The Potter of Firsk and Other Stories

by Jack Vance

  This time he had only a moment to wait. The chief came striding up from the village, burnoose flapping back from powerful limbs, a grim smile on his face.

  “So—it is the insolent lordling again. Good—we are in need of bone-lime, and yours will suit us admirably. Prepare your soul for the Great Burn, and your next life will be the eternal glory of a perfect glaze.”

  Thomm felt fear, but he also felt a kind of desperate recklessness. He touched his gun. “I’ll kill a lot of Potters, and you’ll be the first,” he said in a voice that sounded strange to him. “I’ve come for the four Mi-Tuun that you took from Penolpan. These raids have got to stop. You don’t seem to understand that we can punish you.”

  The chief put his hands behind his back, apparently unimpressed. “You may fly like the birds, but birds can do no more than defile those below.”

  Thomm pulled out his gamma-gun, pointed to a boulder a quarter-mile away. “Watch that rock.” And he blasted the granite to gravel with an explosive pellet.

  The chief drew back, eyebrows raised. “In truth, you wield more sting than I believed. But—” he gestured to the ring of burnoosed Potters around Thomm “—we can kill you before you can do much damage. We Potters do not fear death, which is merely eternal meditation from the glass.”

  “Listen to me,” said Thomm earnestly. “I came not to threaten, but to bargain. My superior, Covill, gave me orders to destroy the mountain, blast away your caves—and I can do it as easily as I blasted that rock.”

  A mutter arose from the Potters.

  “If I’m harmed, be sure that you’ll suffer. But, as I say, I’ve come down here, against my superior’s orders, to make a bargain with you.”

  “What sort of bargain can interest us?” said the Chief Potter disdainfully. “We care for nothing but our craft.” He gave a sign and, before Thomm could twitch, two burly Potters had gripped him, wrested the gun from his hand.

  “I can give you the secret of the true yellow glaze,” shouted Thomm desperately. “The royal fluorescent yellow that will stand the fire of your kiln!”

  “Empty words,” said the chief. Mockingly he asked: “And what do you want for your secret?”

  “The return of the four Mi-Tuun you’ve just stolen from Penolpan, and your word never to raid again.”

  The chief listened intently, pondered a moment. “How then would we formulate our glaze?” He spoke with a patient air, like a man explaining a practical truth to a child. “Bone-lime is one of our most necessary fluxes.”

  “As Covill told you, we can give you unlimited quantities of lime, with any properties you ask for. On Earth we have made pottery for thousands of years and we know a great deal of such things.”

  The Chief Potter tossed his head. “That is evidently untrue. Look—” he kicked Thomm’s gamma-gun “—the substance of this is dull opaque metal. A people knowing clay and transparent glass would never use material of that sort.”

  “Perhaps it would be wise to let me demonstrate,” suggested Thomm. “If I show you the yellow glaze, then will you bargain with me?”

  The Chief Potter scrutinized Thomm almost a full minute. Grudgingly: “What sort of yellow can you make?”

  Thomm said wryly: “I’m not a potter, and I can’t predict exactly—but the formula I have in mind can produce any shade from light luminous yellow to vivid orange.”

  The chief made a signal. “Release him. We will make him eat his words.”

  Thomm stretched his muscles, cramped under the grip of the Potters. He reached to the ground, picked up his gamma-gun, holstered it, under the sardonic eyes of the Chief Potter.

  “Our bargain is this,” said Thomm, “I show you how to make yellow glaze, and guarantee you a plentiful supply of lime. You will release the Mi-Tuun to me and undertake never to raid Penolpan for live men and women.”

  “The bargain is conditional on the yellow glaze,” said the Chief Potter. “We ourselves can produce dingy yellows as often as we wish. If your yellow comes clear and true from the fire, I agree to your bargain. If not, we potters hold you a charlatan and your spirit will be lodged forever in the basest sort of utensil.”

