Hypnosis? ‘I can’t – ’ began the king again, but he brought out a pen and signed with an automatic flourish. Next moment, he was lying back on the narrow bench with Ap-Eye bending eagerly over him.
‘Come on, old friend, we’re going to get you cured. Nothing to worry about any more. Look at me hard now, hurry up …’
The eyes, the just eyes, grew suddenly more luminous – then they fell forward on to Ap-Eye’s cheeks, dangling springily. In the cavities were more eyes, but these lenses, strange, whirling, flickering, held a power too fearful to be ordinarily revealed. Under their induction, King Horace felt himself fade into a minute pool of being.
And then he was merged into Ap-Eye.
A moment of pain grew and vanished as he fitted into the new brain. His consciousness had been poured from one body into the other as easily as liquid is poured from one vessel to another.
Ap-Eye stood up slowly. The king’s body lay breathing shallowly on the bench, relaxed and deserted.
‘You’ll stay in a trance till I put you safely back there. The body as a body will function more smoothly without your interfering mind in it.’
‘I’m frightened.’
‘What, because you happen to use the same mouth to eat and speak with as I? You’ve never been better off, old friend. This body’s immortal, you know. And now – to present our document to Swap. Sleep tight, sweet prince!’
There was no interconnection between their kinds, or Ap-Eye allowed none. Horace – he could now hardly think of himself as a sovereign – was carried helplessly as the other willed. The odd idea that he no longer had any being obsessed him; still, there was pleasure in savouring the integration of a fit body, although he realised more clearly than ever that his unending illness rode in his mind, as he rode parasitically in Ap-Eye’s.
He watched or half-watched helplessly as the spaceship landed on Earth. His old body (the trial had been waived in view of his ‘illness’ and Swap’s promise to take the living corpse into his custody) was shipped home, Ap-Eye collected money from the royal coffers, Swap began a prolonged debate with the court. The two elderly nurses slipped off and married the two stokers.
Their journey to Globadan began almost at once.
It was long, but not monotonous. Gradually, as they wormed their way out through the long light years, towards the rim of the Galaxy, the Döppler effect became noticeable – through those strange optics of Ap-Eye’s. The people about them, passengers and crew, began to slow up. It was gradual, very gradual, the dragging of a foot, the faltering flash of a girl’s eye. And to this Ap-Eye carefully adjusted his movements, impeding them deliberately, while his made brain functioned as rapidly as usual.
So they came to Globadan.
He stood with another prisoner on the starting line. That had been easily arranged: the Globadanians were a primitive people with harsh laws – a window broken at midnight, a flash of moonlight on the shattered glass and he had been hurried enthusiastically to prison.
Now he waited beneath the great grandstand, his ears – Ap-Eye’s ears – full of the noise of festival. The yellow sun shone down on banners, bright instruments and feathers. Everyone wore plumage for the occasion: the crowd might have been a flock of birds. And beside him, curbed but snorting, was the line of shubshubs.
The shubshub is native to several planets. It is one of the finest creatures in God’s galaxy, tall, fleet, sweet of temper. The specimens entered for this race were all over seventeen hands high, six-legged and shod with steel. Their muscles rippled and their white beaks shone.
The starter’s trumpet blared, the clarion note plunging them into gracious action. The treble mile lay flat before them, and they plunged over it like war arrows.
But they ran their splendid race on the slow outer edge of the galaxy: through their limbs flowed the slur of space-time. To Ap-Eye’s unchanged perceptions they merely crawled.
He ran. The course was ochre-coloured.
The great beasts plunging in bright slow-motion, the sun a fervent yellow, the time holding back, waiting for him, waiting …
… as once before it had waited, over thirty years ago.
The clock on the palace tower had been stopped. It had been stopped deliberately to delay the king and queen, to keep them idling on the summer beach an extra ten minutes. The young guardsman who in fear of his life had stopped it hurried down to the royal nursery.
There was Horace’s mother, a gardener’s wife at the palace, young, lovely and nervous, with her child clasped in her arms. The child was himself – Horace! She looked up as the guardsman came in and flashed him a brief smile of thanks for his help.
