The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction 8 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Alfred Bester

~ * ~

  "The what!" I had the sensation of running unexpectedly into a mad tangle of briars.

  "The trombone and the big bass drum," Dr. Curtis repeated.

  "Keeping perfect time and no doubt in perfect step, though you couldn't thump your feet convincingly six feet off the ground. Supposing, of course, you were a trombone with feet, which this wasn't."

  "Dr. Curtis," I grabbed a corner of his hunting coat. "Please, please? What happened? Tell me! I've got to know."

  He looked at me and sobered. "You are taking this seriously, aren't you?" he said wonderingly.

  I gulped and nodded.

  "Well, it was about five miles above the Half Circle Star Ranch, where the heavy pine growth begins. And so help me, a trombone and a bass drum marched in the air across the road, the bass drum marking the time—though come to think of it, the drumsticks just lay on top. I stopped the jeep and ran over to where they had disappeared. I couldn't see anything in the heavy growth there, but I swear I heard a faint Bronx cheer from the trombone. I have no doubt that the two of them were hiding behind a tree, snickering at me." He rubbed his hand across his fuzzy chin. "Maybe I'd better drink that coffee, cold or not."

  "'Dr. Curtis," I said urgently, "can you help me? Without waiting for questions? Can you take me out there? Right now?" I reached for my coat. Wordlessly he helped me on with it and opened the door for me. The day was gone and the sky was a clear aqua around the horizon, shading into rose where the sun had dropped behind the hills. It was only a matter of minutes before we were roaring up the hill to the junction. I shouted over the jolting rattle.

  "It's the Francher kid," I yelled. "I've got to find him and make him put them back before they find out."

  "Put who back where?" Dr. Curtis shouted into the sudden diminution of noise as we topped the rise, much to the astonishment of Mrs. Frisney, who was pattering across the intersection with her black umbrella protecting her from the early starshine.

  "It's too long to explain," I screamed as we accelerated down the highway. "But he must be stealing the whole orchestra because Mrs. McVey bought him a new suit, and I've got to make him take them back or they'll arrest him, then heaven help us all."

  "You mean the Francher kid had that bass drum and trombone?" he yelled.

  "Yes!" My chest was aching from the tension of speech. "And probably all the rest."

  I caught myself with barked knuckles as Dr. Curtis braked to a sudden stop.

  "Now look," he said, "let's get this straight. You're talking wilder than I am. Do you mean to say that that kid is swiping a whole orchestra?"

  "Yes, don't ask me how. I don't know how, but he can do it—" I grabbed his sleeve. "But he said you knew! The day you left on your trip, I mean, be said you knew someone who would know. We were waiting for you!"

  "Well, I'll be blowed!" he said in slow wonder. "Well, dang me!" He ran his hand over his face. "So now it's my turn!" He reached for the ignition key. "Gangway, Jemmy!" he shouted.

  "'Here I come with another! Yours or mine, Jemmy? Yours or mine?"

  ~ * ~

  It was as though his outlandish words had tripped a trigger. Suddenly all this strangeness, this out-of-stepness became a mad foolishness. Despairingly I wished I'd never seen Willow Creek or the Francher kid or a harmonica that danced alone or Twyla's tilted side glance, or Dr. Curtis or the white road dimming in the rapid coming of night. I huddled down in my coat, my eyes stinging with weary hopeless tears, and the only comfort I could find was in visualizing myself twisting my hated braces into rigid confetti and spattering the road with it.

  I roused as Dr. Curtis braked the jeep to a stop.

  "It was about there," he said, peering through the dusk.

  "It's mighty deserted up here—the raw end of isolation. The kid's probably scared by now and plenty willing to come home."

  "Not the Francher kid," I said. "He's not the run-of-the-mill type kid."

  "Oh, so!" Dr. Curtis said. "I'd forgotten."

  Then there it was. At first I thought it the evening wind in the pines, but it deepened and swelled and grew into a thunderous magnificent shaking chord—a whole orchestra giving tongue. Then, one by one, the instruments soloed, running their scales, displaying their intervals, parading their possibilities. Somewhere between the strings and woodwinds I eased out of the jeep.

  "You stay here," I half whispered. "I'll go find him. You wait."

  It was like walking through a rainstorm, the notes spattering all around me, the shrill lightning of the piccolos and the muttering thunder of the drums. There was no melody, only a child running gleefully through a candy store, snatching greedily at everything, gathering delight by the handful and throwing it away for the sheer pleasure of having enough to be able to throw it.

  I struggled up the rise above the road, forgetting in my preoccupation to be wary of unfamiliar territory in the half-dark. There they were, in the sand hollow beyond the rise—all the instruments ranged in orderly precise rows as though at a recital, each one wrapped in a sudden shadowy silence, broken only by the shivery giggle of the cymbals which hastily stilled themselves against the sand.

  "Who's there?" He was a rigid figure, poised atop a boulder, arms half lifted.

  "Francher," I said.

  "Oh." He slid through the air to me. "I'm not hiding any more," be said. "I'm going to be me all the time now."

  "Francher," I said bluntly, "you're a thief."

