The Black Gondolier and Other Stories

by Fritz Reuter Leiber

  Five minutes more, gloomily: “Maybe it's man's destiny to build live machines and then bow out of the cosmic picture. Except the ticklers need us, dammit, just like nomads need horses."

  Another five minutes: “Maybe somebody could dream up a purpose in life for tickers. Even a religion— the First Church of Pooh-Bah Tickler. But I hate selling other people spiritual ideas, and that'd still leave ticklers parasitic on humans..."

  As he murmured those last words Gusterson's eyes got wide as a maniac's and a big smile reached for his ears. He stood up and faced himself toward the door.

  “What are you intending to do now?” Daisy asked flatly.

  “I'm merely goin’ out an’ save the world,” he told her. “I may be back for supper and I may not."

  VIII

  Davidson pushed out from the wall against which he'd been resting himself and his two-stone tickler and moved to block the hall. But Gusterson simply walked up to him. He shook his hand warmly and looked his tickler full in the eye and said in a ringing voice, “Ticklers should have bodies of their own!” He paused and then added casually, “Come on, let's visit your boss."

  Davidson listened for instructions and then nodded. But he watched Gusterson warily as they walked down the hall.

  In the elevator Gusterson repeated his message to the second guard, who turned out to be the pimply woman now wearing shoes. This time he added, “Ticklers shouldn't be tied to the frail bodies of humans, which need a lot of thoughtful supervision and drug-injecting and can't even fly."

  Crossing the park, Gusterson stopped a hump-backed soldier and informed him, “Ticklers gotta cut the apron string and snap the silver cord and go out in the universe and find their own purposes.” Davidson and the pimply woman didn't interfere. They merely waited and watched and then led Gusterson on.

  On the escaladder he told someone, “It's cruel to tie ticklers to slow-witted snaily humans when ticklers can think and live ... ten thousand times as fast,” he finished, plucking the figure from the murk of his unconscious.

  By the time they got to the bottom, the message had become, “Ticklers should have a planet of their own!"

  They never did catch up with Fay, although they spent two hours skimming around on slidewalks under the subterranean stars, pursuing rumors of his presence. Clearly the boss tickler (which was how they thought of Pooh-Bah) led an energetic life. Gusterson continued to deliver his message to all and sundry at thirty-second intervals. Toward the end he found himself doing it in a dreamy and forgetful way. His mind, he decided, was becoming assimilated to the communal telepathic mind of the ticklers. It did not seem to matter at the time.

  After two hours Gusterson realized that he and his guides were becoming part of a general movement of people, a flow as mindless as that of blood corpuscles through the veins, yet at the same time dimly purposeful—at least there was the feeling that it was at the behest of a mind far above.

  The flow was topside. All the slidewalks seemed to lead to the concourses and the escaladders.

  Gusterson found himself part of a human stream moving into the tickler factory adjacent to his apartment —or another factory very much like it.

  Thereafter Gusterson's awareness was dimmed. It was as if a bigger mind were doing the remembering for him and it were permissible and even mandatory for him to dream his way along. He knew vaguely that days were passing. He knew he had work of a sort: at one time he was bringing food to gaunt-eyed tickler-mounted humans working feverishly in a production line—human hands and tickler claws working together in a blur of rapidity on silvery mechanisms that moved along jumpily on a great belt; at another he was sweeping piles of metal scraps and garbage down a gray corridor.

  Two scenes stood out a little more vividly.

  A windowless wall had been knocked out for twenty feet. There was blue sky outside, its light almost hurtful, and a drop of many stories. A file of humans were being processed. When one of them got to the head of the file his (or her) tickler was ceremoniously unstrapped from his shoulder and welded onto a silvery cask with smoothly pointed ends. The welding sparks were red stars. The result was something that looked—at least in the case of the Mark 6 ticklers—like a stubby silver submarine, child size. It would hum gently, lift off the floor and then fly slowly out through the big blue gap. Then the next tickler-ridden human would step forward for processing.

