The Very Best of F & SF v1

by Gordon Van Gelder (ed)

  11

  Light converted to energy, thus:

  In the fortieth year of his five hundredth incarnation, all-unknowing of the eons of which he had been part, the man found himself wandering in a terrible dry place under a thin, flat burning disc of sun. He was a Berber tribesman who had never considered shadows save to relish them when they provided shade. The shadow came to him, sweeping down across the sands like the khamsin of Egypt, the simoom of Asia Minor, the harmattan, all of which he had known in his various lives, none of which he remembered. The shadow came over him like the sirocco.

  The shadow stole the breath from his lungs and the man’s eyes rolled up in his head. He fell to the ground and the shadow took him down and down, through the sands, into the Earth.

  Mother Earth.

  She lived, this world of trees and rivers and rocks with deep stone thoughts. She breathed, had feelings, dreamed dreams, gave birth, laughed, and grew contemplative for millennia. This great creature swimming in the sea of space.

  What a wonder, thought the man, for he had never understood that the Earth was his mother, before this. He had never understood, before this, that the Earth had a life of its own, at once a part of mankind and quite separate from mankind. A mother with a life of her own.

  Dira, Snake, shadow... took the man down and let the spark of light change itself to energy as the man became one with the Earth. His flesh melted and became quiet, cool soil. His eyes glowed with the light that shines in the darkest centers of the planet and he saw the way the mother cared for her young: the worms, the roots of plants, the rivers that cascaded for miles over great cliffs in enormous caverns, the bark of trees. He was taken once more to the bosom of that great Earth mother, and understood the joy of her life.

  Remember this, Dira said to the man.

  What a wonder, the man thought...

  ...and was returned to the sands of the desert, with no remembrance of having slept with, loved, enjoyed the body of his natural mother.

  12

  They camped at the base of the mountain, in a greenglass cave; not deep but angled sharply so the blown pumice could not reach them. They put Nathan Stack’s stone in a fault in the cave’s floor, and the heat spread quickly, warming them. The shadow thing with its triangular head sank back in shadow and closed its eye and sent its hunting instinct out for food. A shriek came back on the wind.

  Much later, when Nathan Stack had eaten, when he was reasonably content and well fed, he stared into the shadows and spoke to the creature sitting there.

  “How long was I down there... how long was the sleep?”

  The shadow thing spoke in whispers. A quarter of a million years.

  Stack did not reply. The figure was beyond belief. The shadow creature seemed to understand.

  In the life of a world, no time at all.

  Nathan Stack was a man who could make accommodations. He smiled quickly and said, “I must have been tired.”

  The shadow did not respond.

  “I don’t understand very much of this. It’s pretty damned frightening. To die, then to wake up... here. Like this.”

  You did not die. You were taken, put down there. By the end you will understand everything, I promise you.

  “Who put me down there?”

  I did. I came and found you when the time was right, and I put you down there.

  “Am I still Nathan Stack?”

  If you wish.

  “But am I Nathan Stack?”

  You always were. You had many other names, many other bodies, but the spark was always yours. Stack seemed about to speak, and the shadow creature added, You were always on your way to being who you are.

  “But what am I? Am I still Nathan Stack, dammit?”

  If you wish.

  “Listen: you don’t seem too sure about that. You came and got me, I mean, I woke up and there you were. Now who should know better than you what my name is?”

  You have had many names in many times. Nathan Stack is merely the one you remember. You had a very different name long ago, at the start, when I first came to you.

  Stack was afraid of the answer, but he asked, “What was my name then?”

  Ish-lilith. Husband of Lilith. Do you remember her?

  Stack thought, tried to open himself to the past, but it was as unfathomable as the quarter of a million years through which he had slept in the crypt.

  “No. But there were other women, in other times.”

  Many. There was one who replaced Lilith.

  “I don’t remember.”

  Her name... does not matter. But when the mad one took Lilith from you and replaced her with the other... then I knew it would end like this. The Deathbird.

  “I don’t mean to be stupid, but I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

  Before it ends, you will understand everything.

  “You said that before.” Stack paused, stared at the shadow creature for a long time only moments long, then, “What was your name?”

  Before I met you my name was Dira.

  He said it in his native tongue. Stack could not pronounce it.

  “Before you met me. What is it now?”

  Snake.

  Something slithered past the mouth of the cave. It did not stop, but it called out with voice of moist mud sucking down into a quagmire.

  “Why did you put me down there? Why did you come to me in the first place? What spark? Why can’t I remember these other lives or who I was? What do you want from me?”

  You should sleep. It will be a long climb. And cold.

  “I slept for two hundred and fifty thousand years, I’m hardly tired,” Stack said. “Why did you pick me?”

  Later. Now sleep. Sleep has other uses.

  Darkness deepened around Snake, seeped out around the cave, and Nathan Stack lay down near the warming-stone, and the darkness took him.

  13

  SUPPLEMENTARY READING

  This is an essay by a writer. It is clearly an appeal to the emotions. As you read it, ask yourself how it applies to the subject under discussion. What is the writer trying to say? Does he succeed in making his point? Does this essay cast light on the point of the subject under discussion? After you have read this essay, using the reverse side of your test paper, write your own essay (500 words or less) on the loss of a loved one. If you have never lost a loved one, fake it.