  He jerked in protest. "I'm not either—"

  "If this is being you, you're a thief. You stole these instruments."

  He groped for words, then burst out: "They stole my money! They stole all my music."

  " 'They'?" I asked. "'Francher, you can't lump people together and call them 'they.' Did I steal your money? Or Twyla—or Mrs. Frisney—or Rigo?"

  "Maybe you didn't put your hands on it," the Francher kid said. "But you stood around and let McVey take it."

  "That's a guilt humanity has shared since the beginning. Standing around and letting wrong things happen. But even Mrs. McVey felt she was helping you. She didn't sit down and decide to rob you. Some people have the idea that children don't have any exclusive possessions but what they have belongs to the adults who care for them. Mrs. McVey thinks that way. Which is quite a different thing from deliberately stealing from strangers. What about the owners of all these instruments? What have they done to deserve your ill will?"

  "They're people," he said stubbornly. "And I'm not going to be people any more." Slowly he lifted himself into the air and turned himself upside down. "See," he said, hanging above the hillside. "People can't do things like this."

  "No," I said. "But apparently whatever kind of creature you have decided to be can't keep his shirttails in either."

  Hastily he scrabbled his shirt back over his hare midriff and righted himself. There was an awkward silence in the shadowy hollow, then I asked:

  "What are you going to do about the instruments?"

  "Oh, they can have them back when I'm through with them—if they can find them," he said contemptuously. "I'm going to play them to pieces tonight." The trumpet jabbed brightly through the dusk and the violins shimmered a silver obbligato.

  "And every downbeat will say 'thief,'" I said. "And every roll of the drums will growl 'stolen.'"

  "I don't care, I don't care!" he almost yelled. " 'Thief' and 'stolen" are words for people and I'm not going to be people any more, I told you!"

  "What are you going to be?" I asked, leaning wearily against a tree trunk. "An animal?"

  "No sir." He was having trouble deciding what to do with his hands. "I'm going to be more than just a human."

  "Well, for a more-than-human this kind of behavior doesn't show very many smarts. If you're going to be more than human you have to be thoroughly a human first. If you're going to be better than a human you have to be the best a human can be, first—then go on from there. Being entirely different is no way to make a big impression on people. You have to be able to out
do them at their own game first and then go beyond them. It won't matter to them that you can fly like a bird unless you can walk straight like a man, first. To most people different is wrong. Oh, they'd probably say, "My goodness! How-wonderful!' when you first pulled some fancy trick, but—" I hesitated, wondering if I were being wise, "but they'd forget you pretty quick, just as they would any cheap carnival attraction."

  He jerked at my words, his fists clenched.

  "You're as bad as the rest." His words were tight and bitter.

  "You think I'm just a freak—"

  "I think you're an unhappy person, because you're not sure who you are or what you are, but you'll have a much worse time trying to make an identity for yourself if you tangle with the law."

  "The law doesn't apply to me," he said coldly. "Because I know who I am—"

  "Do you, Francher?" I asked softly. "Where did your mother come from? Why could she walk through the minds of others? Who are you, Francher? Are you going to cut yourself off from people before you even try to find out just what wonders you are capable of? Not these little sideshow deals, but maybe miracles that really count." I swallowed hard as I looked at his averted face, shadowy in the dusk. My own face was congealing from the cold wind that had risen, but he didn't even shiver in its iciness, though he had no jacket on. My lips moved stiffly.

  "Both of us know you could get away with this lawlessness, but you know as well as I do that if you take this first step you won't ever be able to untake it. And, how do we know, it might make it impossible for you to be accepted by your own kind—if you're right in saying there are others. Surely they're above common theft. And Dr. Curtis is due back from his hunting trip. So close to knowing—maybe—"I didn't know your mother, Francher, but I do know this is not the dream she had for you. This is not why she endured hunger and hiding, terror and panic places—"

  I turned and stumbled away from him, making my way back to the road. It was dark, horribly dark, around me and in me as I wailed soundlessly for this My Child. Somewhere before I got back Dr. Curtis was helping me. He got me back into the jeep and pried my frozen fingers from my crutches and warmed my hands between his broad-gloved palms.

  "He isn't of this world, you know," he said. "At least his parents or grandparents weren't. There are others like him. I've been hunting with some of them. He doesn't know, evidently, nor did his mother, but he can find his People. I wanted to tell you to help you persuade him—"

  I started to reach for my crutches, peering through the dark, then I relaxed. "No," I said with tingling lips. "It wouldn't be any good if he only responded to bribes. He has to decide now, with the scales weighted against him. He's got to push into his new world. He can't just slide in limply. You kill a chick if you help it hatch."

  I dabbled all the way home at tears for a My Child, lost in a wilderness I couldn't chart, bound in. a captivity from which I couldn't free him.

  Dr. Curtis saw me to the door of my room. He lifted my averted face and wiped it.

  "Don't worry," he said. "I promise you the Francher kid will be taken care of."

  "Yes," I said, closing my eyes against the nearness of his. "By the sheriff if they catch him. They'll discover the loss of the orchestra any minute now, if they haven't already."

