Prim interrupted.
‘You’re trying to deceive us!’ he told you in a trembling voice. ‘It’s only you who can pierce marble with a finger, or withstand poison, swords, or bombardment. We would die! Do you take us for fools?’
‘No,’ you replied. ‘You would die, as you say. You are composed of the same exhausted nuclei as everything else; that is exactly why you could not detect this process long ago. I can withstand almost anything you have to offer only because the very stuff of which I am made is new. I am the one fresh factor in an exhausted galaxy.’
You paused and went over to the Highest. He had become very pale. ‘This ravening monster we loosed between us out in space – I suppose that merely hastens the exhaustion process?’ he asked.
‘Yes. The fabric is torn; the gap widens to embrace your island universe.’
The Highest closed his eyes. When he raised his lids again, his regard fixed on you with the alertness of a bird.
‘Our poisons cannot affect you,’ he said. ‘Yet you manage to live among us. How can our food nourish you?’
‘I brought my private supply of calories with me when I left my own world. I was not unprepared. I had even to bring oxygen concentrates.’
You then told the Highest of the effects your unexhausted air had had on Shouter, the spool-seller, how he had been riddled as if by unseen radiations. And you told him how useful Shouter’s microspool library had been.
‘An opportunist,’ the Highest said. ‘My congratulations to you.’
He pulled at his lip and looked, for a moment, almost amused.
‘Have you a moment to spare, if the question has meaning any longer? Perhaps the others will excuse us.’
Something in his manner had changed. He motioned to you with a sharp gesture and made for a door. What did you do? You took a last look over your shoulder at the desolate group whose function in life had abruptly vanished, gave One Eye a mocking salute and followed.
The Highest walked down a corridor at a pace which belied his earlier languor. He flung open another door and you both emerged on to a balcony overlooking the proud city of Nion. A cool evening wind blew; clouds masked the setting sun. The great panorama of avenue and river lay strangely deserted, from distant spires to the pavements of a nearby concourse. Nothing stirred except a fabric far below in a mansion window.
‘How long would this exhaustion process have taken had we not accelerated it?’ the Highest asked almost casually, leaning on the rail and looking down.
‘It must have worsened for centuries,’ you told him. ‘It might have gone on for centuries more …’
You felt a softness for him, and for all men, all the myriads of them, whether they cheated or played fair, loved or hated. All their follies and limitations were forgiven; they were primitives, coming from the dark, fading back into the dark, with a glimpsing of awareness to give poignance.
The Highest took a deep breath of evening.
‘It’s ending! Now comes the time to adventure into death.’
He took another lungful of the darkening wind.
‘And you have a ringside seat, my friend. It will indeed be a sight to see. But you must get back before our craft disintegrates. They won’t be capable of carrying you much longer.’
You said, gently, ‘Everyone must be told what is happening. That seems imperative.’
‘I will not forget.’
He turned and faced you.
‘What impulse brought you here? Nostalgia? Curiosity? Pity? What feelings do you have for – us shadows?’
And what unexpected weakness was it that choked the words in your throat? Why did you turn your face away so that he could not see your eyes?
‘I wanted man to be aware of what is happening to him,’ you said at last. ‘That much was owed him. I – we owed it. You are – our fathers. We are your heirs …’
He touched you gently, asking in a firm voice, ‘What should be told to the people of the Galaxy?’
You looked out over a city now pricked with lights, and up to the evening sky. You found no comfort there or in yourself.
‘Tell them again what a galaxy is,’ you said. ‘Don’t soften it. They are brave. Explain to them once more that there are galaxies like grains of sand, each galaxy a cosmic laboratory for the blind experiments of nature. Explain to them how little individual lives mean compared to the unknown goals of the race. Tell them – tell them that this laboratory is closing. A newer one, with more modern equipment is opening just down the street.’
‘They shall be told,’ the Highest said, his face a shadow as night fell upon the old city and the stars.
We who have already superseded you record these scenes now in your honour, as you once honoured man. Requiescat in pace.
The Shubshub Race
The clock tower of the palace of Harkon looked out over the chill sea.
King Able Harkon Horace sat in a small room of the palace, also gazing out at the meaningless expanse of water. He failed to guess what a momentous day this was to be; his preoccupation, as usual, was with his illness.
Although only in his mid-thirties, the king’s face was already lined with suffering, and his eyes burned with the febrile brightness of an overburdened brain. No man could diagnose what ailed him; hundreds had tried or pretended to try. Nothing could ward off those terrible periods when, for days on end, he fell into a swoon and lay rigidly on his bed, groaning that time had stopped and the world was ending.
King Horace ruled a small Earth kingdom on the edge of the North Sea, one of those quiet kingdoms which sprang up after the establishment of the zero-zero space drive and the collapse of World Government. Its chief industries were fishing and the manufacture of sand-glazed chaperchers for the control templates of spaceship boosters.
With a nervous movement, the king rose from his throne.
‘Silence!’ he said irritably, for it had been reading to him. He was restless, thinking of his visit to the health planet Upotia. Tomorrow he would start on his way to that happy world – for in those times, as now, Upotia was famed throughout the galaxy for its blessedly stable climates, although nowadays it is becoming a little overcrowded.