  Thomm went to the copter, unsnapped the atom bomb from the frame, discarded the parachute. Shouldering the long cylinder, he said: “Take me to your pottery. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Without a word the Chief Potter took him down the slope to the long shed, and they entered through an arched stone doorway. To the right stood bins of clay, a row of wheels, twenty or thirty lined against one wall, and in the center a rack crowded with drying ware. To the left stood vats, further shelves and tables. From a doorway came a harsh grinding sound, evidently a mill of some sort. The Chief Potter led Thomm to the left, past the glazing tables and to the end of the shed. Here were shelves lined with various crocks, tubs and sacks, these marked in symbols strange to Thomm. And through a doorway nearby, apparently unguarded, Thomm glimpsed the Mi-Tuun, seated despondently, passively, on benches. The girl Su-then looked up, saw him, and her mouth fell open. She jumped to her feet, hesitated in the doorway, deterred by the stern form of the Chief Potter.

  Thomm said to her: “You’re a free woman—with a little luck.” Then turning to the Chief Potter: “What kind of acid do you have?”

  The chief pointed to a row of stoneware flagons. “The acid of salt, the acid of vinegar, the acid of fluor spar, the acid of saltpeter, the acid of sulphur.”

  Thomm nodded, and laying the bomb on a table, opened the hinged door, withdrew one of the uranium slugs. Into five porcelain bowls he carved slivers of uranium with his pocket knife, and into each bowl he poured a quantity of acid, a different acid into each. Bubbles of gas fumed up from the metal.

  The Chief Potter watched with folded arms. “What are you trying to do?”

  Thomm stood back, studied his fuming beakers. “I want to precipitate a uranium salt. Get me soda and lye.”

  Finally a yellow powder settled in one of his beakers; this he seized upon and washed triumphantly.

  “Now,” he told the Chief Potter, “bring me clear glaze.”

  He poured out six trays of glaze and mixed into each a varying amount of his yellow salt. With tired and slumped shoulders he stood back, gestured. “There’s your glaze. Test it.”

  The chief gave an order; a Potter came up with a trayful of tiles. The chief strode to the table, scrawled a number on the first bowl, dipped a tile into the glaze, numbered the tile correspondingly. This he did for each of the batches.

  He stood back, and one of the Potters loaded the tiles in a small brick oven, closed the door, kindled a fire below.

  “Now,” said the Chief Potter, “you have twenty hours to question whether the burn will bring you life or death. You may as well spend the time in the company of your friends. You cannot leave, you will be well guarded.” He turned abruptly, strode off down the central aisle.

  Thomm turned to the nearby room, where Su-then stood in the doorway. She fell into his arms naturally, gladly.

  The hours passed. Flame roared up past the oven and the bricks glowed red-hot—yellow-hot—yellow-white, and the fire was gradually drawn. Now the tiles lay cooling and behind the bricked-up door the colors were already set, and Thomm fought the impulse to tear open the brick. Darkness came; he fell into a fitful doze with Su-then’s head resting on his shoulder.

  Heavy footsteps aroused him; he went to the doorway. The Chief Potter was drawing aside the bricked-up door. Thomm approached, stood staring. It was dark inside; only the white gleam of the tiles could be seen, the sheen of colored glass on top. The Chief Potter reached into the kiln, pulled out the first tile. A muddy mustard-colored blotch encrusted the top. Thomm swallowed hard. The chief smiled at him sardonically. He reached for another. This was a mass of brownish blisters. The chief smiled again, reached in once more. A pad of mud.

  The chief’s smile was broad. “Lordling, your glazes are worse than the feeblest attempts of our children.”

  He reached in a
gain. A burst of brilliant yellow, and it seemed the whole room shone.

  The Chief Potter gasped, the other Potters leaned forward, and Thomm sank back against the wall. “Yellow—”

  When Thomm at last returned to the Bureau he found Covill in a fury. “Where in thunder have you been? I sent you out on business which should take you two hours and you stay two days.”

  Thomm said: “I got the four Mi-Tuun back and made a contract with the Potters. No more raiding.”

  Covill’s mouth slackened. “You what?”

  Thomm repeated his information.

  “You didn’t follow my instructions?”

  “No,” said Thomm. “I thought I had a better idea, and the way it turned out, I had.”

  Covill’s eyes were hard blue fires. “Thomm, you’re through here, through with Planetary Affairs. If a man can’t be trusted to carry out his superior’s orders, he’s not worth a cent to the Bureau. Get your gear together, and leave on the next packet out.”

