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

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Superiority in a person

  Should better not

  Nor should it—”

  “Does he know?” asked Colt, looking out into the long night.

  “He wasn’t lying this time. Shall we do it?”

  “We shall. This waiting blasts my ethereal soul.”

  “You’re an impatient cuss,” she smiled at him. “You haven’t seen me dance yet. I was a well-paid dancer once. It should be worth your while.”

  “Dance, then,” he said, settling himself against a rock.

  “You make the music. You know how.”

  He thought for a moment, then uncovered another bit of technique known to the dead. He began to send out mentally Debussy’s Claire de Lune. She heard it, smiled at him as she caught the music, and began to dance.

  Her body was not very good; certainly not as good as it had been. But as he studied the dancing, sometimes with eyes closed so that he could hear only the rustle of her feet on the snow and sometimes so abstracted that he could hear only the displacement of air as she moved, Colt was deeply stirred.

  He tuned in on her thoughts, picking out the swiftly running stream, the skittering little point of consciousness that danced over them.

  “Now I am a swan,” said her thoughts while she danced to the music. “Now I am a swan, dying for love of the young prince who has wandered through the courtyard. And now I am the prince, very pretty and as dumb as a prince could be. Now I am his father the King, very wrathy and pompous. And now, and through it all, I was really the great stone gargoyle on the square top tower who saw all and grinned to himself.”

  She pirouetted to an end with the music, bowing with a stylized, satirically cloying grace. He applauded lustily.

  “Unless you have other ideas,” she said, “I would like to dance again.” Her face was rosy and fresh-looking.

  He began to construct music in his mind while she listened in and took little tentative steps. Colt started with a split-log-drum’s beat, pulse speed, low and penetrating. He built up another rhythm overlaying it, a little slower, with wood-block timbre. It was louder than the first. Rapidly he constructed a series of seven polyrhythmic layers, from the bottom split-log pulse to a small, incessant snare-drum beat.

  “I’m an animal now, a small, very arboreal animal. I can prick up my ears; my toes are opposed, so I can grasp a branch.”

  He added a bone-xylophone melody, very crude, of only three tones.

  “My eyes are both in front of my face. My vision has become stereoscopic. I can sit up and handle leaves. I can pick insects from the branches I live in.”

  Colt augmented the xylophone melody with a loud, crude brass.

  Valeska thought, “I’m bigger—my arms are longer. And I often walk little distances on the ground, on my feet and my arm knuckles.”

  Colt added a see-sawing, gutty-sounding string timbre, in a melody opposed to the xylophone and the brass.

  “I’m bigger—bigger—too big for trees. And I eat grubs as well as leaves—and I walk almost straight up—see me walk!”

  He watched her swinging along the ground, apish, with the memory of brachiation stamped in every limb. He modified the bone-xylophone’s timbre to a woody ring, increased the melodic range to a full octave.

  With tremendous effort Valeska heaved over an imaginary rock, chipped at it. “I’m making flint hand-axes. They kill animals bigger than I am—tigers and bears—see my kitchen heap, high as a mountain, full of their bones!”

  He augmented with a unison choir of woodwinds and a jangling ten-string harp.

  “I eat bread and drink beer and I pray to the Nile—I sing and I dance, I farm and I bake—see me spin rope! See me paint pictures on plaster!”

  A wailing clarinet mourned through the rhythmic sea.

  Valeska danced statelily. “Yes—now I’m a man’s woman—now I’m on top of the heap of the ages—now I’m a human—now I’m a woman.…”

  Colt stopped short the whole accumulation of percussion, melody and harmony in a score of timbres, cutting in precisely a single blues piano that carried in its minor, sobbing-sad left hand all the sorrow of ages; in the serpentine-stabbing chords splashed gold by the right sang the triumph of man in his glory of metal and stone.

  Valeska danced, sending out no words of what the dance was, for it was she, what she dreamed, what she had been, and what she was to be. The dance and the music were Valeska, and they ended when she was in Colt’s arms. The brandy bottle dropped from his grip and smashed on the rock.

  Their long, wordless communion was broken by a disjointed yell from the two sides of the ridge as fighting forces streamed to battle. From the Bad caravan came the yell, “Kill and maim! Destroy! Destroy!” And the Good caravan cried, “In the name of the right! For sanctity and peace on Earth! Defend the right!”

  Colt and Valeska found themselves torn apart in the rush to attack, swept into the thick of the fighting. The thundering voices from above, and the lightning, were almost continuous. The blinding radiance rather than the night hampered the fighting.

  They were battling with queer, outlandish things—frying pans, camp stools, table forks. One embattled defender of the right had picked up a piteously bleating kid and was laying about him with it, holding its tiny hooves in a bunch.