‘Quick,’ he said. ‘Let’s go!’
She hurried over to the cot with the crown emblazoned on it and pulled the curtain back. There lay the royal infant asleep, a child of the same age, almost of the same appearance as her own.
‘Quick!’ urged the guardsman.
Gently, she lifted out the royal babe and put her child in its place. She leant over it lovingly, her eyes filling with tears as it stared solemnly back at her.
‘Fear not, my own babe,’ she whispered. ‘Your mother is a wicked woman. She is going to run away with another man – but at least she has given you a good start in the world. Now you must forget her! Sleep well, my little love, and when you wake you’ll be a prince.’
‘Quick!’ said the guardsman. ‘Time is against us, Anne!’
She thrust the royal babe into his arms and said: ‘Smuggle this one out to your aunt in the country, then, as we arranged. Tell her to call it – oh, Swap!’
‘And I’ll see you tonight by the harbour, my love?’
‘You have an anxious face, sir!’ she said coquettishly.
‘You’ll be there, Anne, dearest?’
‘Have the engine running ready for me.’
‘Total recall!’ bellowed Ap-Eye’s voice in his ear.
From the immensity of space, from the greater immensity of a life’s memory, Horace returned. The yellow sun, the slowly plunging line of animals behind, the dun-coloured plain, the gaudy spectators … they slipped back into place. Ahead loomed the winning post.
‘He kept the engine running but she never came, poor chap,’ Ap-Eye said. ‘She had really fallen for an ugly little man who promised her the stars.’
‘Not … you?’
‘Yes, I … alas! We came here for a honeymoon. When I foolishly confessed I was a pseudo-man – she took a poisoned potion … I was too much in love, she had too much pride … Ah, it’s a long time ago, to human life if not to me. But now finally I hope I have erased the consequences of my folly as well as possible. It’s not a perfect world, old friend. How do you feel?’
He could not answer. He knew he was free at last, and the knowledge choked him. Only a few more yards to run – they had won easily.
‘How do you feel?’ Ap-Eye asked again. ‘Looking forward to getting your own body back?’
‘Yes,’ gulped Horace. ‘Yes, old friend.’ And as he spoke he noticed Priestess Colinette Shawl standing clapping among the throng.
In a burst of triumph, they flashed past the winning post.
Supercity
Fear not, Nathaniel, that you are about to hear a far-flung fantasy extolling the gigantic, the terrific or the tremendous. This is no fable about one of the monstrous cities of our universe, a megapolis covering an entire planet. No, if that is what my heading led you to expect, you were mistaken, Nathaniel.
Supercity (emphasis on the second syllable: supercity) is a word coined by Alastair Mott, the greatest supercitist of them all, to denote the art of becoming indispensable through being thoroughly useless: or, as he phrased it himself, more gracefully, ‘the easiest way to the highest point’. From the ancient Latin, super, above, and cito, easily.
Alastair was born to power, although, as we shall see, he was later ousted from it. At twenty-one he was created Protagon of the Territory of Sconn of the planet Earth, a state about the size of
North and South Dakota put together; in fact, it was North and South Dakota put together; and was later to become Division III of the United Parastates.
Alastair’s life was a carefree one. His health was good, his face handsome, his wealth unlimited. Also he owned a little love nest on Ganymede and (because this last remained a deep secret) was at present wooing, with every omen of future success, the Virgin Rosalynd Staffordshire III. Also – this above all, Nathaniel – he had no social conscience, so that the hardships of his underlings at no time affected his sleep or cooled his natural ebullience.
Away from the frequent parties and carnivals which the loot of a thousand-odd planets provided for his social set, Alastair studied fitfully. He became a dilettante philologist, partly because of a certain genuine interest in language, partly in an attempt to provide himself with a little character, which he knew he lacked.
Philology is a nice, safe pastime, party-going is not. (Indeed, how gratifying to scholars it must be to reflect that in Alastair’s case party-going brought his downfall and philology his regeneration. But we precede ourselves.) Foolishly, Alastair, on the fourth night of a particularly gay and wicked party, became involved in a small triangle, the other two angles of which were occupied by the Virgin Vera Manchester IXA and the Court Procreator.
