Uncanny Tales

by Robert Sheckley

  “It’ll take as long as it takes,” Charon said. “Why? You in a rush?”

  “Not exactly,” Agamemnon said. “Just curious. And interested in getting to the bottom of these mysteries.”

  “Give your curiosity a rest,” Charon said. “Here in the land of the dead, just as in the land of the living, no sooner do you understand one mystery than another comes up to replace it. There’s no satisfying curiosity. I remember when Hercules came through here. He was in a tearing hurry, couldn’t wait to wrestle with Cerberus and bring him up to the world of the living.”

  “They say he succeeded,” Agamemnon said. “Sure. But what good did it do him? When he got back, King Eurystheus just had another job for him. There’s no end of things to do when you’re alive.”

  The red-bearded soldier abruptly said, “I just want you to know, Agamemnon, that I bear you no ill will for having killed me.”

  “That’s good of you,” Agamemnon said. “After you tried so hard to kill me.”

  “There was nothing personal about it,” the red-beard said. “I am Sallices, commander of Aegisthus’ bodyguard in Mycenae. I was ordered to kill you. I follow orders.”

  “And look where they have brought you!” Agamemnon said.

  “Where else would I be going but here? If not this year, then the next, or the one after that.”

  “I didn’t expect to be killed,” the other soldier said. “I am Creonides. My time in Aegisthus’ service was over at the end of the week. I was going back to my little farm outside Argos. Returning to my wife and baby daughter.”

  “I can’t believe this self-pitying nonsense,” the doctor said. “My name is Eumenes. I am a respected doctor of Cos, an island famous for its healers. I came to Mycenae for purely humanitarian reasons, to give what help I could to victims of the plague that you fellows carried back from Asia. And how am I rewarded? A villainous soldier kills me so there should be no witnesses to the illegal and immoral execution of his lord.”

  “But I was just following orders,” Creonides said. “My immediate commander, Sallices here, ordered me to do it.”

  “And I,” Sallices said, “was following the orders of my commander, the noble Aegisthus.”

  “But those were immoral orders!” Pyliades said, sitting up and speaking now for the first time in a firm deep voice, with no signs of plague on him. “Any man can see that!”

  “Do you really think so?” Sallices asked. “And what if the orders were immoral? What is a soldier supposed to do, question and decide on each order given to him by his superiors? I’ve heard that you fellows did a few things you weren’t so proud of during the Trojan War. Killing the whole population of Troy, and burning the city.”

  “We were avenging ourselves for the theft of Helen!” Pyliades declared hotly.

  “And what was Helen to you?” Sallices asked. “Your wife or daughter? Not a bit of it! The wife of a king not even of your own country, since you are Argives, not Spartans. And anyhow, according to all accounts, the lady left Menelaus and went away with Paris willingly. So what were you avenging yourselves on?”

  “Our slain companions,” Pyliades said. “Achilles, our beloved leader.”

  “Now that is really a laugh,” Sallices said. “Your companions were there for the booty, and Achilles was there for the glory. Furthermore, he made his choice. It was prophesied he’d die gloriously at Troy, or lead a long inglorious life if he stayed home. No one had to die for poor Achilles! He made his choice to die for himself.”

  There was silence for a while. Then Doctor Eumenes said, “It must all have seemed different at the time. Men’s choices are not presented to them in a reflective space. They come in the clamor and fury of the moment, when a choice must be made at once, for better or worse.”

  “Is it the same with you, doctor?” Agamemnon asked. “Or are you alone blameless among us?”

  Dr. Eumenes was silent for a long while. At last he said, “My motives were not entirely humanitarian. I might as well confess this to you, since I will have to tell it to the Judges of the Dead. Queen Clytemnestra sent a herald to our school of physicians on Cos, imploring us for help with the plague, and offering a recompense. I was able to buy a nice little house in the city for my wife and children before I embarked.”

  “Clytemnestra!” Agamemnon said. “That murderous bitch!”

