The 34th Golden Age of Science Fiction: C.M. Kornbluth

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Why are they doing it?” he asked at length.

  “It is their way,” she said with a shrug. “I see you are interested. I, too, am interested. Perhaps I should not discuss this before you have had the opportunity of making up your own mind. But as you may guess, the caravan below us there, where they make the noises, is Bad. It is a sort of marching gallery of demons and the black in heart. On the other hand, the caravan with which you found yourself previously is Good—basically kind and constructive, taking delight in order and precision.”

  Colt, half-listening, drew her down beside him on the rock. He uncorked the bottle. “You must tell me about yourself,” he said earnestly. “It is becoming difficult for me to understand all this. So tell me about yourself, if you may.”

  She smiled slowly. “I am half-caste,” she said. “The Russian Revolution—so many attractive and indigent female aristocrats, quite unable to work with their hands… many, as you must know, found their way to Shanghai.

  “There was a Chinese merchant and my mother, a princess. Not eine Fuerstin—merely a hanger-on at court. I danced. When I was a small child already I was dancing. My price was high, very high at one time. I lost popularity, and with it income and much self-assurance. I was a very bad woman. Not bad as those people there are bad, but I was very bad in my own way.

  “Somehow I learned mathematics—a British actuary who knew me for a while let me use his library, and I learned quickly. So I started for India, where nobody would hire me. I heard that there was a country to the north that wanted many people who knew building and mathematics and statistics. Railway took me through the Khaiber and Afghanistan—from there pony and litter—till I died of exposure seven months ago. That is why we meet on High Pamir.”

  “Listen,” said Colt. “Listen to that.”

  It was again the megatherial voices, louder than before. He looked at the woman and saw that her throat cords were tight as she stared into the black-velvet heavens.

  Colt squinted up between two fingers, snapped shut his eyelids after a moment of the glaring word across the sky that followed the voices. He cursed briefly, blinded. Burned into the backs of his eyes were the familiar characters of the lightning, silent and portentous.

  “It doesn’t do to stare into it that way,” said the woman. “Come with me.” He felt for her hand and let her pull him to his feet. As sight returned he realized that again they were walking on rock.

  “And there’s the Good and holy caravan at evening devotions,” said the woman, with the same note of bedrock cynicism in her voice. And they were. From his coign of vantage Colt could see Raisuli Batar solemnly prostrating himself before a modestly clad, well-proportioned idol whose face beamed kindly on the congregation through two blue-enameled eyes. There was a choir that sang the old German hymn “Ein Feste Burg.”

  “Shocking,” said the woman, “yet strangely moving to the spirit. One feels a certain longing.…”

  Bluntly Colt said, “I’d like to join them. You’re holding me back, you know. I wouldn’t see you as a comrade again if I sang with them.” He hummed a few bars of the hymn. “On Earth is not His e-qual—”

  “Girding their loins for the good fight,” said the woman. She chuckled quietly for a moment. In a ribald tone that seemed barely to conceal heartbreak, she snapped, “Do you care to fall in with the ranks of the Almighty? Or may it be with the Lord of Nothing, Old Angra Mainyu of the sixteen plagues? Pick your sides in the divine sweepstakes! It’s for you they do it and of a great love for the soul in you—

  “They want you black and they want you white—

  “How in blazes do you know who’s right?”

  “It seems clear,” said Colt doubtfully.

  “You think so?” she exploded. “You think so now? Wait and see—with them tearing at your heart two ways and you sure that it’ll never hold out but it’s going to rip in half, and it never doing that but you going on through the night thirteen thousand meters above the world and never a soft bed and never a bite of real food and never a moment of closing your eyes and sleeping in darkness and night—!”

  She collapsed, weeping, into his arms.

  3

  The long, starless night had not lifted. Three times more the voices had spoken from the heavens and silent lightning scribbled across the sky. The two in-betweeners had chanted back and forth sacred writings of Asia, wretchedly seeking for answers:

  “I will incline mine ears to a parable. I will open my dark sayings upon the harp. Wherefore should I fear in the days of evil when the iniquity of my heels shall compass me about?”