  “Just as you wish,” said Thomm, turning away.

  “You’re on company time till four o’clock tonight,” said Covill coldly. “Until then you’ll obey my orders. Take the copter to the hangar, and bring the bomb back to the armory.”

  “You haven’t any more bomb,” said Thomm. “I gave the uranium to the Potters. That was one of the prices of the contract.”

  “What?” bellowed Covill, pop-eyed. “What?”

  “You heard me,” said Thomm. “And if you think you could have used it better by blasting away their livelihood, you’re crazy.”

  “Thomm, you get in that copter, you go out and get that uranium. Don’t come back without it. Why, you abysmal blasted imbecile, with that uranium, those Potters could tear Penolpan clear off the face of the planet.”

  “If you want that uranium,” said Thomm, “you go out and get it. I’m fired. I’m through.”

  Covill stared, swelling like a toad in his rage. Words came thickly from his mouth.

  Thomm said: “If I were you, I’d let sleeping dogs lie. I think it would be dangerous business trying to get that uranium back.”

  Covill turned, buckled a pair of gamma-guns about his waist, stalked out the door. Thomm heard the whirr of copter blades.

  “There goes a brave man,” Thomm said to himself. “And there goes a fool.”

  Three weeks later Su-then excitedly announced visitors, and Thomm, looking up, was astounded to see the Chief Potter, with two other Potters behind—stern, forbidding in their gray burnooses.

  Thomm greeted them with courtesy, offered them seats, but they remained standing.

  “I came down to the city,” said the Chief Potter, “to inquire if the contract we made was still bound and good.”

  “So far as I am concerned,” said Thomm.

  “A madman came to the village of the Potters,” said the Chief Potter. “He said that you had no authority, that our agreement was good enough, but he couldn’t allow the Potters to keep the heavy metal that makes glass like the sunset.”

  Thomm said: “Then what happened?”

  “There was violence,” said the Chief Potter without accent. “He killed six good wheel-men. But that is no matter. I come to find whether our contract is good.”

  “Yes,” said Thomm. “It is bound by my word and by the word of my great chief back on Earth. I have spoken to him and he says the contract is good.”

  The Chief Potter nodded. “In that case, I bring you a present.” He gestured, and one of his men laid a large bowl on Thomm’s desk, a bowl of marvelous yellow radiance.

  “The madman is a lucky man indeed,” said the Chief Potter, “for his spirit dwells in the brightest glass ever to come from the Great Burn.”

  Thomm’s eyebrows shot up. “You mean that Covill’s bones—”

  “The fiery soul of the madman has given luster to an already glorious glaze,” said the Chief Potter. “He lives forever in the entrancing shimmer—”

  The Visitors

  Chief Officer Avery came up the tube into the bridge sucking a bulb of coffee. Second Mate Dart rose stiffly from the seat where he had spent his watch. “She’s all yours.”

  Avery was thin, hawk-nosed. His complexion was sallow leather color, his hair lank and sparse. He had black eyes between narrow lids and the angle at which they crossed his cheeks gave his face a look of clownish melancholy. Dart was stocky, stub-featured. His hair was Airedale-red; he was abrupt and positive in his movements. Stretching with a quick wide sweep of short arms, he joined Avery by the forward cupola.

  Avery leaned forward, looked up, down, right, left, tracing the veins of rose and electric blue across the black of macroid space. He said over his shoulder, “She’s dim. Turn her up. Can’t see twenty feet at this level.”

  Dart, blinking, half-asleep, adjusted a rheostat, increasing the flood of polarized light from the bow projectors, and the gristle-like lines of force out in macroid space shone with greater brilliance and detail.

  Avery grunted, “That’s a lot different. And there’s a focus coming up, where those two stringers dent in toward each other.”

  Dart came to watch as the lines trembled, bulged toward each other. Films of color began to flow from the area: wan yellow, pink, green. Suddenly a hot spark of red appeared.

  “There’s the focus,” said Avery sourly. “Three feet from your nose, the center of a sun.”

  Dart ruefully rubbed his chin, thankful that Avery rather than Captain Badt had caught him dozing.

