Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Rosel G Brown

  “But how did he know what you knew?” Avery asked. “How did he know what to paint or what to stick together or hang from a peg or all those ways he does it?”

  “What he always creates,” said Eileen, “is the expression on my face. He goes out and gets pretties and puts them together and then he paints me appreciating them. He doesn’t look at the objects, he looks at me looking at the objects.”

  “Mental telepathy,” Gerald said.

  “Hogwash,” said Tom. “I just like her around when I do my art. You’d think she’d appreciate it, her getting old now and all.”

  Eileen tossed her drink at him, enjoying the way it dripped down his ears and into his tux.

  “It was fun for a long time, for years. I’d be all excited when he came home with a grocery bag full of beauty and he’d arrange things and rearrange them and I’d feel the color and pattern of them and he’d paint or carve or paste together what I felt and it was like riding forth to a glorious battle or getting raucously drunk or skiing in the Alps or being helplessly in love.”

  Tom had his dinner jacket off and was using it to dry his face and neck with. “She’s nuts,” he said. “I said she was going a little funny and now she’s gone.” He threw his balled up jacket into her face and strode towards the whiskey.

  Avery Dart and most of the party, enjoying the domestic quarrel but not wanting to be obvious about it, drifted away. But Gerald Smith-Haven remained, recording all this for posterity.

  “What lovely temperament,” he remarked, and wrote it down. Then he leaned confidentially to Eileen’s ear, taking the damp jacket from her and folding it neatly as he talked. “Tell me truly, truly dear—what was the subject for that art work in that locked room?”

  Eileen pointed up to the corner of the room. It seemed to her as she watched that it was filling more rapidly, sounding with more encompassing volumn.

  Gerald looked, blinked, looked again and wrote something grimly in his little mauve notebook.

  “Maybe,” she said, “Maybe I am crazy. It wouldn’t be surprising. But then if I am—what was it Tom painted? He doesn’t paint what I imagine. He only paints what I see. Do you understand? Even if I were crazy, he could still only paint what I see, not what I think I see. But perhaps you don’t believe that.”

  “Maybe you’re crazy,” Tom said, coming up with an undiluted drink. “Ha, ha! What you see up there, Gerald Smith-Haven, or whatever your name is?”

  “I don’t see anything,” Gerald said. “But then I haven’t Eileen’s years of experience at seeing things—really seeing them. And Gerald Smith-Haven is the correct way to address me.”

  “Yeah? Maybe I ain’t going to address you at all, you jerk. I just want witnesses that there ain’t nothing up there and Eileen sees something. Don’t you, Baby?”

  “You know what I see because you painted it,” Eileen replied. “I paint art,” Tom said, shrugging his head into his shoulders uncomfortably. “An artist paints art, ain’t that right, Whatever your name is?”

  “Gerald Smith-Haven. You know, I’d really be grateful if you’d let me see the picture. After all, I’m a thoroughly trained art interpreter, and maybe I could throw some light on the whole discussion.”

  EILEEN giggled, her neck jerking a little with hysteria. “Isn’t that cute—discussion? Look, I’ve just had an awfully good idea. Especially at a party. A party stunt. We’ll all talk about it for weeks afterwards and Gerald can put it in your biography, Tom.”

  “He ain’t putting nothing in my nothing,” Tom grated belligerantly, and reached out his hand for a refill on the bourbon. “Why don’t you go off to bed, Baby?”

  “No, no. This is important. What you do Tom is go get the step ladder. And you climb up it over there in the corner of the room and you look. If you look close, I think you can see what I see there. My eyesight is better than yours.”

  “Hogwash,” said Tom. “Swill.”

  “All right. If you’re afraid. Just don’t blame me.”

  “Afraid? Of what?”

  “That it’s you that’s nuts, that’s what,” Eileen said, wrinkling her wrinkled face at him and knowing how he hated that expression on it. “That something’s there and you’d like to see it but you can’t because you’re crazy.”

  “Nobody else can see it. Whatever his name is here can’t see it.”