  “O maker of the material world, thou holy one! When the good waters reach the left instep whereon does the Drukh Nasu rush?”

  There was an explosion of cynical laughter above them, old and dry. Grandfather T’ang greeted them, “Be well, Valeska and Colt. And forget the insteps and the heels of the Upanishad. That is my counsel.” He upended the suntori bottle and flushed his throat with a half-pint of the stuff.

  In reply to Colt’s surprised glance she said, “He often visits me. Gaw is a terrible old man who thinks nothing of lying and being untrue to himself.”

  “A little of that would do you no harm, daughter. I belong out here with you, of course. But out here are no likely candidates for the dice box, and this ethereal gullet refuses to do without alcohol. Though this ethereal brain could do with considerably less of the pious nonsense that invariably accompanies winning at dice.”

  He painfully squatted by them, keeping a death grip on the quart bottle. “They’re going to be at it again,” said the old man. “It’s just such a night as in August. Tooth and nail, hammer and tongs, no holds barred.” He spat on the rock. “Pah! These spectacles disgust a man of my mentality.”

  “You see?” asked the woman. “He lies and cheats at dice. Yet often he sings with the worshipers. And always he says he spits on them in his mind. He is terrible!”

  Colt quoted slowly, “Judge me and my cause against the ungodly nation; O deliver me from the deceitful and the unjust man.”

  “Ah?” asked Grandfather T’ang. “Sacred books? Wisdom of the East? I join your symposium with the following, reverently excerpted from the Shuh King: ‘The soil of the province was whitish and mellow. Its contribution of revenue was of the highest of the highest class, with some proportion of the second. Its fields were of the average of the second class.’” He grinned savagely and drank deeply again.

  “You can’t be right,” said Colt. “You can’t be. There’s something that forbids it being right to lie now that you’re dead. It doesn’t matter which side you choose—whether it’s Raisuli’s smiling idol or that thing the other side of the ridge. But you have to choose.”

  “I’m different,” said T’ang smugly. “I’m different, and I’m drunk two thirds of the time, so what’s the difference if I’m different?” He began raucously to sing, beating time with the bottle, the one and only Confucian hymn:

  “Superiority in a person

  Should better not

  Nor should it worsen.

  It should consider everything

  From pussycat to honored king.

  Inferior people

  Need a steeple

  To climb and shout

  Their views about.”

  Colt drew a little aside with Valeska. “Should this matter?” he asked.

  “He really ought to choose one caravan or another. It’s very wrong of him to pretend to be with one when he’s really with neither. Either the Good or the Bad.…” She stared quaintly into Colt’s eyes. “Do you think I’m bad?”

  “No,” said Colt slowly. “I know you’re not. And you aren’t good either. Not by nature, practice or inclination. I’m the same as you. I want to sing their devil song and a Lutheran hymn at the same time. And it can’t be done.”

  “And you aren’t a liar li
ke that lovable old drunk rolling on the rocks there,” she said with a gesture. “At least you aren’t a liar.”

  “I congratulate myself. I can appreciate it to the full. Have a drink, Valeska.”

  “Yes. There is, you know, going to be a holy war. Which side should we be on?”

  “Who knows? Let’s take another look at the Bad boys.”

  There was half a pang of terror in his heart—a formless fear that he might find Badness less repugnant to him than Goodness. He knew the feeling: it was the trial of every human soul torn between one thing and another. Doubt was Hell—worse than Hell—and it had to be resolved, even at the risk of this magnificent creature by his side.

  Silently he passed the bottle as the sky lightened and the silence spoke out of the heavens.

  “As you wish,” she said. Colt felt a sort of opening in his mind, as though unspoken words had passed between them. He had heard her think in sorrow and fear of losing him.

  She led him over a ridge to the long line of fires of the Bad caravan, fires blue-tipped before the ugly altar. There was a disemboweled sacrifice in its lap. Colt stared his fill, trying to probe what was in his own heart. It was neither pleasure nor pain, neither pompous virtue nor cackling glee in destruction and death. There were techniques of self-searching now open to him that could never be those of a living man; he shuddered to think of how he had groped in darkness and ignorance before his death.