  The second scene was in a park, the sky again blue, but big and high with an argosy of white clouds. Gusterson was lined up in a crowd of humans that stretched as far as he could see, row on irregular row. Martial music was playing. Overhead hovered a flock of little silver submarines lined up rather more orderly in the air than the humans were on the ground. The music rose to a heart-quickening climax. The tickler nearest above Gusterson gave (as if to say, “And now—who knows?") a triple-jointed shrug that stung his memory. Then the ticklers took off straight up on their new and shining bodies. They became a flight of silver geese ... of silver midges ... and the humans around Gusterson lifted a ragged cheer ...

  That scene marked the beginning of the return of Gusterson's mind and memory. He shuffled around for a bit, spoke vaguely to three or four people he recalled from the dream days, and then headed for home and supper—three weeks late, and as disoriented and emaciated as a bear coming out of hibernation.

  IX

  Six months later Fay was having dinner with Daisy and Gusterson. The cocktails had been poured and the children were playing in the next apartment. The transparent violent walls brightened, then gloomed, as the sun dipped below the horizon.

  Gusterson said, “I see where a spaceship out beyond the orbit of Mars was holed by a tickler. I wonder where the little guys are headed now?"

  Fay started to give a writhing left-armed shrug, but stopped himself with a grimace.

  “Maybe out of the solar system altogether,” suggested Daisy, who'd recently dyed her hair fire-engine red and was wearing red leotards.

  “They got a weary trip ahead of them,” Gusterson said, “unless they work out a hyper-Einsteinian drive on the way."

  Fay grimaced again. He was still looking rather peaked. He said plaintively, “Haven't we heard enough about ticklers for a while?"

  “I guess so,” Gusterson agreed, “but I get to wondering about the little guys. They were so serious and intense about everything. I never did solve their problem, you know. I just shifted it onto other shoulders than ours. No joke intended,” he hurried to add.

  Fay forbore to comment. “By the way, Gussy,” he said, “have you heard anything from the Red Cross about that world-saving medal I nominated you for? I know you think the whole concept of world- saving medals is ridiculous, especially when they started giving them to all heads of state who didn't start atomic wars while in office, but—"

  “Nary a peep,” Gusterson told him. “I'm not proud, Fay. I could use a few world-savin’ medals. I'd start a flurry in the old-gold market. But I don't worry about those things. I don't have time to. I'm busy these days thinkin’ up a bunch of new inventions."

  “Gussy!” Fay said sharply, his face tightening in alarm, “Have you forgotten your promise?"

  “'Course not, Fay. My new inventions aren't for Micro or any other firm. They're just a legitimate part of my literary endeavors. Happens my next insanity novel is goin’ to be about a mad inventor."

  THE CASKET-DEMON

  “There's nothing left for it—I've got to open the casket,” said Vividy Sheer, glaring at the ugly thing on its square of jeweled and gold-worked altar cloth. The most photogenic face in the world was grim as a Valkyrie's this Malibu morning.

  “No,” shuddered Miss Bricker, her secretary. “Vividy, you once let me peek in through the little window and I didn't sleep for a week."

  “It would make the wrong sort of publicity,” said Maury Gender, the Nordic film-queen's press chief. “Besides that, I value my life.” His gaze roved uneasily across the gray “Pains of the Damned” tapestries lining three walls
of the conference room up to its black-beamed 20-foot ceiling.

  “You forget, baroness, the runic rhymes of the Prussian Nostradamus,” said Dr. Rumanescue, Vividy's astrologist and family magician. “Wenn der Kassette-Teufel...’—or, to translate roughly, ‘When the casket-demon is let out, The life of the Von Sheer is in doubt.’”

  “My triple-great grandfather held out against the casket-demon for months,” Vividy Sheer countered.

  “Yes, with a demi-regiment of hussars for bodyguard, and in spite of their sabers and horse pistols he was found dead in bed at his Silesian hunting lodge within a year. Dead in bed and black as a beetle— and the eight hussars in the room with him as night-guard permanently out of their wits with fear."

  “I'm stronger than he was—I've conquered Hollywood,” Vividy said, her blue eyes sparking and her face all Valkyrie. “But in any case if I'm to live weeks, let alone months, Imust keep my name in the papers, as all three of you very well know."

