Kornbluth, Mary (Ed)

by [Anth] Science Fiction Showcase [v1. 0] [epub]

  It was the right door.

  There was Trumie, four hundred pounds of lard, lying on a marble bench with a foam-rubber cushion, the jowled head in the small lap of –

  Teddy. Or Kathryn Pender in the teddy-bear suit, the sticky like legs pointed straight out, the stick-like arms clumsily patting him. She was talking to him, gently and reassuringly. She was telling him what he needed to know - that he had eaten enough, that he had used enough, that he had consumed enough to win the respect of all, and an end to consuming.

  Garrick himself could not have done better.

  It was a sight from Mother Goose, the child being soothed by his toy. But it was not a sight that fit in well with its surroundings, for the seraglio was upholstered in mauve and pink, and wicked paintings hung about.

  Sonny Trumie rolled the pendulous head and looked squarely at Garrick. The worry was gone from the fearful little eyes.

  Garrick stepped back.

  No need for him just at this moment. Let Trumie relax for a while, as he had not been able to relax for a score of years. Then the psychist could pick up where the girl had been unable to proceed; but in the meantime, Trumie was finally at rest.

  The teddy looked up at Garrick, and in its bright blue eyes, the eyes that belonged to the girl named Kathryn, he saw a queer tincture of triumph and compassion.

  Garrick nodded and left, and went out to the robots of North Guardian and started them clearing away.

  * * * *

  Sonny Trumie nestled his swine’s head in the lap of the teddy-bear. It was talking to him so nicely, so nicely. It was droning away, ‘Don’t worry, Sonny. Don’t worry. Everything’s all right. Everything’s all right.’ Why, it was almost as though it were real.

  It had been, he calculated with the part of his mind that was razor-sharp and never relaxed, it had been nearly two hours since he had eaten. Two hours! And he felt as though he could go another hour at least, maybe two. Maybe - maybe even not eat at all again that day. Maybe even learn to live on three meals. Perhaps two. Perhaps -

  He wriggled - as well as four hundred greasy pounds can wriggle - and pressed against the soft warm fur of the teddy-bear. It was so soothing! ‘You don’t have to eat so much, Sonny. You don’t have to drink so much. No one will mind. Your father won’t mind, Sonny. Your mother won’t mind ...’

  It was very comfortable to hear the teddy-bear telling him those things. It made him drowsy. So deliciously drowsy! It wasn’t like going to sleep, as Sonny Trumie had known going to sleep for a dozen or more years, the bitterly fought surrender to the anesthetic weariness. It was just drowsy....

  And he did want to go to sleep.

  And finally he slept. All of him slept. Not just the four hundred pounds of blubber and the little pig eyes, but even the razor-sharp mind - Trumie that lived in the sad, obedient hulk; it slept; and it had never slept before.

  <>

  * * * *

  the long remembering

  poul anderson

  Claire took my arm, “Do you have to go right away?” she asked.

  “I’d better,” I said. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. I’ll come back with a nice fat check and tomorrow night we’ll go out and celebrate.” I stroked her cheek. “You haven’t gotten much celebration lately, have you?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s enough just having you around the place.” After a moment when we could not have spoken: “OK. Run along.”

  She stood there, smiling at me all my way down the stairs.

  I caught the bus and rode it to Rennie’s, thinking that I was a fortunate man in spite of everything.

  His house was old, and there was nothing to mark it out from its neighbors. When I rang the bell, Rennie himself admitted me. He was a tall gray man with tired eyes.

  “Ah... Mr. Armand.” His voice was gentle. “You are punctual. Come in.”

  He led me down the hall to a cluttered living room walled with books. “Sit down,” he invited. “Have a drink?”

  “A little wine, if you please,” I said. I looked out the windows to the undistinguished sunlight. A car went past, the newest and most blatant model. My leather chair was solid, comfortable; when I moved, its horsehair stuffing rustled dryly.

  I needed that assurance of a real and everyday world.

  Rennie brought in a decanter and poured. It was a pretty good Burgundy. He sat down facing me and crossed interminable legs.

  “There is still time to back out,” he said with a half-smile. It faded, and he went on earnestly: “I won’t blame you a bit if you do. This undertaking is not quite safe, and... I understand you’re married?”

  I nodded. That was no reason for retreat. It was, in fact, the reason for my being here. Claire worked, but there was a baby on the way, and even in my division - chemistry - a graduate assistant is not very well paid. Rennie’s spectacular experiments had won him a large appropriation for his psychophysics department, and he offered good money to his subjects. In a few hours with him, I could earn enough to put me over the hump.

  Still... “I didn’t know there was any danger,” I said. “It’s not as if I were going back physically into the past.”

  “No.” He looked beyond me, and the words came out stiffly: “But this is such a new thing ... uncontrollable... I don’t know how far back you’ll go, or what will happen. Suppose the, er, body you’re in ... suppose it has a bad shock while you’re there. What would the effect be on you?”

  “Why—” I hesitated. “No telling, I guess.”

  “And then there are always ... psychological results. It’ll take you days to get back to normal. Some of my subjects returned terrified, others were unaccountably depressed— Well, you may find yourself in a tailspin, Mr. Armand, though I imagine you’ll pull out of it in a week or so.”

  “I can stand it.” I buried my face in the wineglass.

  “Later on, when I have enough data, it will be better,” said Rennie. “Now about you: all I know is that you’re a good hypnotic subject. And, yes, you claim French ancestry, don’t you?”

  “From the Dordogne,” I nodded. “My parents came to America.”

  “It doesn’t mean much,” said Rennie. “The races of Europe are so scrambled. I’m going to try to send you back as far as possible. To date I’ve only managed a few generations.” He sipped raggedly. “Do you understand the theory of temporal psycho-displacement?”

  “A little,” I answered. “Let’s see... my world line through the space time continuum goes back even further than my birth - it goes back through all my ancestors, branching off at each point where one of them was begotten. The mind, the soul, whatever you call it, is a kind of pattern which can be shunted down the world line into one of those ancestors.”

  “Good enough,” he said. “At least you haven’t swallowed this reincarnation nonsense. All I’ve done actually, is systematize the work of a great many amateur experimenters who never quite realized what they had.”

  “Why can’t you send me into the future?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “I just can’t - so far, anyway. Now you must be aware, Mr. Armand” - he became the parched professor, lecturing me as a shield against his own conscience - ”your body will be in a state of deep hypnosis for several hours. Your... mind... will be back sharing the brain of some ancestor, for the same length of time. You will not only be a spectator; you will actually be that ancestor. When you return, you will have the memories of what happened. That’s all.”

  A shadowy dread was making my heart flutter, but I stood up, jerkily, “Shall we start?”

  He took me into the laboratory and I stretched out on a couch. Certain drugs were injected and the hypnotic mirror began to spin, a whirling blot of light against a darkness that grew around me.

  I fell into night.

  * * * *

  I was Argnach-eskaladuan-tork-luk, which means He Who Draws the Bow Against the Horse, but my true name I held secret from warlocks and the wind ghost
s, and I shall not reveal it. When my first thin beard sprouted, I was given my open name because I made a bow and with it crippled one of the shaggy wild horses so that I could run it down and cut its throat and drag it home. That was on my Journey, which the boys make alone. Afterward we are taken off to a certain place in the dark, and the wind ghosts dance in aurochs hides before us, and the first joint of the middle finger is cut off and given them to eat. More than this I may not say. When it is over, we are men and can take wives.

  This had happened - I do not know how long ago. The Men do not count time. But I was still in the pride of my youth. Tonight it was a cold pride, for I went by myself with small hope of returning.

  Snow gusted across my path as I walked down the mountain slope. Trees talked in the huge noisy wind, and I heard the remote scream of a longtooth. Perhaps it was the longtooth which had eaten Andutannalok-gargut the time fall burned in the rainy forests. I shuddered and fingered the Mother charm in my pouch, for I had no wish to meet a beast with Andutannalok’s ghost looking out of its eyes.

  The storm was waning. I saw the low clouds break overhead and stars trembled between sere branches. Still the dry snow hissed across my feet and crusted the fur of my clothing. There was little but darkness to see; I felt my way with a blind knowledge.

  I wore a heavy coat, trousers, and boots, whose leather should be proof against spearthrust. But the goblins had more strength in their arms than a Man. A hurled stone from one of them could smash my skull like a ripe fruit. And then my body would be left for wolves to devour, and where should my poor gaunt ghost find a home? The wind would harry it through the forests and up over the northern tundras.

  I bore weapons: spear, bow, flint knife with thong-bound handle. The arrows were tipped with wolf bone, to bite the sharper, and the wooden spear had been fire-hardened with many chants by Ingmarak, the Ghost Man. In my pouch was the little stone Mother image, my fingers caressed her great comforting breasts, but it was cold and the wind shrieked and I was altogether alone.

  Down below me I heard the loud chill brawling of the river, where it cut through the steep-sided valley. On its farther side was the goblin lair.

  There were none in the cave to forbid my going after Evavy-unaroa, my white witch girl, but they had spoken against it and no one would come along. Ingmarak shook his bald head and blinked at me with dim rheumy eyes. “It is not well, Argnach,” he said. “There is no good to be had in Goblin Land. Take another wife.”

  “I only wish Evavy-unaroa,” I told him.

  The elders mumbled and the children looked with wide frightened eyes from the inner cave.

  I had won her only last summer. She was young and untaken, my eyes wandered and saw her with hunger, and she smiled back on me. They had all been a little afraid of her, though a more dear and merry creature had never walked the earth, and no one asked to borrow her after we had made the sacrifices. That suited me well enough.

  The soapstone lamps guttered and flared, filling the cave with restless shadows, and the wind flapped the skin curtain at its mouth. We sat warm within, a good store of meat gloriously rotting in one corner, and folk should have been gay. But when I told them I was bound into Goblin Land to fetch Evavy back, fear walked into the cave and sat down with us.

  “They have already eaten her,” said Vuotak-nanavo, the one-eyed man who braided his beard and could smell game half a day’s walk into the breeze. “Her and the unborn child both, they are eaten, and lest their ghosts do not stay in the goblin bellies but come back here, we would do well to lay another handax at the cave mouth.”

  “Perhaps they have not been eaten,” I replied. “It is my weird to go.”

  When I had said this, there was no turning back, and no one spoke. Finally Ingmarak, the Ghost Man, rose. “Tomorrow we will make spells,” he said.

  There was a great deal we did on that day and in the twilight. All saw me take a lamp, and the twig brushes and the little pots of paint, into the far reaches of the cave. There I drew myself with a bow, shooting the goblins, and painted my own face. What else was done I may not tell.

  Ingmarak related to me what was known of the goblins. There were old stories that they had once held all the land, till the Men came from the direction of winter sunrise and slowly crowded them out. There had never been much fighting, we were too afraid of them and ourselves had nothing worth their robbery; they chipped their flints somewhat differently from us, but no worse, and seemed to have less need of warm clothes. Now they dwelt on the other side of the river, where no Man ventured.

  But Evavy had gone to the river to fetch some of the stones in its bed. There were strong stones in that water, for it was believed to flow from the far north, where Father Mammoth walked the tundras and shook his tusks beneath the cliffs of the Ice. But Evavy wanted only those stones which were good to look on, to make a necklace for her child when it was born. She went alone because there were certain words to say, bearing a spear and a torch against beasts, and was not afraid.

  But when she made no return, I went to the river bank and in the trampled snow saw what had happened. A goblin party had stolen her. If she still lived, she was on their side of the water now.

  I heard it rushing wild and noisy as I came out of the forest. It was a long snake of blackness between white banks and icy trees, with here and there a dull gleam as of polished rock. The wind was dropping all the time, but a breath of cold came from the water and I saw ice floes spinning past.

  During the day I had taken an ax and cut down a small tree. A flinthead ax is not a good weapon, I think, but it is a useful tool. I found the trunk and the flattened branch I meant for a paddle. Now it was to cross the river and not be drowned.

  I took off my boots and hung them around my neck. The snow bit my feet like teeth. Looking up, I saw the last clouds like black, breaking mountains. It was clear in the north, and the dead hunters were dancing in the sky. I saw them whirling in many colors. For them I cut a lock of hair off with my knife, and stood by the river and said into the dying wind:

  “I am Argnach-eskaladuan-tork-luk, a man of the Men, who here gives you a piece of his life. For this gift, of course, I ask no return. But know, Sky Hunters, that I am bound into Goblin Land to fetch back my wife, Evavy-unaroa the white witch girl, and for any aid I may receive I offer a fat part of every kill I make for the rest of my days on earth.”

  The huge curtains of light flapped among the stars, and my voice was very small and lonely. I felt the cold around my feet eating into the bones, and launched my tree with a grunt.

  At once the river had me, I went down the stream, driving my paddle into waters gone crazy and foaming about me. I was numbed in the feet, numbed in the head. What happened to me seemed to be happening to a stranger far off while I, the I of my secret name, stood on a high mountain thinking strong thoughts. I thought that it was wrong to sit with feet in bitter water, and that by fire and scraping a log could be so hollowed out that men might sit within it and fish.

  Then my deadened toes bumped on stones, the log grated in the shallows, and I scrambled ashore drawing it after me. I sat for a while rubbing life back into my feet with a fox skin. When that was done I put on my boots and started into Goblin Land, marking well the path I took.

  The goblins had been seen often enough on their side of the river, hunched and furtive, so I knew they could not live very far away. I went at an easy pace, snuffing the now quiet air for smoke that would guide me to their den. I was somewhat afraid, but not much, because my weird was on me and there could be no changing whatever was going to happen.

  Nothing had been quite real to me since the evening I saw goblin tracks across Evavy’s bootprints. It had been as if I were already half a ghost.

  I do not understand why I should have lost all wariness toward Evavy, I alone of all the Men. They agreed she was tall and well shaped, brave of heart and free with her laughter. But she had been born with blue eyes and yellow hair, like the goblins themselves It was said of old,
to be sure, that there had once been mating between Men and goblins, so that now and again the light-colored strain appeared in a cave; but no one alive could remember any such child. Thus there was clearly a Power in Evavy-unaroa, and folk were just a little afraid of her.

  Nevertheless, I, Argnach, had not been afraid. I knew that the Power which dwelt in her was only that of the Mother. It was the same Power which makes a bull elk stand and die for his mates.

  The unmistakable sound of an elk herd crashing through young trees put that thought in me. There was a dim wintry light now, stealing between the branches of twisted firs. I could see the signs of plentiful game, more than we had on our side of the river. Much more!

  And there were coming to be more mouths in our cave than the hunting men and the gathering women and fishing boys could feed.

  I came out on a ridge which climbed northward to end in a blackness across the stars. And the low chill breeze brought me smoke.