  “She was trying to look out for her people,” Eumenes said. “And besides, she had her reasons. We have it on good authority that you sacrificed your daughter Iphigenia to call up a breeze to carry you and your men to Troy.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Agamemnon said. “There’s another version of the story in which the goddess Artemis took Iphigenia to Aulis, to be high priestess to the Taurians.”

  “I don’t care about your face-saving version,” Eumenes said. “It was probably inspired by political reasons. In your heart you know you sacrificed your daughter.”

  Agamemnon sighed and did not answer.

  “And not only did you do that, but you also involved your son, Orestes, in matricide, from which came his agony and his madness.”

  “None of that could be predicted at the time,” Agamemnon said. “Charon, what do you think?”

  Charon said, “We have been doing this ferrying for a long time, my father, my brothers and I, and we share all the information we pick up. We have some questions, too, first and foremost about ourselves.”

  Charon took a drink of wine from a leather flask lying in the bottom of the boat, and continued.

  “What are we here for? Why is there a Charon, or a Charon-function? Are we anything apart from our function? Just as you might ask, Agamemnon, whether you are anything apart from the morally ambiguous story of your life? A story which, for all intents and purposes, has no end and no beginning, and which in one guise or another is always contemporaneous, always happening. Do you ever get any time off from being the Agamemnon-function, do you ever have a chance for some good meaningless fun? Or do you always have to operate your character? Can you do anything without your act proposing a moral question, a dilemma for the ages, ethically unanswerable by its very nature?”

  “What about the rest of us?” Eumenes asked. “Are our lives negligible just because they don’t pose a great moral question like Agamemnon’s?”

  “You and Agamemnon alike are equally negligible,” Charon said. “You are merely the actors of old stories, which have more or less significance as the fashions of the times dictate. You are human beings, and you cannot be said to be with or without significance. But one like you, Agamemnon, is a symbol and a question mark to the human race, just as the human race is to all intelligent life in the Kosmos.”

  A chilling thought crossed Agamemnon’s mind. “And you, Charon? What are you? Are you human? Are you one of those who brought us the lottery?”

  “We are living beings of some sort,” Charon said. “There are more questions than answers in this matter of living. And now, gentlemen, I hope this conversation has diverted you, because we are at our destination.”

  Looking over the side of the boat, Agamemnon could see a dark shoreline coming up. It was low, like the one they had left, but this one had a bright fringe of sandy beach.

  The boat made a soft grating sound as Charon ran it onto the sand.

  “You are here,” Charon said, and then to Agamemnon: “Don’t forget you owe me payment.”

  “Farewell, commander,” said Pyliades. “I hope for a favorable judgment, and to see you again in the palace of Achilles, where they say he lives with Helen, the most beautiful woman who ever was or ever will be. They say the two of them feast the heroes of the Trojan War, and declaim the verses of Homer in pure Greek. I was not a hero, nor do I even speak Greek; but Achilles and Helen may welcome people like me—I have a cheery face now that death has removed the plague from me—and can be counted upon to applaud the great heroes of our Trojan enterprise.”

  “I hope it turns out so,” Agamemnon said. “It may be a while before I co
me there myself, since I am still alive.”

  The others said their farewells to Agamemnon, and assured him they bore him no ill will for their deaths. Then the four walked in the direction of the judges’ seats, which were visible on a rise of land. But Agamemnon followed a sign that read, “This way to the Orchards of Elysium and the Islands of the Blessed.” For these were the regions where he expected to find Teiresias.

  He walked through pleasant meadowlands, with cattle grazing in the distance. These, he had been told, were part of Helius’ herd, which were always straying into this part of Hades, where the grass was greener.

  After a while he came to a valley. In the middle of the valley was a small lake. A man stood in the middle of the lake with water up to his mouth. There were trees growing along the lakeshore, fruit trees, and their branches hung over the man in the water, and ripe fruit drooped low over his head. But when he reached up to pick a banana or an apple—both grew on the same tree—the fruit shrank back out of his reach.

  Agamemnon thought he knew who this was, so he walked to the shore of the lake and called out, “Hello, Tantulus!”