  Colt saw skulls crack, but nobody gave way or even fell. The dead were immortal. Then what in blazes was this all about? There was something excruciatingly wrong somewhere, and he couldn’t fathom what it was.

  He saw the righteous and amiable Raisuli Batar clubbing away with a table leg; minutes later he saw the fiendish and amiable chief of the Bad men swinging about him with another.

  Vaguely sensing that he ought perhaps to be on the side of the right, he picked up a kettle by the handle and looked about for someone to bean with it. He saw a face that might be that of a fiend strayed from Hell, eyes rolling hideously, teeth locked and grinding with rage as its owner carved away at a small-sized somebody with a broken-bladed axe.

  He was on the verge of cracking the fiend out of Hell when it considered itself finished with its victim, temporarily at least, and turned to Colt. “Hello, there,” snapped the fiend. “Show some life, will you?”

  Colt started as he saw that the fiend was Lodz, one of the Good men. Bewildered, he strayed off, nearly being gouged in the face by Grandfather T’ang, who was happily swinging away with a jagged hunk of suntori bottle, not bothering to discriminate.

  But how did one discriminate? It came over him very suddenly that one didn’t and couldn’t. The caravaneers were attacking each other. At that moment there came through a mental call from Valeska, who had just made the same discovery on her own. They joined and mounted a table, inspecting the sea of struggling human beings.

  “It’s all in the way you look at them,” said Valeska softly.

  Colt nodded. “There was only one caravan,” he said in somber tones.

  He experimented silently a bit, discovering that by a twiddle of the eyes he could convert Raisuli Batar into the Bad caravan leader, turban and all. And the same went for the Bad idol—a reverse twiddle converted it into the smiling, blue-eyed guardian of the Good caravan. It was like the optical illusion of the three shaded cubes that point one way or the other, depending on how you decide to see them.

  “That was what Grandfather T’ang meant,” said the woman. Her eyes drifted to the old man. He had just drained another bottle; with a businesslike swing against a rock he shattered the bottom into a splendid cutting tool and set to work again.

  “There’s no logic to it,” Colt said forlornly. “None at all.” Valeska smiled happily and hugged him.

  Colt felt his cheek laid open.

  * * * *

  “Bon soir. Guten Tag. Buon giorno. Buenos dias. Bon soir. Guten Tag. Buon—”

  “You can stop that,” said Colt, struggling
to his feet. He cracked his head against a strut, hung on dazedly. “Where’s—”

  He inspected the two men standing before him with healthy grins. They wore the Red Army uniform under half-buttoned flying suits. The strut that had got in his way belonged to a big, black helicopter; amidships was blazoned the crimson star of the Soviet Union.

  “You’re well and all that, I fawncy?” asked one of the flyers. “We spotted you and landed—bunged up your cheek a bit—Volanov heah would try to overshoot.”

  “I’m fine,” said Colt, feeling his bandage. “Why’n hell can’t you Russians learn to speak American?”

  The two soldiers exchanged smiles and glances. They obviously considered Colt too quaint for words. “Pile in, old chap. We can take you as far as Bokhara—we fuel at Samarkand. I—ah—suppose you have papers?”

  Colt leaned against the strut and wearily shoved over his credentials. Everything would be all right. Chungking was in solid with the Reds at the moment. Everything would be all right.

  “I fawncy,” said Volanov, making conversation while his partner handled the helicopter vanes, “youah glad to see the lawst of all that.”

  Colt looked down, remembered, and wept.

  * * * *

  “I find,” I said as dryly as possible, “a certain familiarity—a nostalgic ring, as it were—toward the end of your tale.” I was just drunk enough to get fancy with The Three-Cornered Scar.

  “You do?” he asked. He leaned forward across the table. “You do?”

  “I’ve read widely in such matters,” I hastily assured him, pouring another glass of red wine.

  He grinned glumly, sipping. “If I hadn’t left half my spirit with Valeska that night I was dead,” he remarked conversationally, “I’d smash your face in.”

  “That may be,” I assented gracefully.

  But I should say that he drank less like half a spirit than half a dozen.

  KAZAM COLLECTS

  Originally published in Stirring Science Stories, 1941.

  “Hail, jewel in the lotus,” half whispered the stringy, brown person. His eyes were shut in holy ecstasy, his mouth pursed as though he were tasting the sweetest fruit that ever grew.

  “Hail, jewel in the lotus,” mumbled back a hundred voices in a confused backwash of sound. The stringy, brown person turned and faced his congregation. He folded his hands.

  “Children of Hagar,” he intoned. His voice was smooth as old ivory and had a mellow sheen about it.

  “Children of Hagar, you who have found delight and peace in the bosom of the Elemental, the Eternal, the Un-knowingness that is without bounds, make Peace with me.” You could tell by his very voice that the words were capitalized.