  AHBHU

  Yesterday my dog died. For eleven years Ahbhu was my closest friend. He was responsible for my writing a story about a boy and his dog that many people have read. The story was made into a successful movie. The dog in the movie looked a lot like Ahbhu. He was not a pet, he was a person. It was impossible to anthropomorphize him, he wouldn’t stand for it. But he was so much his own kind of creature, he had such a strongly formed personality, he was so determined to share his life with only those he chose, that it was also impossible to think of him as simply a dog. Apart from those canine characteristics into which he was locked by his genes, he comported himself like one of a kind.

  We met when I came to him at the West Los Angeles Animal Shelter. I’d wanted a dog because I was lonely and I’d remembered when I was a little boy how my dog had been a friend when I had no other friends. One summer I went away to camp and when I returned I found a rotten old neighbor lady from up the street had had my dog picked up and gassed while my father was at work. I crept into the woman’s backyard that night and found a rug hanging on the clothesline. The rug beater was hanging from a post. I stole it and buried it.

  At the Animal Shelter there was a man in line ahead of me. He had brought in a puppy only a few weeks old. A Puli, a Hungarian sheep dog: it was a sad-looking little thing. He had too many in the litter and had brought in this one either to be taken by someone else or to be put to sleep. They took the dog inside and the man behind the counter called my turn. I told him I wanted a dog and he took me back inside to walk down the line of cages.

  In one of the cages, the little Pul
i that had just been brought in was being assaulted by three larger dogs that had been earlier tenants. He was a little thing, and he was on the bottom, getting the stuffing knocked out of him. He was struggling mightily.

  “Get him out of there!” I yelled. I’ll take him, I’ll take him. get him out of there!”

  He cost two dollars. It was the best two bucks I ever spent.

  Driving home with him, he was lying on the other side of the front seat, staring at me. I had had a vague idea what I’d name a pet, but as I stared at him, and he stared back at me, I suddenly was put in mind of the scene in Alexander Korda’s 1939 film The Thief of Bagdad, where the evil vizier, played by Conrad Veidt, had changed Ahbhu, the little thief, played by Sabu, into a dog. The film had superimposed the human over the canine face for a moment, so there was an extraordinary look of intelligence in the face of the dog. The little Puli was looking at me with that same expression. “Ahbhu. I said.

  He didn’t react to the name, but then he couldn’t have cared less. But that was his name, from that time on.

  No one who ever came into my house was unaffected by him. When he sensed someone with good vibrations, he was right there, lying at their feet. He loved to he scratched, and despite years of admonitions he refused to stop begging for scraps at the table, because he had found most of the people who came to dinner at my house were patsies unable to escape his woebegone Jackie-Coogan-as-the-Kid look.

  But he was a certain barometer of bums, as well. On any number of occasions when I found someone I liked, and Ahbhu would have nothing to do with him or her, it always turned out the person was a wrongo. I took to noting his attitude toward newcomers, and I must admit it influenced my own reactions. I was always wary of someone Ahbhu shunned.

  Women with whom I had had unsatisfactory affairs would nonetheless return to the house from time to time—to visit the dog. He had an intimate circle of friends, many of whom had nothing to do with me, and numbering among their company some of the most beautiful actresses in Hollywood. One exquisite lady used to send her driver to pick him up for Sunday afternoon romps at the beach.

  I never asked him what happened on those occasions. He didn’t talk.

  Last year he started going downhill, though I didn’t realize it because he maintained the manner of a puppy almost to the end. But he began sleeping too much, and he couldn’t hold down his food—not even the Hungarian meals prepared for him by the Magyars who lived up the street. And it became apparent to me something was wrong with him when he got scared during the big Los Angeles earthquake last year. Ahbhu wasn’t afraid of anything. He attacked the Pacific Ocean and walked tall around vicious cats. But the quake terrified him and he jumped up in my bed and threw his forelegs around my neck. I was very nearly the only victim of the earthquake to die from animal strangulation.

  He was in and out of the veterinarian’s shop all through the early part of this year, and the idiot always said it was his diet.

  Then one Sunday when he was out in the backyard, I found him lying at the foot of the stairs, covered with mud, vomiting so heavily all he could bring up was bile. He was matted with his own refuse and he was trying desperately to dig his nose into the earth for coolness. He was barely breathing. I took him to a different vet.

  At first they thought it was just old age... that they could pull him through.

  But finally they took X-rays and saw the cancer had taken hold in his stomach and liver.

  I put off the day as much as I could. Somehow I just couldn’t conceive of a world that didn’t have him in it. But yesterday I went to the vet’s office and signed the euthanasia papers.

  “I’d like to spend a little time with him. Before.” I said.

