because of the complexity and diverseness of the pattern a place could almost always be found for the children. But sometimes there was an odd member to whom there was no fitting, or sometimes for social or political reasons a weaker family was to be joined to a stronger one and there was no natural fitting. So in this case they . . . you are not the right shape to understand this.”

  “I know what it’s like to be rigid,” the Ooze said, gliding over a boulder and running down in a stream.

  “Then, they take and bend the person so he does fit. You understand this entails breaking all his bones and tearing his flesh, which is just as solid to him as mine used to be to me.”

  “A broken sr must be absorbed immediately,” the Ooze said. “Otherwise his susurrations are too horrible to bear.”

  “That’s it. It’s the ultimate in torture, but the Erxian doesn’t die. He lives on and even reproduces and he is not allowed to die until there is a child big enough to occupy his position. And all this time he is in the most excruciating and ceaseless torment.”

  The Ooze shuddered. “The noise doesn’t kill the others?”

  “The others,” said Quant, who found that even now it sickened him to remember it, “the others laugh at it for being a misfit. You see, it has no hope, no sympathy,
no future and even its death is planned only at the convenience of others.”

  “Ah, the pity of it,” the Ooze said. “I’m glad it isn’t true, but it increases my gravity just to think of it.”

  “But it is true.”

  Quant was aware of a luminescent bubble sinking toward him, turning iridescent almost-gold in the moonlights. The bubble rolled as Quant and the ooze coated it, and carried Quant upward. He could feel his drag on it, but it shifted its gravity in some way to compensate, and he rose with the tides of the air.

  “How soft the moonlights sleep on yonder banks,” quoted the bubble melodiously—or this is how it came out in Quant’s mind, because whatever the bubble was saying was poetry and as Quant’s mind was unable to produce anything original, and a literal translation would have missed the meaning completely, bits of suitable quotation had to be dredged up from high school lit.

  Which set in front of Quant’s mind, for no reason at all, a sudden nostalgic picture—Quant tended to think in slides rather than motion picture. A result, perhaps, of inadequate educational aids in his first three grades—a picture of the half acres where he spent childhood summers, where the sunlight wove through two leafed branches and flowed away in gold through a tiny spring that ran down between tree roots. And he became so consumed with a need to go home again that his tongue clove to his palate and he could feel his Chromatan form shiver and contract in a rhythmic fashion.

  He thought of the warmth of his wife and his clear-voiced children and even, one supposes, of God, because he said, My God, what have I done!

  And the bubble, who had perhaps read his thoughts, or perhaps just happened to say it, or even perhaps was saying something entirely different, said, “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

  Only Quant finally got over his mood and he decided it had profited him a good deal.

  Which is a very bad moral, but then Quant was never again heard of by what we think of as the civilized world.

  1962

  AND A TOOTH

  It is usually hard enough on a man when he has two women to contend with. But when both are in the same mind and body . . .