  “Yes, but he’s not an artist. He can’t see the angle of a stick in dried mud, either, or the curl of a dying caterpiller. And this field trip, you couldn’t, either. You came back with nothing.” Eileen held herself taut and forced her eyes up, wondering whether the fear would be too much. “Look at it,” she said. “Just look.”

  And Tom knew she was seeing something, then and there.

  “Oh, all right,” he said. “You want to make a fool of me, make a fool. Everybody knows I’m no fool, the kind of money I make.” And he came back, lightly carrying the heavy step ladder in one hand, and set it up.

  “See, everybody,” he boomed. “I am now going to be the life of the party. Tom the Bomb is going to climb the dangerous step ladder and examine that corner of this here room and if I find anything I’ll toss it down to the bridesmaid. You there, Gerald Smith-Haven or whatever your name is, you be the bridesmaid.” First, he poured one more drink, drank half of it, and threw the rest in Eileen’s face. “You started it,” he said.

  Eileen let it drip. It curled around her nose and into her mouth.

  Tom climbed heavily up the ladder, and it creaked with his weight and his slow progress.

  “Maybe,” said Avery, “This is not a good idea. Perhaps we should all go home.”

  “But it’s a wonderful idea,” Eileen insisted.

  “Go home if you want to.”

  “No, I only meant . . . perhaps it isn’t safe for Tom to be up on a . . . Tom!”

  Somebody screamed.

  TOM’S empty clothes floated to the floor.

  Last of all his watch hit the floor with a thud.

  “You were right,” Eileen said to Avery. “It wasn’t safe.”

  “He’s gone,” Gerald said, his voice like a canary’s shriek. “Just gone.” Gerald’s gold pencil rolled across the floor and stopped softly by Tom’s watch. “There is something there.”

  “There was,” Eileen said. “Tom scared it away. He was too alien.

  And there he is, stuck up in the corner of its room, scaring the hell out of any Its that can see him.”

  “Gone,” Gerald said. He picked up his notebook and fumbled for the pencil he hadn’t noticed dropping. “Yes, but the picture. Where’s the key? We can see the picture.”

  Somebody was at the telephone, talking to the police.

  Avery stared at the ceiling. “It must be a trick.”

  “No.”

  Eileen said, “go see the picture, and see if you’re ever the same again. I’m going to burn it.” People crowded into the display room after Gerald, and came out and got their coats and left, mostly not saying goodbye. What could one say? Provided one could talk at all.

  Then only Gerald and Avery were left, and Gerald said, “I think you’d better burn it. You were right. It’s . . . ghastly. I mean, seeing how Tom painted himself into it.”

  “Himself!” Eileen cried. “He did not.”

  “Well, why don’t you come look?”

  “No,” Avery said. “I think she’d better not.”

  “Oh, but I shall come look.” Eileen steeled herself to look at the picture. It was as frightening as the original, and she’d all but died of fear while Tom painted it.

  It wasn’t really a painting. It was a three . . . four-dimensional construction. From the five sides of it projected five sticks, that met in a point, and seemed at first to cover the flat canvas behind them completely. But as you looked, and walked around it, the flow of lines and masses of convex and concave gobs of clay and the spaces beyond, all projected itself out to you from beyond the interstices of the pyrimidal sticks. And it was balanced out from the wall
so that it moved—ever so slightly—whenever someone walked or the wind blew or a heavy truck went by outside.

  “It’s just as bad as it ever was,” Eileen said. “If Tom had had even a shred of sensitivity he wouldn’t have . . . wait! You’re right, Gerald.” She walked around the picture, watching the shifting pattern as she moved, peering between the interstices. “He is there now. He moves!”

  Avery came up behind Eileen and caught her shoulders. “Steady, now,” he said. “The picture moves. That’s what you see.” But Avery’s hands shook on Eileen’s shoulders. He could see it too.

  Eileen could hear the police.

  She turned suddenly to Gerald and Avery. “That’s all there’ll ever be of Tom. The question is, should I burn it after all?”

  They all watched the shifting pattern of the picture.

  “He’s furious, isn’t he? Absolutely livid with fury. Rather a nice color.”

  Eileen bent one eyebrow. Thought and rethought.