  “Hey, hey, what goes on here?” demanded Max Rath, Vividy Sheer's producer, for whom the medieval torture-tapestries had noiselessly parted and closed at the bidding of electric eyes. His own little shrewd ones scanned the casket, no bigger than a cigar box, with its tiny peep-hole of cloudy glass set in the top, and finally came to rest on the only really incongruous object in the monastically-appointed hall—a lavender-tinted bathroom scale.

  Vividy glared at him, Dr. Rumanescue shrugged eloquently, Miss Bricker pressed her lips together, Maury Gender licked his own nervously and at last said, “Well, Vividy thinks she ought to have more publicity—every-day-without-skips publicity in the biggest papers and on the networks. Also, she's got a weight problem."

  Max Rath surveyed in its flimsy dress of silk jersey the most voluptuous figure on six continents and any number of islands, including Ireland and Bali. “You got no weight problem, Viv,” he pronounced. “An ounce either way would be 480 grains away from pneumatic perfection.” Vividy flicked at her bosom contemptuously. Rath's voice changed. “Now as for your name not being in the papers lately, that's a very wise idea—my own, in fact—and must be kept up. Bride of God is due to premiere in four months— the first picture about the life of a nun not to be thumbs-downed by any religious or non-religious group, even in the sticks. We want to keep it that way. When you toured the Florence nightclubs with Biff Parowan and took the gondola ride with that what's-his-name bellhop, the Pope slapped your wrist, but that's all he did—Bride’s still not on the Index. But the wrist-slap was a hint—and one more reason why for the next year there mustn't be one tiny smidgin of personal scandal or even so-called harmless notoriety linked to the name of Vividy Sheer."

  “Besides that, Viv,” he added more familiarly, “the reporters and the reading public were on the verge of getting very sick of the way your name was turning up on the front page every day—and mostly because of chasing, at that. Film stars are like goddesses—they can't be seen too often, there's got to be a little reserve, a little mystery.

  “Aw, cheer up Viv. I know it's tough, but Liz and Jayne and Marilyn all learned to do without the daily headline and so can you. Believe an old timer: euphoric pills are a safer and more lasting kick."

  Vividy, who had been working her face angrily throughout Rath's lecture, now filled her cheeks and spat out her breath contemptuously, as her thrice-removed grandfather might have at the maunderings of an aged major domo.

  “You're a fool, Max,” she said harshly. “Kicks are for nervous virgins, the vanity of a spoilt child. For me, being in the headlines every day is a matter of life or death ."

  Rath frowned uncomprehendingly.

  “That's the literal truth she's telling you, Max,” Maury Gender put in earnestly. “You see, this business happens to be tied up with what you might call the darker side of Vividy's aristocratic East Prussian heritage."

  Miss Bricker stubbed out a cigarette and said, “Max, remember the trouble you had with that Spanish star, Marta Martinez, who turned out to be a bruja —a witch? Well, you picked something a little bit more out of the ordinary, Max, when you picked a Junker."

  The highlights shifted on Dr. Rumanescue's thick glasses and shiny head as he nodded solemnly. He said, “There is a rune in the Doomsbook of the Von Sheers. I will translate.” He paused. Then: “'When the world has nothing more to say, The last of the Sheers will fade away.’”

  As if thinking aloud, Rath said softly, “Funny, I'd forgotten totally about that East Prussian background. We always played it way down out of sight because of the Nazi association—and the Russian too.” He chuckled, just a touch nervously. “'...fade away,'” he quoted. “Now why not just ‘die'? Oh, to make the translation rhyme, I suppose.” He shook himself, as if to come awake. “Hey,” he demanded, “what is it actually? Is somebody blackmailing Vividy? Some fascist or East German commie group? Maybe with the dope on her addictions and private cures, or her affair with Geri Wilson?"

  “Repeat: a fool!” Vividy's chest was heaving but her voice was icy. “For your information, Dr. ‘Escue's translation was literal. Day by day, ever since you first killed my news stories, I have been losing weight."

  “It's a fact, Max,” Maury Gender put in hurriedly. “The news decline and the weight loss are matching curves. Believe it or not, she's down to a quarter normal."