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Small to medium, from the kink to that inner blue line,” said Avery. “Well, let’s check for planets; that’s what we’re out here for.”

  Inch by inch they searched the cupola, up, down, right, left. Dart said, “By golly, here it is. Just like the illustration in the text. Maybe we’ll slice that bonus yet.”

  The hot red spark faded to yellow; the twist of colored veins which signified a planet started to uncoil. Avery sprang back, snapped the drift switch, and the lines became static.

  For a moment he studied the pattern in the hemispherical cupola. “The sun’s right about here.” He indicated a point between himself and Dart. “The planet’s just inside the cupola.”

  “We’re big men,” said Dart.

  Avery twisted his mouth in a saturnine grimace. “Either big, or a long way off in a freak direction.”

  “With all these guys running loose claiming to be geniuses,” said Dart, “it’s funny one of them hasn’t figured it out.”

  Avery had been searching the cupola for further kinks. “Figure what out?”

  “What happens when we go into macroid space.”

  “You’re a dreamer,” said Avery. “The universe shrinks, or we and the ship get cosmically big. The main thing is, we get there. Talk to Bascomb, he’ll give you ten answers, all different. That’s genius for you.” Bascomb was the ship’s biologist, who had gained himself the reputation of a tireless polemist and theoretician.

  Avery took one more look at the kink. “Call the captain, ring general quarters. We’re going into normal space.”

  * * *

  The unigen was an intelligent organism, though its characteristics included neither form nor structure. Its components were mobile nodes of a luminous substance which was neither matter nor yet energy. There were millions of nodes and each was connected with every other node by tendrils similar to the lines of force in macroid space.

  The unigen might be compared to a great brain, the nodes corresponding to the gray cells, the lines of force to the nerve tissue. It might appear as a bright sphere, or it might disperse its nodes at light speed to all corners of the universe.

  Like every other aspect of reality, the unigen was a victim of entropy; to survive, it processed energy down the scale of availability, acquiring the energy from radioactive matter. The unigen’s business of living included a constant search for energy.

  There were periods of plenitude when the unigen would wax heavy with energy and
might expand the number of its nodes by a kind of parthenogenetic fission. Other times the nodes would wane, glowing only feebly, and the unigen would seek energy stuff like a wolf, stalking the planets, satellites, meteors and dark stars for crumbs of even low-grade energy material. During a lean time, one of the nodes, approaching the planet of a small sun, became aware of quanta suggesting the presence of radioactivity: a spangle of distinctive color against a mottled background.

  Hope, an emotion compounded of desire and imagination, was not alien to the unigen. It speeded the node forward and the radiation came hard and sharp. The node flitted down through a high scud of cloud. The glow of colored light stretched, elongated, and near its middle shone a markedly bright spot, like a diamond on a band of silver, evidently where the radioactive material broke surface. Toward this spot the unigen directed the node.

  As it dropped, the unigen sought evidences of danger: the spoor of energy-eaters, sources of static electricity, such as clouds, which might disrupt the tight coils of a node with a spark.

  The air was clear and the planet seemed free of dangerous life-forms. The node fell like a bright snowflake toward the central concentration of radioactivity.

  * * *

  The ship circled the planet in a reconnaissance orbit. Captain Badt, taciturn and something of a martinet, stood by the bridge telescreen, receiving reports from the technicians and keeping his opinions to himself.

  Dart muttered to Avery in a disgruntled voice, “I’d hardly call the place a tourist planet.”

  “Looks pretty grim in spots, but it looks like a bonus.”

  Dart sighed, shook his round red head. “There never yet was a world so tough that colonists wouldn’t flock out to it. If it’s not cold enough to freeze air and not hot enough to boil water, and if you can breathe without popping your eyes, then it’s land, and men seem to want it.”

  “I was born on a planet a hell of a lot worse than this,” said Avery shortly.

  Dart was silent a moment; then, with the air of a man who refuses to admit discouragement, went on. “Well, it’s livable. Breathable atmosphere, temperature and gravity inside the critical area, and—so far—no signs of life.” He went to the cupola, which now overlooked the world below. “At home the ocean’s blue. It’s yellow on Alexander, red on Coralasan. Here it’s green. Grass by-Jesus green.”