As soon as the party was over, Alastair realised his mistake; he awoke and found the dawn was grey, for the Virgin Vera, by forfeiting her title, had placed his own status in jeopardy. The Court Procreator was not a man to be trifled with: it lay within his power to elect one to the August Order of Eunuchs at a moment’s notice. Alastair blanched at the very thought and ended the affair forthwith. He ended it, unfortunately, with more precipitance than tact. Quite justifiably, the Virgin Vera Manchester IXA was offended, reading in his sudden withdrawal a mute criticism of her charms;, for ladies, in those days as now, prefer to be taken to bed than to ask.
The Virgin Vera nursed her spite in secret while Alastair returned to wooing the Virgin Rosalynd. All might have been well had there not occurred at Court – as have occurred at Courts from time immemorial – several fortunate deaths among the highest in the hierarchy. At the drop of a hat, the Virgin Vera had been acclaimed Ultimate Lady, a title which to the ears of that century held a sinister ring in it, and so the. Territory of Sconn and its Protagon came under her jurisdiction.
Almost at once Alastair was promoted.
He received the news in his afternoon bath.
‘I have been elected Resident Governor of the planet Acrostic I!’ he said with some astonishment, scanning the telecoder above the bath taps. ‘What does that mean? And where in Jake’s universe is Acrostic I?’
His robot attendant made a sound like heavy breathing for five seconds, and then pronounced Acrostic I to be one of two planets circling a yellow sun on the periphery of Smith’s Burst, which is a small intragalactic nebula many light years from any form of civilisation.
Alastair’s eye fell sadly on the word ‘Resident’, which so neatly knocked away the props from under his pleasant life as Protagon of Sconn. All relish fled immediately from his existence. He stood up dripping.
‘It’s been an honour to know you, Protagon,’ the robot said as it blew hot, dry air over him.
Space travel in those days was definitely not what it is now: then, it might take you sixteen weeks to do as many light years. Their ships, mere tubs which seldom could carry more than one hundred souls, had correspondingly to take more food, fuel, facilities and equipment for the long voyage. Even a planetary governor was allowed no excess baggage. Alastair stepped aboard the SS Garfinkle with two trunks (supplied by the company) and no secretaries; all that he loved he had to leave behind.
On the long and tedious voyage into exile, most of which he passed with Obliveen pills, Alastair outgrew his homesickness. True, he still recalled with regret Sconn Territory, and, it must be admitted, the little spicery on Ganymede; he still thought with affection of his friends; he still dwelt lovingly, although without much faith, on the farewell words of the Virgin Rosalynd: ‘Adieu, sweet Alastair, I will be true’; but he resolved to make the very best of Acrostic I. It may be that The Plan was already forming in his mind: aware of his own uselessness, he knew it would only be by exerting that talent to the utmost that he would make anything of his banishment. Perhaps it was during these vacant hours he coined the word supercity.
At last they entered the regions of Smith’s Burst, and the Garfinkle put Alastair down on his planet before hurrying off to more magnificent and exploited areas.
Acrostic I was not the best of all possible worlds. Its atmosphere was thin, and sickening to breathe until one became acclimatised. Although it was larger than Earth, it possessed almost no metals or heavier elements, so that its gravity was just enough below normal to produce a light-headed effect. Its orbit held it too close for comfort to Acrostic (the sun) and the days were very hot; because its axial revolution was slow and the atmospheric blanket was thin, the nights were very cold.
Storms, snow, frost, heat-waves, drought and floods moved with monotonous irregularity across the battered face of Acrostic I. Small wonder that the native Acrosticians, primitive, elephantine beings, numbered themselves (for nobody else cared to do it for them) in hundreds merely.