  The caravan master, the squat monster in the mighty turban, greeted him warmly, “We’ve been watching your progress with considerable interest, my son. We have felt that you were warming to our ideas. How do you feel about our community?”

  Colt rolled back his consciousness into the dark recesses of his mind, exploring a new stock of knowledge—things that it seemed he must always have known, but never recognized till now for what they were. “Community”—that meant the mutual practice of evil and destruction. One of the tidbits of wisdom newly in his mind was an awareness that the Bad worked together, sealed in a union that bore death as its bond. The Good practiced alone, rising very seldom to a community of any respectable proportions.

  “May I enter the bond tentatively?” he asked.

  The master looked pained. “My son of abomination,” he said kindly, “I’ll have to ask you to be very careful. The balance is beautifully precise; it would be a shame to throw them out of kilter. But since you wish to go ahead, very well. Enter!”

  Colt squatted on the ground with numerous others of the Bad people. He sent out a consoling line of thought to Valeska, who stood somberly by, fearing to lose her solitary ally. He smiled a little and ran back a signal of reassurance.

  He trembled a little with the effort, then threw back his mind like a door. The inverging flood of black, glistening stuff gave him a warm feeling of comradeship with the others; he yielded and allowed himself to drift with them.

  He inspected the attitude of which he was a part, found it consisted of a series of aesthetic balances among eye, ear, touch, smell and taste. The viewpoint was multiplex, dirigible, able to rise, enlarge, focus from infinity to zero, split to examine an object from all vantages.

  The viewpoint inspected a rock from about a dozen feet in the air, saw it as a smoothly prolate spheroid. There was a moment of dwelling on the seeming fact of its perfection, a painful moment, then the viewpoint descended slowly and with little waves of pleasure as chips and scars became apparent in the rock. The viewpoint split, correlated its observations and registered the fact that the rock was of an eccentric shape, awkward and unbeautiful.

  The viewpoint coalesced again and shrank microscopically, then smaller still. For an ecstatic moment it perceived a welter of crashing, blundering molecules, beetling about in blindness.

  It shifted again, swiftly, far away to a point in Hong Kong where a lady was entertaining a gentleman. The viewpoint let the two humans’ love, hate, disgust, affection and lust slide beneath its gaze. There was a gorgeous magenta jealousy from the man, overlaying the woman’s dull-brown, egg-shaped avarice, both swept away in a rushing tide of fluxing, thick-textured, ductile, crimson-black passion.

  The viewpoint passed somewhere over a battlefield, dwelt lovingly on the nightmare scene below. There were dim flares of vitality radiating from every crawling figure below; a massing of infantry was like a beacon. From the machinery of war there came a steely radiance which waxed as it discharged its shell or tripped its bomb, then dimmed to a quiet glow of satisfaction.

  A file of tanks crawled over a hill, emitting a purplish radiance which sent out thin cobwebs of illumination. They swung into battle formation, crept down the slope at the infantry mass. Behind the infantry antitank guns were hurrying up—too late. The tanks opened fire, their cobwebs whitening to a demon’s flare of death as soldiers, scurrying for cover, one by one, keeled over. As they fell there was a brittle little tingle, the snapping of a thread or wire, and the light of vitality was extinguished, being replaced by a sallow, corpsey glow.

  The viewpoint gorged, gloated, bloated on the scene, then seemed to swell immeasurably.

  Suddenly, after a wringing transition feeling, it was in a mighty hall, approaching a lightless apse where two little points of radiance gleamed.

  There was music, harmonizing ear, eye, taste, touch and smell in a twilit blend of sensations. Colt struggled involuntarily, felt himself bathed in rhythmic complications, subtly off-pleasure, spoiled by the minute introduction of some unharmonious element. With dismay he felt there creeping into his own consciousness, his segment of the viewpoint, a simple little flicker of a theme in C major. He was conscious of a gnat’s wing beat of disapproval in response to his untoward disturbance. The viewpoint continued its drift toward the darkened apse.

  It lovingly picked out the inhabitant of the lightless space and greeted it, even Colt, even though it was a monster of five legs and incredible teeth which opened wide. Damnably, irritatingly, the little C-major motif persisted; he tried to drive it from his mind, then, in a fatal moment, recognized it as one Oliver’s “Flower Song,” a sweet little thing suitable for small hands on the pianoforte.

