Uncanny Tales

by Robert Sheckley

  “What happens if I eat it?”

  “It means I will still have some claim on you even in the land of the living. It means that you will return to hell.”

  “Return to hell?” Persephone said. “But I was planning to return and visit you anyway.”

  I shook my head. “You don’t know what you’ll do when you get back into the upper world with its light and air. Once you’re fully alive again, you’ll forget me. And you’ll wonder how you ever came to enjoy this gloomy palace with its dark courtyards and the river of forgetfulness always running by with the dead souls swimming just below its surface and the weeping willows murmuring just overhead. You’ll think to yourself, ‘He must have bewitched me! No one in his right mind goes for a holiday in hell’.”

  She smiled and touched my hand. “Maybe you have bewitched me. I’m quite content here in hell.”

  “Then eat the pomegranate seed,” I told her.

  She did not move. Her gaze was far away. She said after a while, “Achilles and Helen asked us over this evening for dinner. You must make my apologies.”

  We freeze on Hades and Persephone, and then we cut away from them, leave the river bank, track across green rolling meadows with topiary sculpture that makes the place look like a funeral home or a French park, and we continue to the palace of the dead. From the middle distance it’s like a small city. The palace is the composite of many palace- shaped buildings. They are all crowded together, and some are a dozen levels high. You see all sorts of shapes in these buildings made up of many other buildings that make up the city of the dead. There are domes of all sorts, and spires, and many shapes, both curved and cubical. Binding them all together are narrow roadways from many different levels. From many of the buildings you can walk out a window on an upper floor and cross directly, or by a little catwalk, to the next building.

  The lighting of the city of the dead is like moonlight. Or like late afternoon sunlight in winter as seen from behind a bank of clouds. It is not night, it is not day. Twilight is the eternal hour in the city of the dead.

  There’s not a lot to do around here. But if you’re bored, you can watch the people step out their windows and take to the catwalks to cross from one part of the city to another. There are wires that connect everything to everything else here, and some people use them as shortcuts, tiptoeing along the highwires to get from place to place. They do this clumsily, because few of the dead, just as few of the living, have any acrobatic ability. They use the catwalks and highwires anyway, no one fears falling. When you fall from a catwalk in the city of the dead, you tumble down to the ground slowly, slowly, like a shadow falling. If you happen to bounce off a cornice or two, or graze yourself on a gargoyle, or catch yourself on a sharp projecting bit of roof, it is no matter. You can’t hurt yourself, you’re already dead. You can’t feel any pain. Pain is forbidden. That is because pleasure is forbidden. Or unlikely, almost the same thing.

  Where there is no pleasure, there’s no pain. Some might think that a good tradeoff. The dead in the palace of the dead don’t think so. Being unable to hurt yourself just makes the boredom that much more excruciating. There are people in hell who cut their throats every evening. It doesn’t do anything. It’s just a gesture. But gestures are important when you don’t have anything else, and all you have in hell are gestures. Some make gestures of pain, and cut their own throats. Others step out the windows and take to the catwalks and high wires and go visiting. Is visiting a pleasure? Not in hell. It is a gesture. The people of hell don’t despise gestures. After you’re dead, gesture is all that’s left.

  We zoom through a doorway, segue down a corridor, slither through a doorway, do the whole thing several times, and then we come to a stop in a large room. Achilles is sitting in a lyre-backed chair. We know it is him because affixed to his back there is a bronze plaque reading ACHILLES.

  The matter of easy identification has been found necessary in hell, where unnecessary confusion is frowned upon. It is more than enough work just to be dead, without wondering who the people all around you are. This plaque system is for the benefit, not just of the inhabitants, but for future audiences which will look at the stories of people in this place on films made by us, the people who will either go back in time to record them, or build them up as imaginative constructs in the computer that can build anything that can be imagined. And looking just beyond that, we foresee a time when secondary and tertiary images will be capable of generation, based not only on primary sources but also people’s different versions of those primary sources; and while this might not strictly be the only kind of imagination—the jury’s out on that one—it certainly is one of the possible sorts, a sort of synthesis manqué so the least we can do is keep everyone easily identifiable.

  Back in the real world, of course, people are rarely found just sitting in a chair, not reading, not watching TV, not even thinking. But these are not realistic stories in that the sort of detail one would like—the incomes of the protagonists, their main loves and hates, their family tree for three generations—is unfortunately missing. But Achilles does in fact happen to be just sitting as we turn our attention to him. He spends a lot of time doing this. The problem of doing nothing is one of the greatest problems in hell, one which people have put a lot of attention into but not solved yet. Achilles certainly has not solved it. He is just sitting in his chair, staring into the middle distance.

  Helen of Troy enters from the right.

  It’s a mistake to try to describe or even photograph the features of someone as famous, as numinous, as Helen of Troy, because her features exist mostly in dreams, where they are made up of the images generated by all the men who have ever dreamed of her, or at least a significant cross-section thereof, because the computer only needs a cross-section of data, not all of it. Since we don’t use the dreams of everyone who ever dreamed of Helen, her reproduced image is a little blurred around the nose, though I think we captured her general shape quite nicely. Suffice it to say she’s a good-looking dame of everyone’s predilection, and she wears her bronze plaque with distinction, so you think, looking at her, she walks like she’s Helen of Troy, and that of course is who she is. She wears a simple frock made up of silken ambiguities, and around her head is a golden lie.