  They brought him in and put him on the stainless steel examination table. He had grown so thin. He’d always had a pot-belly, and it was gone. The muscles in his hind legs were weak, flaccid. He came to me and put his head into the hollow of my armpit. He was trembling violently. I lifted his head and he looked at me with that comic face I’d always thought made him look like Lawrence Talbot, the Wolf Man. He knew. Sharp as hell, right up to the end, hey old friend? He knew, and he was scared. He trembled all the way down to his spiderweb legs. This bouncing ball of hair that, when lying on a dark carpet, could be taken for a sheepskin rug, with no way to tell at which end head and which end tail. So thin. Shaking, knowing what was going to happen to him. But still a puppy.

  I cried, and my eyes closed as my nose swelled with the crying, and he buried his head in my arms because we hadn’t done much crying at one another. I was ashamed of myself, not to be taking it as well as he was.

  “I got to, pup, because you’re in pain and you can’t eat. I got to. But he didn’t want to know that.

  The vet came in, then. He was a nice guy and he asked me if I wanted to go away and just let it be done.

  Then Ahbhu came up out of there and looked at me.

  There is a scene in Kazan’s and Steinbeck’s Vina Zapata where a close friend of Zapata’s, Brando’s, has been condemned for conspiring with the federales. A friend that had been with Zapata since the mountains, since the revolución had begun. And they come to the hut to take him to the firing squad, and Brando starts out, and his friend stops him with a hand on his arm, and he says to him with great friendship, “Emiliano, do it yourself.”

  Ahbhu looked at me and I know he was just a dog, but if he could have spoken with human tongue he could not have said more eloquently than he did with a look, don’t leave me with strangers.

  So I held him as they laid him down and the vet slipped the lanyard up around his right foreleg and drew it tight to bulge the vein, and I held his head and he turned it away from me as the needle went in. It was impossible to tell the moment he passed over from life to death. He simply laid his head on my hand, his eyes fluttered shut and he was gone.

  I wrapped him in a sheet with the help of the vet and I drove home with Ahbhu on the seat beside me, just the way we had come home eleven years before. I took him out in the backyard and began digging his grave. I dug for hours, crying and mumbling to myself, talking to him in the sheet. It was a very neat, rectangular grave with smooth sides and all the loose dirt scooped out by hand.

  I laid him down in the hole and he was so tiny in there for a dog who had seemed to be so big in life, so furry, so funny. And I covered him over and when the hole was packed full of dirt, I replaced the neat divot of grass I’d scalped off at the start. And that was all.

  But I couldn’t send him to strangers.

  THE END

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. Is there any significance to the reversal of the word god being dog? If so, what?

  2. Does the writer try to impart human qualities to a nonhuman creature? Why? Discuss anthropomorphism in the light of the phrase, “Thou art God.”

  3. Discuss the love the writer shows in this essay. Compare and contrast it with other forms of love: the love of a man for a woman, a mother for a child, a son for a mother, a botanist for plants, an ecologist for the Earth.

  14

  In his sleep, Nathan Stack talked.

  “Why did you pick me? Why me... ?”

  15

  Like the Earth, the Mother was in pain.

  The great house was very quiet. The doctor had left, and the relatives had gone into town for dinner. He sat by the side of her bed and stared down at her. She looked gray and old and crumpled; her skin was a powdery, ashy hue of moth-dust. He was crying softly.

  He felt her hand on his knee, and looked up to see her staring at him. “You weren’t supposed to catch me,” he said.

  “I’d be disappointed if I hadn’t,” she said. Her voice was very thin, very smooth.

  “How is it?”

  “It hurts. Ben didn’t dope me too well.”

  He bit his lower lip. The doctor had used massive doses, but the pain was more massive. She gave little starts as tremors of sudden agony hit her. Impacts. He watched the life leaking ou
t of her eyes.

  “How is your sister taking it?”

  He shrugged. “You know Charlene. She’s sorry, but it’s all pretty intellectual to her.”

  His mother let a tiny ripple of a smile move her lips. “It’s a terrible thing to say, Nathan, but your sister isn’t the most likable woman in the world. I’m glad you’re here.” She paused, thinking, then added, “It’s just possible your father and I missed something from the gene pool. Charlene isn’t whole.”

  “Can I get you something? A drink of water?”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  He looked at the ampoule of narcotic painkiller. The syringe lay mechanical and still on the clean towel beside it. He felt her eyes on him. She knew what he was thinking. He looked away.

  “I would kill for a cigarette,” she said.

  He laughed. At sixty-five, both legs gone, what remained of her left side paralyzed, the cancer spreading like deadly jelly toward her heart, she was still the matriarch. “You can’t have a cigarette, so forget it.”

  “Then why don’t you use that hypo and let me out of here.”

  “Shut up, Mother.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Nathan. It’s hours if I’m lucky. Months if I’m not. We’ve had this conversation before. You know I always win.”

  “Did I ever tell you you were a bitchy old lady?”

  “Many times, but I love you anyhow.”

  He got up and walked to the wall. He could not walk through it, so he went around the inside of the room.

  “You can’t get away from it.”

  “Mother, Jesus! Please!”

  “All right. Let’s talk about the business.”

  “I couldn’t care less about the business right now.”

  “Then what should we talk about? The lofty uses to which an old lady can put her last moments?”