  "You made him think," he said. "He wouldn't have stood still for all that if you hadn't."

  "Too late," I said. "A thought too late."

  ~ * ~

  Alone in my room I huddled on my bed, trying not to think of anything. I lay there until I was stiff with the cold, then I crept into my warm woolly robe up to my chin. I sat in the darkness there by the window, looking out at the lacy ghosts of the cottonwood trees, in the dim moonlight. How long would it be before some kindly soul would come blundering in to regale me with the latest about the Francher kid?

  I put my elbows on the window sill and leaned my face on my hands, the heels of my palms pressing against my eyes. "Oh, Francher My Child, My lonely lost Child—"

  "I'm not lost."

  I lifted a startled face. The voice was so soft. Maybe I had imagined...

  "No, I'm here." The Francher kid stepped out into the milky glow of the moon, moving with a strange new strength and assurance, quite divorced from his usual teen-age gangling.

  "Oh, Francher—" I couldn't let myself sob, but my voice caught on the last of his name.

  "It's okay," he said. "I took them all back."

  My shoulders ached as the tension ran out of them.

  "I didn't have time to get them all back in the hall but I stacked them carefully on the front porch." A glimmer of a smile crossed his face. "I guess they'll wonder how they got out there."

  "I'm so sorry about your money," I said awkwardly.

  He looked at me soberly. "I can save again. I'll get it yet. Someday I'll have my music. It doesn't have to be now."

  Suddenly a warm bubble seemed to be pressing up against my lungs. I felt excitement tingle clear out to my fingertips. I leaned across the sill. "Francher," I cried softly, "you have your music. Now. Remember the harmonica? Remember when you danced with Twyla? Oh, Francher. All sound is is vibration.

  "You can vibrate the air without an instrument. Remember the chord you played with the orchestra? Play it again, Francher!"' He looked at me blankly, and then it was as if a candle had been lighted behind his face. "Yes!" he cried. "Yes!"

  Softly—oh, softly—because miracles come that way, I heard the chord begin. It swelled richly, fully, softly, until the whole back yard vibrated to it—a whole orchestra crying out in a whisper in the pale moonlight.

  "But the tunes!" he cried, taking this miracle at one stride and leaping beyond it. "I don't know any of the tunes for an orchestra!"

  "There are books," I said. "Whole books of scores for symphonies and operas and—"

  "And when I know the instruments better!" Here was the eager alive voice of the-Francher-kid-who-should-be. "Anything I hear—" The back yard ripped raucously to a couple of bars of the latest rock 'n' roll, then blossomed softly to an "Adoramus Te" and skipped to "The Farmer in the Dell." "Then someday I'll make my own—" Tremulously a rappoor threaded through a melodic phrase and stilled itself.

  In the silence that followed the Francher kid looked at me, not at my face but deep inside me somewhere.

  "Miss Carolle!" I felt my eyes tingle to tears at his voice.

  "You've given me my music!" I could hear him swallow. "I want to give you something." My hand moved in protest, but he went on quickly, "Please come outside."

  "Like this? I'm in my robe and slippers."

  "They're warm enough. Here, I'll help you through the window."

  And before I knew it I was over the low sill and clinging dizzily to it from the outside.

  "My braces," I said, loathing the words with a horrible loathing. "My crutches."

  "No," the Francher kid said. "You don't need them. Walk across the yard, Miss Carolle, all alone."

  "I can't!" I cried through my shock. "Oh, Francher, don't tease me!"

  "Yes, you can. That's what I'm giving you. I can't mend you but I can give you that much. Walk."

  I clung frantically to the sill. Then I saw again Francher and Twyla spiraling down from the treetops, Francher upside down in the air with his midriff showing, Francher bouncing Balance Rock from field to field.

  I let go of the till. I took a step. And another, and another. I held my hands far out from my tides. Glorious freedom from clenched hands and aching elbows! Across the yard I went, every step in the milky moonlight a paean of praise. I turned at the fence and looked back. The Francher kid was crouched by the window in a tight huddle of concentration. I lifted onto tiptoe and half skipped, half ran back to the window, feeling the wind of my going lift my hair back from my cheeks. Oh, it was like a drink after thirst! Like food after famine! Like gates swinging open!

  I fell forward and caught at the window till. And cried out inarticulately as I felt the old bonds clamp down again, the old half-death s
eize hold of me. I crumpled to the ground beside the Francher kid. His tormented eyes looked into mine, his face pale and haggard. His forearm went up to wipe his sweat-drenched face. "I'm sorry," he panted. "That's all I can do now."

  My hands reached for him. There was a sudden movement, so quick and so close that I drew my foot back out of the way.

  I looked up, startled. Dr. Curtis and a shadowy someone else were standing over us. But the surprise of their being there was drowned in the sudden upsurge of wonderment.

  "It moved!" I cried. "My foot moved. Look! Look! It moved!" And I concentrated on it again—hard, hard! After laborious seconds my left big toe wiggled.

  My hysterical laugh was half a shout. "One toe is better than none!" I sobbed. "Isn't it, Dr, Curtis? Doesn't that mean that someday—that maybe—?"