Making a gesture of impatience, he stalked out onto the promenade with the aid of his stick. Sweeping the view with a sick and listless gaze, he observed approaching the palace his Air Vice-Marshal: for in this kingdom, vice was not allowed on the ground.
The Air Vice-Marshal was leading by the collar a handsome man in a white uniform with rather too natty brown gloves, who walked along protesting loudly that it was a free country.
‘Who’s that fellow?’ King Horace asked, pointing at the white uniform with his stick: ‘Never seen him before.’
The AVM, bowing low, begged His Majesty not to be deceived by the other’s haughty airs: he was only a common wrongdoer named Swap who had just been caught with a girl committing vice in the palace grounds. He was to be executed tomorrow.
‘Good,’ said the king.
‘ – – !’ said the captive, and was at once hauled away.
Increasingly restless now, the king made off by the side gate and went down a shingly twisting lane to the margins of the grey sea. The wind blew no warmer for its being May, and he pulled his cloak more tightly about him. God, but he was sick of everything, his own disease as much as others’ health. That fellow Swat … no, Swap …
A voice at his elbow, in a tone that admitted no doubt, said: ‘I know your cure.’
King Horace perceived he was being addressed by a chunky figure five feet high who wore a strange habit and kept his face concealed. The king’s anger was at once aroused, but there were no guards within call, and to his questions the creature gave no reply except to say that he was an oracle who had travelled many light years to sell the king something: the key to his health.
‘You are singularly rude for a tradesman,’ exclaimed the king.
The oracle spat.
‘Diagnose me,’ demanded the king, shakin
g with irritation and expectation together. The oracle for answer produced from his habit a wafer-thin circle of metal as large as a plate, which he pronounced to contain the key to King Horace’s suffering. Eagerly, the king stretched out a hand for it.
‘Money first,’ snapped the oracle. ‘I must have payment or you will have no confidence in the cure.’
‘You’ll have to come to the palace then, I’ve no money on me.’
‘You think me a fool? To be locked in one of your insanitary dungeons? Give me your stick – that’ll be payment enough.’
Now the king’s stick was indeed valuable. It contained, besides the usual umbrella, dagger and stun-gun, phials of curative powders, with cyanide and Elastoplast for emergencies, a small stock of gold, a miniature 3D of Betsy Gorble, telestar, and a mind-defacer which automatically blanketed the bearer’s neural projections, if any esp-men were in the neighbourhood. The stick, therefore, was a treasure; nevertheless, King Horace exchanged it after only momentary hesitation for the metal plate. At once the oracle padded behind a sand-dune and was gone.
As if paralysed, the king stared down at his acquisition. A gust of wind whipped it from his palm and blew it towards the sea. With a cry, the king ran after it over the wet sand. Two floating gulls rose shrieking from the waves and wheeled over him. Lines of foam lapped round the plate, dragging it back with their retreat. He pounced on it; it eluded him. Then, stretching forward desperately, he seized it.
He stepped back, spray bursting over his cloak – and trod on nothing!
In a flash, he was up to his thighs in quicksand. Only the bottomless muds of Earth lay below him. Instinctively he threw himself flat, clawing with frantic hands to reach solidity and safety. The sea pounded and the gulls screamed and his heart drummed. Inch by inch, he tore himself out of the coldly sucking filth. He lay then for an hour, sobbing and resting, before growing strong enough to crawl back to the palace.
When his servants and physicians had bathed, reproached and given him sedatives, King Horace had a rare flash of gratitude. His life had been spared: he would spare a life.
‘Order that fellow Swap to be pardoned and brought here,’ he said, thinking: ‘Mine is a poor life, after all, compared with his.’
He lay back amid pillows and a servant appeared with the metal plate, which King Horace had thrust into the bosom of his tunic and forgotten in his struggle with the sands. Dismissing the servant, he held it in shaking hands and then prised it open. A momentary resistance, the hiss of collapsing vacuum and the lid came up. On the bottom plate was a white strip bearing an obscure sentence:
ON GLOBADAN I WON THE SHUBSHUB RACE
King Horace’s face twisted bitterly. He stabbed at the message to pluck it away, but it formed part of the plate. Tears burned in his eyes: how could that nonsense cure him? Even as he peered at it again, the wording writhed and faded till not a trace remained. He stared for a moment more, then sent the plate scudding far out of the palace window.
Next morning, King Horace was in poor shape. He appeared obsessed with the idea of leaving for Upotia, sick as he was: nobody could dissuade him. Swap arrived and was ordered to escort the king on pain of having his sentence reimposed. They made for the tiny space port, the king ignoring the glad farewells of his subjects. Once there, he dismissed his courtiers with a glum wave of the hand, and hobbled into the lift of S.S. Potent. In a moment more he was whisked up out of sight. Swap, two elderly nurses and a baggage man followed without enthusiasm; they formed all his retinue.
