Uncanny Tales

by Robert Sheckley

  “I understand,” Elia said. “But do you think that now, especially in light of you having killed her, that her feelings for you will be the same?”

  “I am sure of it. If she had killed me, I would forgive her and continue to love her. I can expect no less of her.”

  “Your love is very noble,” Elia said. “But what about this Rodgers? Will not his being there prove an impediment?”

  “An unimportant one,” Edwards said. “I killed him once. If necessary, I’ll do it again. Nothing will stand in the way of my love!”

  “I think I understand it all now,” Elia said.

  Edwards got to his feet. He was a very large man. The expression on his face was not pleasant as he said, “You are going to put me into the mirror, aren’t you?”

  “There is no doubt of that,” Elia said. “There is merely the matter of payment to take care of first.”

  Edwards pulled out his billfold and began to lay out large denomination bills in Alcenor currency. After a while, Elia held up her hand. “That is enough.”

  “I can give more.”

  “No. This is quite enough. We will put you into the mirror this evening, after I have made a few final arrangements.”

  “You won’t disappoint me now?” Edwards said.

  “You will not be disappointed.”

  That evening, in front of the mirror, Edwards followed Elia’s instructions and felt his body collapse behind him. He had a moment of panic as his life seemed to slide away. Then he was in the mirror.

  The first thing he noted was that he still seemed to be in his body. He grasped his forearm. He could feel himself, he was solid, real. Perhaps he was only an image now, but to himself and to other images he was real. He looked around. He remembered this room. It was the room in which he had seen Elena for the last time, back on Earth. And now he would see her again. He turned quickly—he had caught a glimpse of someone—Elena! Yes, it was her!

  She was standing in a mirrored doorway, and she was smiling at him.

  “Elena, darling,” he said. “I’m so sorry I killed you. Believe me, it won’t happen again.”

  She was still smiling, but she didn’t answer. He had never seen her look so beautiful. He walked toward her. There she was, just inside a mirrored doorway. He passed through the doorway himself. “Elena?”

  She was just a little ahead of him. He passed through another doorway, and another beyond that. There seemed to be a lot of doorways around here, and standing in each of them was Elena, smiling at him.

  “Playing games with me?” he asked. “Never mind, there are a lot of doors here, but I have a lot of time. I will find you, my darling, I promise you that.” He moved on, following Elena’s image, into the deeper complications of the maze.

  Afterwards, Lobo asked Elia how she knew Edwards would go into the mirror maze, the small mirrored box with its endless reflected passageways that she had put into view on a small table behind Edwards.

  “I baited it,” Elia said. “With this.” She showed him a small mirror. Lobo looked at the image of a beautiful young girl.

  “She was younger then,” Elia said. “This image must be from before she met Edwards. I pulled this from the mirror.”

  “You put that image in the maze?”

  “Precisely. I couldn’t leave Edwards in the mirror to terrorize those two young people.”

  Lobo considered, watching the tiny figure of Edwards moving through the mirrored rooms. “Can he ever get out?”

  Elia shook her head. “A true mirror maze has an entrance but no exit.”

  Lobo whistled softly to himself. “So he is to wander there forever.”

  “Or until something finds him.”

  Lobo looked at her quizzically.

  “Mirror mazes are uncanny places. They can generate the unexpected. But even wandering in a maze cannot go on forever.”

  “But what if Elena and the other man go into the maze themselves?”

  “Against some eventualities there is no prevention. If either or both of them go into the maze, we can only say they will get what is coming to them.”

  “You play rough,” Lobo said, a note of admiration in his voice.

  “Rough but fair. And now, my young friend, it is time to split the money.”

  Sightseeing, 2179

  In this story I did something I have long wanted to do—wrote a story about Venice while in Venice. I wrote it in longhand, on the deck of a vaporetto. I would have thought that the sight of those ancient buildings unwinding—each building different, since they were built in an age before men believed that all buildings should look the same—would have called up their own particular line of thought. I had no such thought when I wrote the story. Maybe I’ll write another Venice story one of these days. Maybe I’ll ride a vaporetto again3 and see what story comes out of it. Meanwhile, here’s this one.

  Well-meaning friends had advised K to exercise caution on this trip to Venice. Considering the fragile state of his health, it would require the utmost caution on his part to come out of this all right. In fact, considering the inevitable strain of the journey and the dislocations attendant on any holiday in foreign parts, and also adding in the constant temptation to augment his mind receptivity in order to get the most out of the experience, it would be best not to go to Venice at all, not to leave Brooklyn, where he had immediate access to the finest medical treatment. To stay at home was the only way of playing it safe. And after all, he had visited Venice once, many years ago. It was natural to want to repeat a peak experience. But he did have his health to consider.

  Nor would he necessarily lose by staying home. His friend Mortimer Gould had offered him exclusive access to Gould’s own memories of Venice, which he had registered as recently as last year. Gould’s memories were fresh, and he had spent two weeks in the city and had seen everything. K could connect to these memories in the comfort of his own home, or even in a hospital setting, if that seemed the wise thing to do, and all this at his leisure, with plenty of time for breaks, refreshments, naps, even for professional moment-to-moment monitoring of his state of health.