  “Hello, Achilles,” she says. “I’m just back from the marketplace. Boy, have I got a story to tell you.”

  Achilles had been staring off into the middle distance, paying no attention to his wife, Helen of Troy. But on hearing her words, he turned his head.

  “How could you hear anything? There’s never any news around here. What could ever happen in hell? Just people’s opinions, that’s all you get in hell. So what could you have heard in the marketplace? I suppose the philosophers have figured out another proof for the possibility or the impossibility of this place existing? Frankly, I couldn’t care less. It’s a matter of minor importance, whether this place exists or not. But even if they have a proof about it one way or the other, it is still hardly news.”

  “Do stop making speeches,” Helen said. “It isn’t your turn. Despite your hypothesizing, I do happen to have real and incontestable news of a timely and late-breaking nature. That gives me the right, not only to speak, but also to embroider images and use words in strange and unlikely ways. For it is well known that matters must never be spoken of directly, and that one must not take refuge in the subterfuge which the Heisenbergian position forces on us.”

  “If you got some news,” Achilles said brutally, “what is it?”

  “That approach is much too simple, my darling,” Helen said. “Once the bearer of news has discharged her novelty, it is all over, she has no more news to impart, she is forced to return to her original rather static position, Unappreciated Love Object. Me. Can you fancy that? No, don’t be too quick, my friend, I need to get some value out of the fact that I might even carry news, without being forced prematurely to divulge it.”

  “You run a fine line,” Achilles said, “since what y
ou mean is that you carry the imputation that you carry news, rather than the news itself. And an imputation is of much less value than the fact it imputes toward.”

  “What I have heard is weighty enough,” Helen said, “for me to interrupt you and to tell you that what I have to tell is even now taking place, but out of your sight, my dear Achilles. Now, wouldn’t you like to know what is happening?”

  The scene froze. The camera or whatever it was dissolved into a light show. This was pleasurable in its own right, and mildly hypnotic as well. The dead have found that everything goes better when you’re mildly hypnotized. In fact, there are some who say that death itself is but a state of mild hypnosis, or, to be more specific, that there is no such thing as death, since what we call death is merely a pathological hypnotic state from which we cannot waken.

  Be that as it may, the camera was powered through a cable that trailed out through the window, from which it hung in a great catenary loop so that, considering it as a roadway, we could travel along the curve, and see, at the top, a little house, under which the stream that is the cable flows. In the several rooms of this house above the torrent, there are various activities going on. We make a choice, go through the nearest door, and we see that we are in some sort of a control room. There’s a man sitting there. Hello, it’s me! I look closer to see what I am doing.

  I see that I am engaged in some extraordinary work involving symbols and dials and buttons. By manipulating the controls, I can put together all the inputs from all of the selves who are signaling to me through the many threads that connect this place to everywhere else. It forms a beautiful tapestry. Or would if I could ever get it all together. Actually, I don’t quite have it down yet. Or, even more likely, I have no idea what to do with it after I get it all together. Assuming I ever do.

  I decide that I’ll return to this place at some other time. There’s a lot of stuff here that interests me. Not necessarily you, the audience for whom I’m spinning this tale. Why should you care what happens to me? But maybe you do, since this is likely your problem too, since everybody is everybody else. But it is time to return to Achilles and Helen.

  “I’ll hold it back no longer,” Helen said. “For the sake of the story I’ll put aside the byways of statement and tell it to you forthright. The fact is, Achilles, someone is leaving hell today.”

  Achilles was stunned, but not by Helen’s statement. In fact he barely registered Helen’s statement, astounding though it was. Another realization had come to him, and its even more monstrous implications had flooded his mind and was presently using up all referential emotion. The fact of the matter was, Achilles suddenly saw that he was a provisional figure, and it really blew him out. Achilles had always considered himself immortal, without even thinking too much about it, and to realize now, on the basis of one tightly packed fragment of information that had come careening out of the god knows where and impacted in his mind, to realize that the collection of circumstances that brought him to life today in the mind of the computer might not come to pass again soon, or perhaps even ever, well, it was really a little much.

  Provisional! It was an astounding thought, and Achilles forced himself to contemplate it without shrinking. Provisional meant that he was a manipulable concept in someone else’s mind, and it meant that he wasn’t even important enough to that mind to ensure securing him for another appearance at a later date. Because the indications were clear, this entity who was doing this dreaming was about to shut down, go off line, take itself out of circuit, shift its attention-energy elsewhere, attend to something else. While that was going on, Achilles would be literally nowhere until he was brought back into this mind again. And when was that likely to happen? Perhaps never. Because Achilles realized (and it was a hell of a thing to become aware of) that he was as likely as not never to be thought of again, and certainly not in this context, unless he could do something, make some sort of impression on the entity dreaming him so that the entity, after taking care of his own unimaginable concerns, would call him up again rather than some other character. Some quick research convinced Achilles that this was the first time the computer had ever conjured him up, and the whole damned construct was likely to crumble into dream-dust unless the computer did the hard work necessary to give the damn thing some zing so that he would call the city of the dead back into existence on subsequent occasions.