  “—lilies, roses, flowers of every hue—”

  He couldn’t lose it after having recognized it that far; the theme spread and orchestrated through the viewpoint. The whole polysensual off-pleasure matrix broke up, tore wide open as it was about to pass down the gullet of the monster in the apse.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, rising. “I simply couldn’t help—”

  “I know,” said the caravan master sadly. “I know what it was. But you wrecked a full communion all the same. Go in torment, my son of abomination. May your ways be woeful.”

  Colt thanked him and left with Valeska.

  “How was it?” she asked.

  “Indescribable,” he exploded. “Loathsome—glorious—terrible. I found myself gloating over—” He went into details.

  “So did I,” she said absently. “I went through it, too. It has a gorgeous kick to it, no doubt. But it isn’t right for us. Me, I broke up their communion with a line from Pushkin: The aged sorcerer in anger said, This queen is evil from toe to head. You know it?”

  The sound of singing came from over the ridge, blurred by the megatherial voices. Colt stared abstractedly at the sky as the words were scribbled again in light.

  “Their turn,” he said. “The Good boys.”

  4

  They stepped over ridges of snowy rock and stood for a moment surveying the other caravan. There was a semicircle of faces, gleaming benevolently in the firelight, handsome smiling faces. They were singing, under the pleasant aspect of the blue-eyed idol, a lusty slab from the great Bach’s great Mass in B minor. While Valeska smiled a little cynically, Colt sidestepped into the baritone choir and sounded back tentatively for the words and music. They came easily; he was experiencing again, for the first time in many years, the delights of clo
se harmony that move men to form barbershop quartets and Philharmonic Societies.

  He sang the hearty, solid language, the crashing chords, from his chest, standing straight, bouncing the tones from his palate like the old glee-clubber that he was. Beside him he saw Lodz, a beatific smile on his face, chanting sonorously. Why were so many small men bassos?

  Colt forgot himself and sang, let his voice swim out into the pool of sound and melt into harmony; when need was, he sang up, playing off against M. Lodz’s basso and McNaughton’s ringing tenor. And then he sang a sinister quarter-tone. It ended the bar on a gorgeously askew chord and got him very severely looked at. Raisuli Batar, baton in hand, frowned. Colt signaled wildly back that he couldn’t help it.

  It might have been lack of control, but it wasn’t. It seemed that musical virtuosity was a gift to the dead. He had no choice in the matter—it was his nature that had dictated the quarter-tone. Raisuli Batar tapped a rock twice with the baton, then swept down, his left hand signaling volume, cuing in the bassos with his eyes.

  The brilliant, crashing unison passage rang out. Damn! As though he had no control over his own voice, Colt sang not in unison but sharping and flatting around the line, botching the grand melody completely.

  He strode angrily from the semicircle of singers, back to Valeska. She passed the bottle with a twisted smile on her face.

  “You tried to compromise,” she said. “It can’t be done. They didn’t thank you for Stravinskying their Bach.”

  “Right,” he said. “But what do we do?”

  “It doesn’t seem right,” she brooded. “We shouldn’t be the only in-betweeners. Five thousand years—more—they must appear more often. Then something happens to them. And they go away somewhere.”

  “Right,” crowed Grandfather T’ang, drunker than ever. “Right, m’lass. And I know what happens to them. And I’ll tell you what to do.”

  “Why?” asked Colt practically.

  “Because I’m not as far outside as you think, children. Once I was as far in-between as you. I had my chance and I missed it—passed it up for the suntori and the dice games around the fires. Grandfather was a fool. I can’t tell you any more than this: Get into the battle and observe rather closely. When you discover a very important secret, you will ascend to the Eighteenth Orbit and dwell forever, dancing and singing on the rings of Saturn. Or, to discard the gibberish, your psychic tissues so alter that you recognize a plane of existence more tenuous than ours; a plane, one suspects, more delectable. The mythological name for it is Heaven.” He hugged his bottle and crooned affectionately to it: