Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  This was infinity, where time was not. For milleniums, he thought, he drifted there upon oblivion. Milleniums, or moments!

  From far away a something began to be, He did not recognize it—he knew only that where nothingness had been, now there was a something. He heard a call. That was it, a call, a sound of incredible sweetness.

  A voice? Yes, it was a voice of sheer melody, saying a name. He did not know the name.

  “Kern—Kern,” it cried. The syllable had no meaning to him, but the sweetness of the voice that shaped it gradually began to rouse him from his stupor. Over and over the syllable sounded, and then with a sudden blaze of awareness he knew it for what it was.

  “My name!” he thought with amazement. “My own name!”

  The mind came back into him, and he knew. Like Bruce Hallam, he had hung frozen and empty from the touch of the all-consuming fire which had been himself. Like Bruce, he had been emptier than death.

  “Kern, Kern, come back,” wailed the voice of impossible sweetness. He knew it now. Byrna’s voice, lovely as a siren’s magical song, summoning him back to the living.

  Slowly, slowly, he felt warmth return to him. Slowly he drew his mind together again, and then his body came back around him, and with infinite effort he lifted the eyelids that shut out the world.

  He lay on a hillside in the full warm tide of the sunlight which poured down from an empty sky. There was no Mountain any more. No vertiginous thunderhead of glass towering up the zenith, casting its pale shadow across the world. Someone bent over him, holding her wings to shut the sun’s glare from his eyes. Her wings glistened.

  Tentatively he flexed his own. And then strength came back with a magical rush to him, and he sat up with a strong beat of his pinions that almost lifted him from the ground. All around him smiling faces watched in the shadow of their wings.

  And he knew that he was free at last, and the winged world was free. And he was no longer alien.

  FURY

  Part One of Three. A new novel of the undersea civilization of Venus—an undersea civilization that couldn’t make up its mind to crawl out of the comfortable, but throttling, shells, the great Keeps. A sequel to “Clash By Night.”

  INTRODUCTION

  It was white night upon Earth and twilight’s dawn on Venus.

  All men knew of the shining darkness that had turned Earth into a star in the clouded skies. Few men understood that on Venus dawn had merged imperceptibly into dusk, in an era that never knew noon. For as the slow twilight drew on, the undersea lights flamed brighter and brighter, turning the great Keeps into enchanted citadels beneath the shallow sea.

  Seven hundred years ago those lights were brightest. Six hundred years had passed since the destruction of Earth. It was the Twenty-seventh Century.

  Time had slowed now. In the beginning it had moved much faster. There was much to be done, and the advanced technologies of the period had a nearly impossible task to fulfill. Venus was uninhabitable. But men had to live on Venus.

  On Earth the Jurassic had passed before humans evolved into a reasoning race. Man is both tough and fragile. How fragile will be understood when a volcano erupts or the earth shakes. How tough will be understood when you know that colonics existed for as long as two months on the Venusian continents.

  Man never knew the fury of the Jurassic—on Earth. On Venus it was worse. When you pull a weed from the hydroponic tanks, you may think of the cycads of a forgotten age; when you see a small, darting lizard, you may remember that giants once walked the earth in this guise. And Venus was alien land. Its ecology paralleled, but was not identical, with the ecology of Earth.

  Man had no weapons to conquer the Venus lands. His weapons were either too weak or too potent. He could destroy utterly, or he could wound lightly, but he could not live on the surface of Venus. He was faced with an antagonist no man had ever known, because the equivalent had perished from Earth before marsupials changed to true mammals.

  He faced fury.

  And he fled.

  There was safety of a sort undersea. Science had perfected interplanetary travel and had destroyed Earth; science could build artificial environments on the ocean bottom. The impervium domes were built. Beneath them the cities began to rise.

  The cities were completed.

  As soon as that happened, dawn on Venus changed to twilight. Man had returned to the sea from which he sprang. The race had returned to the racial womb.

  Despair thy charm;

  And let the angel whom thou still hast serv’d

  Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother’s womb

  Untimely ripp’d.

  —Shakespeare

  Sam Marker’s birth was a double prophecy. It showed what was happening to the great Keeps where civilization’s lights still burned, and it foreshadowed Sam’s life in those underwater fortresses and out of them. His mother Bessi was a fragile, pretty woman who should have known better than to have a child. She was narrow-hipped and tiny. Sam tore the life out of her before the emergency Caesarean released him into a world that he had to smash before it could smash him.

  That was why Blaze Harker hated his son with such a blind, vicious hatred. Blaze could never think of the boy without remembering what had happened that night. He could never hear Sam’s voice without hearing Bessi’s thin, frightened screams. The caudal anesthesia hadn’t helped much, because Bessi was psychologically as well as physically unfit for motherhood. And Blaze never saw Sam’s red hair without thinking of blood.

  Blaze and Bessi—it was a Romeo and Juliet story with a happy ending, up to the time Sam was conceived. They were casual, purposeless hedonists. In the Keeps you had to choose. You could either find a drive, an incentive—be one of the technicians or artists—or you could drift. The technologies made a broad field, everything from thalassopolitics to the rigidly limited nuclear physics. But drifting was easy, if you could afford it. Even if you couldn’t, lotus-eating was cheap in the Keeps. You simply didn’t go in for the expensive pleasures like the Olympus rooms and the arenas.

  Still, Blaze and Bessi could afford the best. Their idyll could make a saga of hedonism. And it seemed that it would have a happy ending, for in the Keeps it wasn’t the individual who paid. It was the race that was paying.

  After Bessi died, Blaze had nothing left except hatred.

  These were the generations of Harker:

  Geoffrey begat Raoul; Raoul begat Zachariah; Zachariah begat Blaze; and Blaze begat Sam.

  Blaze relaxed in the cushioned seat and looked at his great-great-grand-father.

  “You can go to the devil,” he said. “All of you.”

  Geoffrey was a tall, muscular, blond man with curiously large ears and feet. He said, “You talk like that because you’re young, that’s all. How old are you now? Not twenty!”

  “It’s my affair,” Blaze said.

  “I’ll be two hundred in another twenty years,” Geoffrey said. “I had sense enough to wait till I was past fifty before fathering a son. I had sense enough not to use my common-law wife for breeding. Why blame the child?”

  Blaze stubbornly looked at his fingers.

  His father Zachariah, who had been glaring silently, sprang up and snapped, “He’s psychotic! Where he belongs is in a psych-hospital. They’d get the truth out of him!”

  Blaze smiled. “I took precautions, Father,” he said mildly. “I took a number of tests and exams before I came here today. Administration’s approved my I.Q. and my sanity. I’m thoroughly compos mentis. Legally, too. There’s nothing any of you can do, and you know it.”

  “Even a two-week-old child has his civil rights,” said Raoul, who was thin, dark, elegantly tailored in soft celoflex, and seemed wryly amused by the entire scene. “But you’ve been careful not to admit anything, eh, Blaze?”

  “Very careful.”

  Geoffrey hunched his buffalo shoulders forward, met Blaze’s eyes with his own cool blue ones, and said, “Where’s the boy?”

  “I don’
t know.”

  Zachariah said furiously, “My grandson—we’ll find him! Be sure of that! If he’s in Delaware Keep we’ll find him—or if he’s on Venus!”

  “Exactly,” Raoul agreed. “The Harkers are rather powerful, Blaze. You should know that. That’s why you’ve been allowed to do exactly as you wanted all your life. But that’s stopping now.”

  “I don’t think it is stopping,” Blaze said. “I’ve a great deal of money of my own. As for your finding . . . him . . . have you thought that it might be difficult?”

  “We’re a powerful family,” Geoffrey said steadily.

  “So we are,” Blaze said. “But what if you can’t recognize the boy when you find him?”

  He smiled.

  The first thing they did was to give him a depilatory treatment. Blaze couldn’t endure the possibility that dyed hair would grow back red. The baby’s scanty growth of auburn fuzz was removed. It would never grow again.

  A culture catering to hedonism has its perversions of science. And Blaze could pay well. More than one technician had been wrecked by pleasure-addiction; such men were usually capable—when they were sober. But it was a woman Blaze found, finally, and she was capable only when alive. She lived when she was wearing the Happy Cloak. She wouldn’t live long; Happy Cloak addicts lasted about two years, on the average. The thing was a biological adaptation of an organism found in the Venusian seas. It had been illegally developed, after its potentialities were first realized. In its native state, it got its prey by touching it. After that neuro-contact had been established. the prey was quite satisfied to be ingested.

  It was a beautiful garment, a living white like the white of a pearl, shivering softly with rippling lights, stirring with a terrible, ecstatic movement of its own as the lethal symbiosis was established. It was beautiful as the woman technician wore it, as she moved about the bright, quiet room in a tranced concentration upon the task that would pay her enough to insure her death within two years. She was very capable. She knew endocrinology. When she had finished, Sam Harker had forever lost his heritage. The matrix had been set—or, rather, altered from its original pattern.

  Thalamus, thyroid, pineal—tiny tumps of tissue, some already active, some waiting till the trigger of approaching maturity started the secretions. The infant was unformed, a somewhat larger lump of tissue, with cartilage for bones and his soft skull imperfectly sutured as yet.

  “Not a monster,” Blaze had said, thinking about Bessi all the time.

  “No, nothing extreme. Short, fleshy—thick!”

  The bandaged lump of tissue lay still on the operating table. Germicidal lamps focused on the anaesthetized form.

  The woman, swimming in anticipated ecstasy, managed to touch a summoning signal-button. Then she lay down quietly on the floor, the shining pearly garment caressing her. Her tranced eyes looked up, flat and empty as mirrors. The man who came in gave the Happy Cloak a wide berth. He began the necessary post-operative routine.

  The elder Harkers watched Blaze, hoping they could find the child through his father. But Blaze had refined his plan too thoroughly to leave such loopholes. In a secret place he had Sam’s fingerprints and retina-prints, and he knew that through those he could locate his son at any time. He was in no hurry. What would happen would happen. It was inevitable—now. Given the basic ingredients, and the stable environment, there was no hope at all for Sam Harker.

  Blaze set an alarm clock in his mind, an alarm that would not ring for many years. Meanwhile, having faced reality for the first time in his life, he did his utmost to forget it again. He never forget Bessi, though he tried. He plunged back into the bright, euphoric spin of hedonism in the Keeps.

  The early years merged into the unremembered past. Time moved more slowly for him then. Days and hours dragged. The man and woman he knew as father and mother had nothing in common with him, even then. For the operation had not altered his mind; his intelligence, his ingenuity, he had inherited from half-mutant ancestors. Though the mutation was merely one of longevity, that trait had made it possible for the Harkers to rise to dominance on Venus. They were not the only long-lived ones, by any means; there were a few hundred others who had a life-expectancy of from two to seven hundred years, depending on various complicated factors. But the strain bred true. It was easy to identify them.

  There was a carnival season once, he remembered, and his foster parents awkwardly donned finery and went to mingle with the rest. He was old enough to be a reasoning animal by then. He had already seen glamour from a distance, but he had never seen it in operation.

  Carnival was a respected custom. All Delaware Keep was shining. Colored perfumes hung like a haze above the moving Ways, clinging to the merrymakers as they passed. It was a time when all classes mingled.

  Technically there were no lower classes. Actually—

  He saw a woman—the loveliest woman he had ever seen. Her gown was blue. That does not describe its color in the least. It was a deep, rich, different blue, so velvety and smooth that the boy ached to touch it. He was too young to understand the subtlety of the gown’s cut, its sharp, clean lines, the way it enhanced the woman’s face and her corn-yellow hair. He saw her from a distance and was filled with a violent need to know more about her.

  His foster mother could not tell him what he wanted.

  “That’s Kedre Walton. She must be two, three hundred years old by now.”

  “Yes.” Years meant nothing. “But who is she?”

  “Oh—she runs a lot of things.”

  “This is a farewell party, my dear,” she said.

  “So soon?”

  “Sixty years—hasn’t it been?”

  “Kedre, Kedre—sometimes I wish our lives weren’t so long.”

  She smiled at him. “Then we’d never have met. We immortals gravitate to the same level—so we do meet.”

  Old Zachariah Harker reached for her hand. Beneath their terrace the Keep glittered with carnival.

  “It’s always new,” he said.

  “It wouldn’t be, though, if we’d stayed together that first time. Imagine being bound together indissolubly for hundreds of years!”

  Zachariah gave her a shrewd, questioning stare.

  “A matter of proportion, probably,” he said. “Immortals shouldn’t live in the Keeps. The restrictions . . . the older you grow, the more you’ve got to expand.”

  “Well—I am expanding.”

  “Limited by the Keeps. The young men and the short-lived ones don’t see the walls around them. We old ones do. We need more room. Kedre, I’m growing afraid. We’re reaching our limits.”

  “Are we?”

  “Coming close to them—we Immortals. I’m afraid of intellectual death. What’s the use of longevity if you’re not able to use your skills and powers as you gain them? We’re beginning to turn inward.”

  “Well—what then? Interplanetary?”

  “Outposts, perhaps. But on Mars we’d need Keeps, too. And on most of the other planets. I’m thinking of interstellar.”

  “It’s impossible.”

  “It was impossible when man came to Venus. It’s theoretically possible now, Kedre. But not practically so. There’s no . . . no symbolic launching-platform. No interstellar ship could be built or launched from an undersea Keep. I’m speaking symbolically.”

  “My dear,” she said, “we have all the time in the world. We’ll discuss this again in . . . oh, fifty years, perhaps.”

  “And I won’t see you till then?”

  “Of course you’ll see me, Zachariah. But no more than that. It’s time we took our vacation. Then, when we come together again—” She rose. They kissed. That, too, was symbolic. Both of them felt the ardor fading into gray ash—and, because they were in love, they were wise enough and patient enough to wait till the fire could be rekindled again.

  So far the plan had been successful.

  After fifty years had passed they would be lovers again.

  Sam Harker stared at the gau
nt gray-faced man moving purposefully through the throng. He was wearing cheerful celoflex too, but nothing could disguise the fact that he was not a Keep man. He had been sunburned once, so deeply that centuries undersea had not bleached him of that deep tan. His mouth was set in a habitual sneering grin.

  “Who’s that?”

  “What? Where? Oh. I don’t know. Don’t bother me.”

  He hated the compromise that had made him don celoflex. But his old uniform would have been far too conspicuous. Cold, cruel-mouthed, suffering, he let the Way carry him past the enormous globe of the Earth, draped in a black plastic pall, that served in every Keep as a reminder of mankind’s greatest achievement. He went to a walled garden and handed in an identification disk at a barred window. Presently he was admitted to the temple.

  So this was the Temple of Truth!

  It was impressive. He had respect for technicians—logistics, logicians . . . not logistics, that was behind him now. A priest took him into an inner chamber and showed him a chair.

  “You’re Robin Hale?”

  “Right.”

  “Well—you’ve collated and given us all the data we need. But there must be a few clarifying questions. The Logician will ask them himself.”

  He went away. Downstairs, in the hydroponic gardens, a tall, thin, bony-faced man was pottering about cheerfull.

  “The Logician is needed. Robin Hale’s waiting.”

  “Ah, rats,” said the tall, thin man, setting down a spray and scratching his long jaw. “Nothing I can tell the poor fella. He’s sunk.”

  “Sir!”

  “Take it easy. I’ll talk to him. Go away and relax. Got his papers ready?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “O.K. I’ll be along. Don’t rush me.” Muttering, the Logician shambled toward a lift. Presently he was in the control room, watching, through a visor, the gaunt sunburned man sitting uncomfortably on his chair.

  “Robin Hale,” he said, in a new, deeper voice.