  But how likely was that? Achilles ground his teeth in frustration. He was going to have to try to bribe the computer. What present could he make to bribe the Computer-dreamer who was the one who had synthesized all the available views of Achilles that Achilles was now cognating? How could he convince him the errant and light-minded dreamer that he, Achilles, was worth coming back for?

  “I’ll put it to you as directly as I can,” Achilles said. “I’m trying out for Voice. I’m not asking for an exclusive. I want to be a Viewpoint. And I know you’re looking for one. I’m also trying to sell mood. I’m trying to talk you into making the city of the dead a regular stop on your mental itinerary. I know you’ve been looking for a place like this.”

  The computer didn’t answer.

  Achilles said in a soothing voice, “I know what you’re scared of. That you’ll make this commitment and then find out that this concept is not interesting. That it will not solve, all by itself, the problems of creativity and recombination and energy. That’s it, isn’t it? I hail your caution, applaud your uncertainty. That will make it all the stronger when you choose the right one, this one. Helen, why don’t you say a few words?”

  Helen smiled into the camera, and said, in low thrilling tones, “I think we can accommodate you very nicely. We’re stage people, you see, Achilles and I, and we perform best when we’re set into motion. We’re not your tight-lipped modern people. If it’s words you want, we have a lot of them for you. Daring words, lying words, but not boring words. Let us entertain you with the story of your life.”

  Achilles touched her shoulder. “Well said, Helen.” And now he turns his face directly to us. We blink, unsure what to do, staring into the blinding beauty of Achilles’ face. Because this Achilles is the Achilles of infinite thought over the possibility of great deeds in the world. Achilles also represents the hopelessness of falling in love with the wrong woman. Looking at him we realize, through a swift glance at the sidebar, that Briseis, the love of his life, isn’t even represented in this story, her whereabouts are unknown, and Achilles has been paired with Helen for purely symbolic reasons, two troupers acting out a part. “We’ve done what we could,” Achilles said. “Now tell me what you learned in the marketplace.”

  “Hades, King of Hell, has gone out of the city and across the little streams that surround hell. He has gone to the near shore of the Styx, where there is a meadow suitable for a picnic. But he does not picnic there, Hades, though he has caused a feast to be laid for his guest, Persephone.”

  “Persephone? Hades walks with Persephone, the Queen?”

  “Of course. Who else would he walk with? You know how besotted he is of her.”

  “That’s because she’s living,” Achilles said. “People are much more attractive when they’re living. But she is a lovely woman in her own regard, and of course a first-class nature myth of considerable antiquity. Being a very old myth gives a girl a certain panache, don’t you think?”

  “Of course I do,” Helen said. “You think being Helen of Troy is jello? Nobody knows about Persephone any more. But everybody knows Helen.”

  “I know you’re wonderful,” Achilles said soothingly, because he didn’t want to get her started. He wanted to hear her news, wanted to know what was going on with Hades, however, because Hades’ condition was of importance to Achilles because he figured if he could put some pressure on Hades there might be a way to get out of this place. Because Achilles had by no means accustomed himself to being dead. At least not all of the time.

  So if you’re Achilles you attend to reality, even if reality is just being dead. But what you want is
this nice interior place protected from bill collectors, jealous lovers, bailiffs, lawyers, wives and ex-wives, husbands and children in all degrees of alienation, and all the rest of the people who live out there, just outside your head, in a world of their own. They’re a little much, aren’t they, other people? That’s why you like to come here, to the city of the dead. That’s why we’re trying to convince you, or rather, demonstrate to you, that our city of the dead is one hell of a good construct and is worthy of your most careful attention. We’ll come back to this from time to time. The important thing to remember is this: we are the party of freedom.

  We cut back to Hades. Me.

  Persephone was saying, “When Achilles hears about this, he’ll go crazy. He wants like crazy to get out of hell.”

  “Achilles thinks he had a lot more fun when he was alive than was actually the case. He makes too much over living.”

  “Tell me the truth,” Persephone asked me. “Is being alive really that good?”

  I shrugged. “Achilles thinks so. But that’s just one dead man’s opinion.”

  Persephone and I were sitting together beside a black poplar and close to an enormous weeping willow, its branches trailing in the black waters of Lethe which flowed silently past us with a slight gurgle, like a dead man’s gasp. You could see low gray shapes across on the far shore but it was not possible to make out what they were. I was strangely happy. Being with Persephone always brought up that mood in me. They made hell seem brighter. Although gray clouds forever overhung this place, they seemed majestical and inspiring today rather than ominous and sad. I was happy in hell. Which was lucky because I was king. Or, I should say I was almost happy and I was virtually king.

  I looked at Persephone’s hands. The one that held the pomegranate seed was on the other side, away from me. I couldn’t see if she had taken the seed or not. I supposed not.

  It seemed almost as if she had forgotten about it. But how could she have forgotten? The weight of all that stagecraft pressed on my soul. I knew something was about to happen.