  “I believe I shall burn it. And just have done with it.”

  THE END

  1966

  EARTHBLOOD

  His ancestors had conquered the stars but now they were slaves—these creatures called men!

  PROLOGUE

  The sign scabbed to the dog-yellow wall read:

  FOR SALE

  VIABLE HUMAN EMBRYOS

  GENUINE TERRESTRIAL STRAIN

  “This is the place, Bella,” Raff Cornay said. “By God, we’re a long way from home.”

  Bella smiled up at him and bit her dyed lips. Having them dyed hadn’t really made her look twenty years younger—or even a year younger. She moved closer to his side, put lean, grayish fingers on his thick, brown arm, looking up the dark ravine of the stairway.

  “Raff, it’s so . . .” she started and then left it, because when you’ve been married twenty years all those words aren’t necessary.

  Raff hitched at the harness that crossed his heavy, rounded shoulders, brushed with a finger the comforting bulge of the short-barrelled power pistol.

  “We’ll be all right, Bella.” He patted her thin hand, moved ahead of her to the high, narrow steps, worn into hollows pocketing oily puddles. The heat and sounds of the plaza faded as they climbed through layered odors of decay and alien cookery, passed a landing railed with twisted iron, reached a towering, narrow doorway hung with a” dirt-glazed beaded arras that clashed softly as Raff held it aside.

  There was a leathery rustle, a heavy thump, the clack of clawed feet. An enormously tall, stooped figure in ornately decorated straps and bangles minced forward from yellowish gloom, ruffling moulting plumage. It settled itself on a tall stool, clattering stiff, flightless feathers, blinking translucent eyelids from Raff to Bella.

  “What do you want?” the creature rasped. “There is no charity here.”

  “The lady’d like to sit down too, maybe,” Raff said sharply.

  “Then sit.”

  Raff looked around. There was no other chair. He looked at the proprietor, eyeing the red, leathery neck, the tarnished beak.

  “I never knew one like you before,” he said. “What are you, you don’t know how to treat a human lady?”

  “Human?” The alien clacked its beak contemptuously, staring at Bella’s gray Yill skin.

  “Don’t, Raff.” Bella put her hand on his arm. “We don’t care nothing about him. All we want’s the baby.” Through the ill-fitting youth suit he had bought for the trip, she could feel him forcing himself not to care. Maybe he was too old for the legal adoption agency, but he was as good as any man a hundred years younger.

  “We’ve got money,” Raff said tightly. “We’re here on business.” The big eyes blinked at him. “How much money?”

  “Well—almost five hundred credits.”

  The tall creature on the stool closed its eyes, opened them again. “I can offer you something in a sturdy mute, guaranteed I.Q. of 40 . . .”

  “No,” Raff and Bella said together. “No defective stock,” Raff went on. “Your sign down on the square said Genuine Terry Strain.”

  “Too much intellect in a slave is undesirable. Now, this line of stock . . .”

  “You think we’d make a slave of a human child?” Raff snapped. “Can’t you see we’re Terries—Terry stock, anyway,” he added, as the round eyes flicked over him, then Bella. She stirred and wrapped her cloak closer.

  The dealer clacked its beak contemptuously, “Five hundred credits! And for this, I should produce perhaps a Conquistador, complete with Sc. D. certificate?”

  “Just an ordinary boy,” Raff said. “Just so he’s normal. Earth normal. We don’t mind if he’s maybe color-blind.”

  The dealer cocked its head, eyed Raff. “What kind of citizenship do you have?”

  “What? Why, we’re Freeholders, from Gran font.”

  “You have papers?”

  “Sure. Otherwise we’d never . . .” The dealer half turned, raised its voice in a sharp cry. A small slave in trailing rags came in from a side room.

  “Bring benches for my valued customers—and brandy. The Fleon, ’49.” It turned back to Raff, its hooded eyes sharp and interested now. “A happy blending of rain, sun, sulphur and fungi.”

  “We don’t need the build-up,” Raff said. “We didn’t come here to socialize.” He stopped. It wasn’t a thing you could put words to. We came to buy a human child . . . to buy a son.