The Earth colonists, when Alastair arrived to govern them, were a mere twenty thousand strong, all of them living within about eighty miles of Acrostic’s only town, All Saints. This hopefully named shanty town was to be Alastair’s home! He groaned as a quaff, the local variety of packhorse, bore him through the dusty streets to his residence. Vultures and tiny monkeys peered down from the rooftops at his lugubrious progress. The lack of metal showed itself all too plainly in a diversity of ways, from the lame architecture to the long beards; the lack of proper sanitation also made itself felt in the usual way. Large numbers of the colonists, literally under the weather, had given up their lands and drifted to town, where no occupation but immorality was open to them. Posters picturing makes of gun, displaying gigantic whisky bottles, advertising leg shows or inquiring whether the passer-by possessed Breath Appeal gave All Saints the air of a libellous parody on civilisation. The Ultimate Lady had certainly settled her debts: Smith’s Burst hath no fury like a woman scorned.
Alastair never despaired, nor took to drink. Instead, he took to quaff and travelled among the people, learning the true nature of the planetary situation; the people, suspicious at first, came to trust him as they realised he was not researching on their account. It took Alastair only a short while to find the truth about Acrostic I: it was a dead end: nobody left and nobody came.
Acrostic I was virtually unheard of on Earth. Nothing of its dull history or existence had seeped back home – except one word. Words get where goods cannot; they are frequently a planet’s first export.
To you, Nathaniel, the verb ‘to scutterbuck’ is a staid and familiar old word meaning ‘to kill time pleasantly’. In Alastair’s time, however, the expression was for Earth something new, exotic, slangy. It had seeped back over the space routes, like a thousand other extra-terrestrial words, to become a temporary or integral part of our ever-expanding vocabulary. To Earth’s masses, scutterbucking sounded something enjoyably exciting; as not infrequently happens, Earth’s masses had the wrong end of the stick.
Alastair, being an amateur philologist, was intrigued by this single thin connection between home and the ball to which he had been politely exiled. He quaffed out with a human interpreter to the nearest native settlement to investigate the strict meaning of the word and found that scutterbucking (or, more correctly, skutterbucking) is an Acrostician form of hibernation, undergone when the weather is particularly foul. Voluntary rather than seasonal, the condition of scutterbucking is accompanied by grotesque withering of the grey Acrostician flesh and blissful indifference to externals, a considerable asset on a place like Acrostic I.
Very shortly, Galactic Life, Earth’s leading telemag, produced a feature called ‘Come Where S
cutterbucking Comes From!’ It was illustrated with flashes of the dwarf, three-breasted Acrostic Monkeys, which apart from their one outstanding peculiarity are all but human in appearance; careful choice of background concealed the true height of these creatures (nine inches in the largest specimen, Nathaniel). As the telefeature, while failing to mention Acrostic’s odd climate, let slip that the monkeys were the planet’s highest form of life, it was only a matter of time before a thin trickle of male tourists began to plod anxiously round the streets of All Saints, seeking what everyone means by ‘local colour’.
As a frontier planet, Acrostic I had been ‘wide open’; anyone who wished might come and go on it. Alastair proceeded to change all that. Customs sheds were erected by the space port, an elaborate tariffs system was introduced, a barn-like hotel-hospital was built, wherein newcomers could spend an enforced and expensive period of isolation and acclimatisation. The lucrative business of currency regulation was established, together with passport, visa and identification systems, all of which cost money – all of which went to the Resident Governor.
But the tourist trade was not the only nor the strongest string to Alastair’s bow, although it brought him enough money to carry out the rest of his ideas.
He began making official reports home. New York, which was at that time the hub of World Administration, was gratified. Generally, it was an impossible task to induce reports (which also meant returns) from anywhere but the major worlds; since all communications travelled via ship, the smaller galactic fry could always claim ‘Lost in Transit’ to any unpleasant referendum, a claim which might take years to refute conclusively.
New York responded with true bureaucratic fervour to Alastair’s tentative advances. Department upon department despatched sheaves of every imaginable type of form and questionnaire, and filed with glee the mocked-up statistics or nil returns which Alastair sent back.
What percentages of female colonist underwent marriage at the following age groups … ? What was the average yield per acre of the following types of wheat … ? What species of Earth cattle flourished best under Acrostic conditions … ? What were conditions on Acrostic in terms of average annual rainfall, monthly rainfall, annual sunshine, monthly sunshine, isobar, isotherms … ? Etc.
The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 42