  The man in the water said, “Why, if it isn’t Agamemnon, ruler of men! Have you come to rule here in hell, Agamemnon?”

  “Certainly not,” Agamemnon said. “I’m just here for a visit. I’ve come to talk with Teiresias. Would you happen to know where I might find him?”

  “Teiresias keeps a suite in Hades’ palace. It’s just to your left, over that rise. You can’t miss it.”

  “Thanks very much, Tantulus. Is it very onerous, this punishment the gods have decreed for you? Is there anything I can do?”

  “Good of you to ask,” Tantulus said. “But there’s nothing you could do for me. Besides, this punishment is not as terrible as it might seem. The gods are relentless in decreeing punishment, but they don’t much care who actually does it. So a couple of us swap punishments, and thus get some relief from the same thing over and over.”

  “Who do you trade with, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “By no means. A bit of conversation is a welcome diversion. Sisyphus, Prometheus and I from time to time take over one another’s punishments. The exercise of pushing Sisyphus’s boulder does me good—otherwise I might get fat—I tend to gorge when I get the chance.”

  “But to have your liver torn out by a vulture when you take over for Prometheus—that can’t be much fun.”

  “You’d be surprised. The vulture often misses the liver, chews at a kidney instead, much less hurtful. Especially when you consider that here in hell, sensation is difficult to come by. Even King Achilles and Queen Helen, each blessed with the unsurpassed beauty of the other, have a bit of trouble feeling desire without bodies. Pain is a welcome change to feeling nothing.”

  Agamemnon set out again in the direction Tantulus had indicated. He went across a high upland path, and saw below a pleasant grove of pine trees. There were a dozen or so men and women in white robes, strolling around and engaging in animated conversation.

  Agamemnon walked over to them and announced who he was. A woman said, “We know who you are. We were expecting you, since your trip here was mentioned in several of the books that were lost when the great library at Alexandria burned. In honor of your arrival, several of us have written philosophical speeches entitled ‘Agamemnon’s Lament.’ These speeches are about the sort of things we thought we would hear from you.”

  “Since you knew I was coming, why didn’t you wait and hear what I actually did say?”

  “Because, Agamemnon, what we did is the philosophical way, and the way of action. We wrote your speech ourselves, instead of passively waiting for you to write it, if you ever would. And, since you are not a philosopher yourself, we thought you were unlikely to cast your thoughts into a presentation sufficiently rigorous for an intelligent and disinterested observer. Nor were you a dramatist, so your thoughts were unlikely to have either the rigor or beauty of a philosophical dramatist such as Aeschylus or Sophocles. Since words once said cannot be unsaid, as conversation permits no time for reflection and revision, we took the liberty of putting what we thought you would be likely to say into proper grammatical form, carefully revised, and with a plethora of footnotes to make the meaning of your life and opinions clear to even the meanest understanding.”

  “Very good of you, I’m sure,” said Agamemnon, who, although deficient in philosophy, had a small but useful talent for irony.

  “We don’t expect our work will represent you, Agamemnon, the man,” another philosopher said. “But we hope we’ve done justly by you, Agamemnon the position.”

  “This is all very interesting,” Agamemnon said. “But could you tell me now how I might find Teiresias?”

  The philosophers conferred briefly. Then one of them said, “We do not recognize Teiresias as a philosopher. He is a mere shaman.”

  “Is that bad?” Agamemnon asked.

  “Shamans may know some true things, but they are not to be relied upon because they do not know why or how they know. Lacking this—”

  “Hey,” Agamemnon said, “the critique of Shamanism is unnecessary. I just want to talk to the guy.”

  “He’s usually in the little grove behind Achilles’ palace. Come back if you want a copy of our book of your opinions.”

  “I’ll do that,” Agamemnon said, and walked away in the direction indicated.