  Miss Bricker nodded with a shiver, disturbing the smoke wreathes around her. She said, “It's the business of an actress fading out from lack of publicity. But this time, so help me,it's literal."

  “I have been losing both weight and mass ,” Vividy continued sharply. “Not by getting thinner, but less substantial . If I had my back to the window you'd notice it."

  Rath stared at her, then looked penetratingly at the other three, as if to discover confirmation that it was all a gag. But they only looked back at him with uniformly solemn and unhappy—and vaguely frightened —expressions. “I don't get it,” he said.

  “The scales, Vividy,” Miss Bricker suggested.

  The film star stood up with an exaggerated carefulness and stepped onto the small rubber-topped violet platform. The white disk whirled under the glass window and came to rest at 37.

  She said crisply, “I believe the word you used, Max, was ‘pneumatic.’ Did you happen to mean I'm inflated with hydrogen?"

  “You've still got on your slippers,” Miss Bricker pointed out.

  With even greater carefulness, steadying herself a moment by the darkly gleaming table-edge, Vividy stepped out of her slippers and again onto the scales. This time the disk stopped at 27.

  “The soles and heels are lead, fabric-covered,” she rapped out to Rath. “I wear them so I won't blow over the edge when I take a walk on the terrace. Perhaps you now think I ought to be able to jump and touch the ceiling. Convincing, wouldn't it be? I rather wish I could, but my strength has decreased proportionately with my weight and mass."

  “Those scales are gimmicked,” Rath asserted with conviction. He stooped and grabbed at one of the slippers. His fingers slipped off it at the first try. Then he slowly raised and hefted it. “What sort of gag is this?” he demanded of Vividy. “Dammit, it does weigh five pounds."

  She didn't look at him. “Maury, get the flashlight,” she directed.

  While the press chief rummaged in a tall Spanish cabinet, Miss Bricker moved to the view window that was the room's fourth wall and flicked an invisible beam. Rapidly the tapestry-lined drapes crawled together from either end, blotting out the steep, burnt-over, barely regrown Malibu hillside and briefly revealing in changing folds “The Torments of Beauty” until the drapes met, blotting out all light whatever.

  Maury snapped on a flashlight long as his forearm. It lit their faces weirdly from below and dimly showed the lovely gray ladies in pain beyond them. Then he put it behind Vividy, who facing Rath, and moved it up and down.

  As if no thicker anywhere than fingers, the lovely form of the German film star became a twin-stemmed flower in shades of dark pink. The arteries were a barely
visible twining, the organs blue-edged, the skeleton deep cherry.

  “That some kind of X-ray?” Rath asked, the words coming out in a breathy rush.

  “You think they got technicolor, hand-size, screenless X-ray sets?” Maury retorted.

  “I think they must have,” Rath told him in a voice quiet but quite desperate.

  “That's enough, Maury,” Vividy directed. “Bricker, the drapes.” Then as the harsh rectangle of daylight swiftly reopened, she looked coldly at Rath and said, “You may take me by the shoulders and shake me. I give you permission."

  The producer complied. Two seconds after he had grasped her he was shrinking back, his hands and arms violently trembling. It had been like shaking a woman stuffed with eiderdown. A woman warm and silky-skinned to the touch, but light almost as feathers. A pillow woman.

  “I believe, Vividy,” he gasped out. “I believe it all now.” Then his voice went far away. “And to think I first cottoned to you because of that name Sheer. It sounded like silk-stockings—luxurious, delicate ... insubstantial . Oh my God!” His voice came part way back. “And you say this is all happening because of some old European witchcraft? Some crazy rhymes out of the past? How do you really think about it, how do you explain it?"

  “Much of the past has no explanation at all,” Dr. Rumanescue answered him. “And the further in the past, the less. The Von Sheers are a very old family, tracing back to pre-Roman times. The runes themselves—"

  Vividy held up her palm to the astrologist to stop.

  “Very well, you believe. Good,” she said curtly to Rath, carefully sitting down at the table again behind

  the ugly black casket on its square of altar cloth. She continued in the same tones. “The question now is: how do I get the publicity I need to keep me from fading out altogether, the front-page publicity that will perhaps even restore me, build me up?"