  “Ah, but I like people with resources. I confide in them.” The dealer was beaming owlishly now. “You wash an heir. I understand. You have come at a fortunate time. I can offer a most exceptional embryo—a son fit for an emperor!”

  “We’re not emperors,” Raff said. “Just plain folks. We want a plain Terry boy.”

  “So.”

  “The dealer ruffled limp shoulder plumes indifferently, his expression abruptly cold again. “If you want to rear inferior stock, I can sell you something cheap.”

  “Good. How much?” Raff rose, resting his hand on his credit coder.

  “Wait!” Bella cried. “I want to know what he means. What’s the . . . the other kind you was talking about?” She pulled Raff back into his chair as the slave returned with a tray bearing a clay pot and bellshaped glasses.

  The dealer placed spidery, plucked-chicken fingers together, waiting while the slave poured and withdrew. He cocked an eye at Bella.

  “As it happens, I am in a position to offer top price for free-hold citizenships.”

  “Are you crazy?” Raff started.

  “How’d we ever get back?”

  Bella picked up a glass and said, “Wait, Raff.” She made a great thing of sipping the brandy, making it a compliment.

  “Sell our citizenships!” Raff snorted. “It takes us for ignorant rubes. Bella.”

  The creature hunched on its stool, fragile feathers raised in a halo around its head, eyes on Bella now.

  “I happen, at this moment, to have in my tanks,” it said with impressive gravity, “a prime-quality fetus intended for the personal service of—a most high official. A magnificent blastophere, large, vigorous and of a superior intellectual potentiality.”

  “What’s wrong with it, this high official didn’t take delivery?” Raff asked bluntly.

  The round eyes blinked. “Alas, the Shah is . . . er . . . dead—together with his heirs and assigns. One of these annoying uprisings of the rabble. By great good luck, an agent of mine—But no matter. I lost two valuable servants in the acquisition of this prize, which now, frankly, must be transferred to a ratable artificial placenta, or be lost. I confide this in you, you see.”

  “This is just sales talk, Bella,” Raff said. “To build up the price.”

  “A rustic’s shrewdness is the merchant’s joy,” the dealer quoted sharply. It raised its head and shrilled for the slave again, chirped instructions. Raff and Bella waited. The slave returned, toiling under a small, glittering, stone-encrusted box. At a sign from the dealer, it handed the casket to Raff. He took it; his hands sagged under
the unexpected weight.

  “This golden incubator, set with diamonds, awaited the favored tot. Now heavy-footed bucolics haggle for his destiny. The price is three thousand credits—or two freehold citizenships.”

  “That’s twice the going black-market price,” Raff said weakly, overwhelmed by the box and what was in it.

  “You’re not bargaining for black-market goods now. I’m a ligitimate trader, licensed by the Sodomate.”

  “I’ll give you one citizenship,” Raff said. “Mine. I can earn another with a few years work.”

  The dealer snapped horny lips together. “I’d decant this jewel among lads into the hive sewers before I’d cut my price a demichit! The. descendant of kings deserves no less.”

  “Raff . . .” Bella said, appeal in her voice.

  “How do we know he’s telling the truth, Bella?”

  “I have a license to protect, outlander,” the tall creature said. “You think I’d risk my reputation for your paltry custom? The Shah paid fifty thousand Galactic credits in rhodium ingots!”

  “But if you don’t sell it quick—”

  “I’ve told you my price. Take it or leave it—and then get out.”

  “Well . . .” Raff hesitated.

  “We’ll take it,” Bella said.

  They moved through the noise of the plaza, Raff leading the way among hawkers’ stalls, Bella clutching a two-inch glass cylinder to her lean chest. Yellow dust swirled, stirred by a fitful desert wind. The second sun was low in a bronze-black sky.

  “We shouldn’t have spent all that credit,” Raff said. “How’re we going to get back, Bella?”

  “We’ll find a way,” Bella said. “But first, we got to find a Man doctor.”

  Raff halted. “Bella! You ain’t coming down sick?”

  “We got to have the baby implanted right away, Raff.”