Spaceships, it is frequently said, are inventions of the devil. But in King Horace’s day the devil was obviously less of an engineer than he is now. The ship which bore the king – not, incidentally, one of his own, for his kingdom was too small to finance more than moon freighters – belonged to the Solar (Upotia-Vegan and All Stations for Andromeda) Line and was a tub. To be more precise, it was cramped, had a poor cuisine and boasted almost no turn of speed. So the unpleasant journey was also protracted, the seven light years taking nearly four weeks to cover.
Nevertheless, Upotia was worth a little discomfort.
For the early part of the journey, the king preserved a reflective silence. He brooded chiefly on the question of the oracle, for although his message had been, at best, a conundrum, the man himself was as much of a riddle. Was he genuine or a trickster? The odds seemed evenly balanced. On the one hand, his complete indifference to the person of the king argued a certain authority noticeably lacking in all the quacks who had previously presented their fawning selves at court; on the other hand, if he had anything of real value to offer, it seemed likely he would have insisted on greater reward than he had, in fact, received – his passage paid home, at the least.
Now he had vanished, leaving only a sentence of uncertain meaning.
King Horace was still undecided when they touched lightly down on Upotia.
Most planets, like Earth itself, provide all sorts of weather, although a few like Venus possess only bad: but Upotia enjoys only good. This is due partly to an exceptionally deep atmosphere, partly to its axial inclination and partly to the multiple sun system of which it is the only habitable planet.
‘Delightful!’ exclaimed the king, inhaling deeply.
‘Absolutely!’ echoed Swap. His first surliness had long since faded. Once he fully realised what an easy number he had fallen into, he was as agreeable as it was in his uncertain nature to be. The voyage had forced him into the king’s company: they were much of an age: when allowances were made for the king’s infirmity he was not such a bad chap: he had given Swap the Royal Pardon: they were going on holiday – and the King had told him about the oracle and ‘On Globadan I won the Shubshub race’.
‘At least we know what shubshubs are,’ said Swap, as who should say: ‘ – and a fat lot of good that does us!’
‘Do you?’ said the king eagerly. ‘I don’t! I thought it was a bit of gibberish. What are shubshubs? Sweets?’
‘Of course you’ve led a very secluded life,’ said Swap, mastering the big word with difficulty. And he explained that shubshubs were rare and expensive animals like six-legged ostriches which ran more swiftly than leopards. Where they came from he did not know, nor had he ever seen one.
Perhaps there was something in the message after all. Hope began to circulate again in the king’s blood; after all, surely if the oracle had been a fraud he would have taken care to be more ingratiating?
‘We may find out more about this on Upotia,’ the king said.
But they found out no more on Upotia. For one thing, there was a deal of snobbery among the rich invalids there, and those who had seen the king land not in his private craft but in a common liner cut him dead. So the king and Swap (and the two elderly nurses) roamed the country by caracar, away from the centres of population.
They had been there a fortnight of golden days when they met the Priestess Colinette Shawl. King Horace had by now grown tired of Swap and the limitations of his mind: for though at first he had been titillated by the other’s accounts of romantic wrongdoing back in the palace grounds, he soon wearied of what sounded rather an empty routine. Accordingly, he was the more ready to welcome the priestess.
‘This is my entourage,’ he said, reluctantly introducing Swap.
‘Charmed,’ they said together, and Swap rested thoughtful and commanding eyes on the newcomer – for where the priestess came from priestesses were picked for their power to attract the parishioners. That indeed was her business on Upotia: to make converts to her sect. She began straight away on the king and Swap, and when it grew dark she pitched her tent beside theirs.
After midnight the third and fourth suns rose. The fourth was a glinting speck hundreds of millions of miles away, while the third was a dull, fuzzy giant, trailing over the horizon like a shock of red hair. Together they made little more light than Luna, but the effect was very romantic.
Possibly you recall the old saying about the chlorophyll being greener in someone else’s grass.
Swap also recalled it as he lay and meditated on the discomfort of his bed; he was unable to sleep.
At last he rose, and padded out to Priestess Colinette’s tent. He knocked gently on the wooden door-pole.
‘I’m converted!’ he whispered.
The priestess, who had heard that one before, came circumspectly forth and delivered a religious address.
‘What is more,’ she added, ‘it is too late to start anything. Tomorrow I begin the voyage back to Globadan.’
‘Globadan!’ shouted Swap. ‘You mean to say you come from Globadan? There is such a dump! Hey, skipper – wake up!’
And he pulled the king out of bed, much to the latter’s displeasure. Swap had acted with his usual thoughtlessness. Nevertheless, hope that the oracle’s message might after all bear some significance silenced the royal irritation, and in none too horrible a voice the king told Priestess Shawl the whole business, hoping she might throw more light upon it.
‘On Globadan I won the shubshub race’, she echoed. ‘Unless that was written by another shubshub, it’s pure nonsense. Nothing, absolutely nothing on legs can beat a shubshub.’
‘OK It’s nonsense. Let’s go back to bed!’ said Swap, suddenly tiring of the whole thing. ‘It would be me have to go getting tied up with neurotic kings …’ he reflected.
‘You go,’ said the king. ‘I want to ask the priestess a couple of questions – ’
(‘I’ll wait till you go,’ said Swap; he wasn’t born yesterday.) ‘ – are these shubshub races an institution on Globadan?’
The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 40