  Agamemnon passed through a little woods. He noticed it was brighter here than the other parts of Hades he had visited. Although no sun was visible, there was a brightness and sparkle to the air. He figured he was in one of the better parts of the underworld. He was not entirely surprised when he saw, ahead of him, a table loaded with food and drink, and a masked man in a long cloak sitting at it, with an empty chair beside him.

  The man waved. “Agamemnon? I heard you were looking for me, so I’ve made it easy by setting myself in your path. Come have a chair, and let me give you some refreshment.”

  Agamemnon walked over and sat down. “You are Teiresias?”

  “I am. Would you like some wine?”

  “A glass of wine would be nice.” He waited while Teiresias poured, then said, “May I ask why you are masked?”

  “A whim,” Teiresias said. “And something more. I am a magician, or shaman, to use a term popular in your time. Upon occasion I go traveling, not just here in Hellas, but elsewhere in space and time.”

  “And you don’t want to be recognized?”

  “It can be convenient, to be not too well known. But that’s not the real reason. You see, Agamemnon, knowing someone’s face can give you a measure of power over him. So Merlin discovered when he consorted with the witch Nimue, and she was able to enchant him. I do not give anyone power over me if I can help it.”

  “I can’t imagine anyone having power over you.”

  “I could have said the same for Merlin, and one or two others. Caution is never out of place. Now tell me why you seek me out. I know, of course. But I want to hear it from your own lips.”

  “It’s no secret,” Agamemnon said. “My wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, have sworn to kill me. I come to you to ask if there is some way out of this Greek trap I am in.”

  “You are supposed to be slain for having sacrificed your daughter Iphigenia, so your fleet could sail to Troy.”

  “Now wait a minute!” Agamemnon said. “There’s another version in which I did not kill Iphigenia. She’s alive now in Aulis!”

  “Don’t try to deceive me with tricky words,” Teiresias said. “Both versions of your story are true. You both killed and did not kill your daughter. But you are guilty in either version, or both. Have you ever heard of Schrodinger’s cat? It was a scientific fable popular in your day and age.”

  “I’ve heard of it,” Agamemnon said. “I can’t pretend I ever really understood it.”

  “The man who concocted the fable is condemned, though no cat was ever slain. And this is true in the two worlds.”

  Agam
emnon was silent for a while. He had been watching Teiresias’ mask, which at times seemed made of beaten gold, at other times of golden cloth that billowed when he spoke.

  After a while, Agamemnon asked, “What two worlds are you speaking of?”

  “The world of Earth with its various time lines, and the world of the lottery.”

  “So there’s no escape?”

  “My dear fellow, I never said that. I only wanted to point out that you’re in a far more complicated and devious game than you had imagined.”

  “Why have the people of the lottery done this to us?”

  “For the simplest and most obvious of reasons. Because it seemed a good idea to them at the time. Here was Earth, a perfect test case for those who could manipulate the time lines. Here were the stories of the Greeks, which the human world is not finished with yet. It seemed to the makers of the lottery that here was a perfect test case. They decided to live it through again, and again, to see if the moral equations would come out the same each time.”

  “And have they?”

  The tall figure of Teiresias shrugged, and Agamemnon had the momentary impression that it was not a man’s form beneath the cloak.

  “As I said, it seemed a good idea at the time. But that was then, and yesterday’s good idea doesn’t look so good today.”

  “Can you tell me how to get out of here?”

  Teiresias nodded. “You’ll have to travel on the River of Time.”

  “I never heard of it.”

  “It’s a metaphor. But the underworld is a place where metaphors become realities.”

  “Metaphor or not, I don’t see any river around here,” Agamemnon said.

  “I’ll show you how to get to it. There’s a direct connection, a tunnel from here to Scylla and Charybdis, both of which border the ocean. You’ll go through the tunnel which will lead you there.”

  “Isn’t there some other way to get there?”

  Teiresias continued, “This is the only way. Once past Scylla and Charybdis, you’ll see a line of white breakers. Cross them. You will be crossing the river in the ocean that goes into the past. You don’t want that one. You’ll see another line of breakers. Cross these and you will be in the river that will carry you from the past into the future.”