  K had thanked Gould courteously, but had insisted on going to Venice himself, in his own failing body. He knew it might be the last time, and he was determined to relive his own memories while he still had the chance, to restimulate them with one more look at the real thing, one final visit to a dearly loved city. This had become urgent to him as his state of health declined and the time he had left to live grew increasingly uncertain.

  And so he had followed his own decision and taken the flight to Marco Polo airport, and now he was on the Grand Canal of Venice in a water bus, a vaporetto, prepared to store in his memories enough to last whatever time he had left, store them and replay them in his small apartment on Stone Street in Brooklyn.

  But would he ever get back to Brooklyn? That seemed in some doubt, though he tried to assure himself otherwise. But in any event, what did it matter? Memories were not just for the sake of the replaying. These memories, which he was stimulating and re-enhancing, were the closest he could come to recapturing something infinitely precious but unnamable, indefinable. And that was as it should be, because the essence of life was not to be won like a prize in a shooting gallery.

  It was August of the year 2179. The life of individuals and of nations was the best it had ever been. Major wars were a thing of the past. Even minor conflicts nowadays were quickly and judiciously settled by international tribunals with enforcement powers supplied to them by most of the nations of the world. The birthrate had leveled out at an acceptable level. The impoverishment of the world’s resources had been arrested, even put modestly into reverse. The Greenhouse Effect had been turned back. Species on the verge of extinction were making a comeback. The ozone layers had returned. Plankton was coming back, and with it all other fish. Bison now roamed America’s greatly expanded state and national parks. Wolves were firmly entrenched. The bald eagle needed no longer to fear chemicals. Substitutes for da
ms had been found, and salmon could now swim upstream to their spawning places. The list went on and on. Medically, it had been a stirring time. AIDS had been all but eradicated. No other plague or virus threatened. Psychologically, great strides had been made. The brain technicians had learned how to put a man in charge of the controls of his own mind. Now, with proper training, a man could dial up his sensations when he wanted to, or dial them down to subsistence level when it was a matter of just standing around waiting.

  The success of the Genome Program, though too late for some, had proven a spur to the science of longevity. People now lived longer, and in better health, than ever before. But men still died. No matter how good life was, or how long it lasted, it came at last to an end. One day you heard the fat lady sing and you knew the words were, “that’s all she wrote, folks.”

  The very pleasantness of life made it more than usually bitter to leave it. But if you had to go, at least you had some choice in the manner of your departure. If you’ve got to go out, better to go out with a bang, K reasoned. Following this line of thinking, K had no difficulty convincing himself that he had to visit Venice one last time, if not because he was up for it then because he was not up for it. At least he could give himself one last fling no matter what the price.

  He thought of this staring at the young girls who leaned out over the Rialto Bridge, waving, not to him, perhaps, but to the man he once had been.

  The vaporetto pulled up to a dock and came to a stop, the barrier was pulled back, a crowd pushed off, another crowd pushed on. Secure in his front seat, at the boat’s front left hand side, K took it all in. His Brooklyn memories, like old rotogravures, blazed up for a moment: his grandfather’s pushcart, the smell of freshly ground coffee in the small three-room apartment, the hard slick feeling of the sofa stuffed with horsehair. Then those memories faded and the images of Venice past and present rose up in his mind. The old memories were splendid, but they were overshadowed by the new images that crossed his mind—there at the Accademia Bridge with Santa Maria Salute coming up in the background.

  It was an important moment, but he wanted to feel it more powerfully. With a mental command he stepped up the intensity dial on his interior controls. His doctor had warned him against doing this. “Take this trip if you must. But don’t play with your internal mechanisms. There’s a price to be paid for everything, you know, and this mental ability that man has available now, this access to his interior engineering that permits a man to augment his acuity, is all very well, but it comes at a price. Our bodies follow an ancient design, our physiological systems were not built to permit the ravishing of our senses made possible by our inner controls. Oh, a young man can get away with it for a while, but yours, even with the enhancements of medical technology, is an old model of an ancient design. I know, you want to live like a god once more. Bur remember, K, your body won’t stand for it. Be patient, be prudent, enjoy the good without insisting on the superlative.”

  Good advice, no doubt of it, and K, despite the bravado of his thoughts, had had every intention of following it.

  Just to see Venice again, he had told himself, that was enough. But now, at this moment, in the gently rocking vaporetto, warm air rising from the lagoon, blue sky overhead, the indescribable buildings of Venice approaching slowly, like stately figures in a dance, K threw all caution to the winds. He stepped up the intensity again, and when he felt his heart balking at this psychic overload, he overrode it, his spirit floating on top of it, young and vibrant again, a godlike human whose apprehension was unlimited, no longer bound by Hamlet’s doubt or Lear’s bitterness.

  “Once more into the breach, brave friends,” he said aloud.

  A few people glanced at him curiously, then turned away. A man was still permitted to talk to himself for no apparent reason, even in this enlightened day and age. And what if they did think he was crazy? K didn’t care. He was feeling wonderful. At that moment he was where he should have been if his species had been better designed. The music from the orchestra in front of Florian’s rose in a triumph of heavenly harmonies, and he saw a one-armed gondolier poling his boat across the smooth waters in perfect harmony, saw a straw hat floating in a little side canal in solitary glory, saw a single white cloud of tremulous promise drift across the impossibly blue sky like a detail in a stage-setting.

  Floating in the wonder of enhanced receptivity, he watched the spectacle of distant buildings seen through arched openings. These buildings seemed to float on the water, colored in hues that began to fade even as he looked at them.

  Still entranced, he left the vaporetto and walked through narrow streets and across hump-backed bridges, still in an ecstasy. But his pleasure began to give way to a pain in his legs, chronic, attention-getting, which he suppressed by mental directive. And then there was the pounding of his heart, which he suppressed by mental command. He did this in order to fully appreciate a foreign woman in a Donald Duck T-shirt toss long bronze-colored hair out of her eyes. After that he was eating a pizza with false teeth made whole by determination alone, and then he was walking among the pigeons strutting with impunity along the cobblestones, and after that he was watching a child at a kiosk try on a golden carnival mask of papier-mache.

  At that point he knew he had won a victory over time and illness and loss, won it and still was living. It was time to let up, slow down, retreat from the exhilarating and dangerous heights he had attained, calm down, accept the pain again, get to the train station, find a taxi, get to a hotel room, or, better, to a hospital.

  That would have been the wise thing to do. But the godlike being he had created or resurrected inside himself, the all-devouring god of memory who accepted no boundaries, refused to accept the inevitable anti-climax of a return to his mortal state. On the one side was his doctor’s warning, backed up by the frugal wisdom of science, which saw each moment mainly as an opportunity to live the next. On the other side he heard mad Nietzsche’s voice, speaking as Zarathustra, saying, “Die at the right time.”

  If a man had to die, what better way to go than at the height of his powers, flooded with brilliant vision? One small part of him regretted only the inconvenience he would be causing others as his body refused any longer to accept the insult or the grace from the overload he was giving it.

  He collapsed to the pavement.

  He was leaving a mess, but he couldn’t help it. It was inevitable that in a world built for the living, dying should be an inconvenience to others. But to a man dying, death should be a triumph and a glorious summation of all the best acts, visions and nuances of his existence, blazing forth now as he descended into the dark mystery that alone made life worth living.

  Agamemnon’s Run

  This story idea gave me an opportunity to write about legendary ancient Greeks of the Homeric period. But my characters are not ancient Greeks. They are modern people of our own time, replaying an ancient game—the game of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. How will it work out this time? Can Agamemnon keep himself alive?

  Agamemnon was desperate. Aegisthus and his men had trapped him in Clytemnestra’s bedroom. He could hear them stamping through the hallways. He had climbed out a window, made his way down the wall clinging by his fingernails to the tiny chiseled marks the stonecutters had left in the stone. Once in the street, he thought he’d be all right, steal a horse, get the hell out of Mycenae.

  It was late afternoon when he made his descent from the bedroom window. The sun was low in the west, and the narrow streets were half in shadow.

  He thought he had gotten away free and clear. But no: Aegisthus had posted a man in the street, and he called out as soon as Agamemnon was on the pavement.

  “He’s here! Agamemnon’s here! Bring help!”

  The man was a beefy Spartiate, clad in armor and helmet, with a sword and shield. Agamemnon had no armor, nothing but his sword and knife. But he was ready to tackle the man anyhow, because his rage was up, and although Homer hadn’t mentioned it, Agamemnon was a fighter to bewar
e of when his rage was up.

  The soldier must have thought so. He retreated, darting into a doorway, still crying the alarm. Agamemnon decided to get out of there.

  A little disoriented, he looked up and down the street. Mycenae was his own city, but he’d been away in Troy for ten years. If he turned to his left, would the street take him to the Lion Gate? And would Aegisthus have guards there?

  Just that morning he had ridden into the city in triumph. It was hateful, how quickly things could fall apart.

  He had entered Mycenae with Cassandra beside him in the chariot. Her hands were bound for form’s sake, since she was technically a captive. But they had been bedmates for some weeks, ever since he had bought her from Ajax after they sacked Troy. Agamemnon thought she liked him, even though Greek soldiers had killed her parents and family. But that had been while their blood rage was still high; their rage at so many of their companions killed, and for the ten long wasted years camped outside Troy’s walls, until Odysseus and his big wooden horse had done the trick. Then they’d opened the city gates from the inside and given the place over to rage, rape, and ruin.

  None of them were very proud of what they’d done. But Agamemnon thought Cassandra understood it hadn’t been personal. It wasn’t that he was expecting forgiveness from her. But he thought she understood that the important ones—him, Achilles, Hector, Odysseus—were not bound by the rules of common men.

  They were special people, and it was easy to forget that he was not the original Agamemnon, not the first. The lottery had put them into this position, the damnable lottery which the aliens had set over them, with its crazed purpose of replaying events of the ancient world, only this time with the possibility of changing the outcomes.