  “Let our Word,” intoned the stringy, brown person, “be spread. Let our Will be brought about. Let us destroy, let us mould, let us build. Speak low and make your spirits white as Hagar’s beard.” With a reverent gesture he held before them two handfuls of an unattached beard that hung from the altar.

  “Children of Hagar, unite your Wills into One.” The congregation kneeled as he gestured at them, gestured as one would at a puppy one was training to play dead.

  The meeting hall—or rather, temple—of the Cult of Hagar was on the third floor of a little building on East 59th Street, otherwise almost wholly unused. The hall had been fitted out to suit the sometimes peculiar requirements of the unguessable Will-Mind-Urge of Hagar Inscrutable; that meant that there was gilded wood everywhere there could be, and strips of scarlet cloth hanging from the ceiling in circles of five. There was, you see, a Sanctified Ineffability about the unequal lengths of the cloth strips.

  The faces of the congregation were varying studies in rapture. As the stringy, brown person tinkled a bell they rose and blinked absently at him as he waved a benediction and vanished behind a door covered with chunks of gilded wood.

  The congregation began to buzz quietly.

  “Well?” demanded one of another. “What did you think of it?”

  “I dunno. Who’s he, anyway?” A respectful gesture at the door covered with gilded wood.

  “Kazam’s his name. They say he hasn’t touched food since he saw the Ineluctable Modality.”

  “What’s that?”

  Pitying smile. “You couldn’t understand it just yet. Wait till you’ve come around a few more times. Then maybe you’ll be able to read his book—‘The Unravelling.’ After that you can tackle the ‘Isba Kazhlunk’ that he found in the Siberian ice. It opened the way to the Ineluctable Modality, but it’s pretty deep stuff—even for me.”

  They filed from the hall buzzing quietly, dropping coins into a bowl that stood casually by the exit. Above the bowl hung from the ceiling strips of red cloth in a circle of five. The bowl, of course, was covered with chunks of gilded wood.

  Beyond the door the stringy, brown man was having a little trouble. Detective Fitzgerald would not be convinced.

  “In the first place,” said the detective, “you aren’t licensed to collect charities. In the second place this whole thing looks like fraud and escheatment. In the third place this building isn’t a dwelling and you’ll have to move that cot out of here.” He gestured disdainfully at an army collapsible that stood by the battered rolltop desk. Detective Fitzgerald was a big, florid man who dressed with exquisite neatness.

  “I am sorry,” said the stringy, brown man. “What must I do?”

  “Let’s begin at the beginning. The Constitution guarantees freedom of worship, but I don’t know if they meant something like this. Are you a citizen?”

  “No. Here are my registration papers.” The stringy, brown man took them from a cheap, new wallet.

  “Born in Persia. Name’s Joseph Kazam. Occupation, scholar. How do you make that out?”

  “It’s a good word,” said Joseph Kazam with a hopeless little gesture. “Are you going to send me away—deport me?”

  “I don’t know,” said the detective thoughtfully. “If you register your religion at City Hall before we get any more complaints, it’ll be all right.”

  “Ah,” breathed Kazam. “Complaints?”

  Fitzgerald looked at him quizzically. “We got one from a man named Rooney,” he said. “Do you know him?”

  “Yes. Runi Sarif is his real name. He has hounded me out of Norway, Ireland and Canada—wherever I try to reestablish the Cult of Hagar.”

  Fitzgerald looked away. “I suppose,” he said matter-of-factly, “you have lots of secret enemies plotting against you.”

  Kazam surprised him with a burst of rich laughter. “I have been investigated too often,” grinned the Persian, “not to recognize that one. You think I’m mad.”

  “No,” mumbled the detective, crestfallen. “I just wanted to find out. Anybody running a nut cult’s automatically reserved a place in Bellevue.”

  “Forget it, sir. I spit on the Cult of Hagar. It is my livelihood, but I know better than any man that it is a mockery. Do you know what our highest mystery is? The Ineluctable Modality.” Kazam sneered.

  “That’s Joyce,” said Fitzgerald with grin. “You have a sense of humor, Mr. Kazam. That’s a rare thing in the religious.”

  “Please,” said Joseph Kazam. “Don’t call me that. I am not worthy—the noble, sincere men who work for their various faiths are my envy. I have seen too much to be one of them.”

  “Go on,” said Fitzgerald, leaning forward. He read books, this detective, and dearly loved an abstract discussion.

  The Persian hesitated. “I,” he said at length, “am an occult engineer. I am a man who can make the hidden forces work.”

  “Like staring a leprechaun in the eye till he finds you a pot of gold?” suggested the detective with a chuckle.

  “One manifestation,” said Kazam calmly. “Only one.”

  “Look,” said Fitzgerald. “They still have that room in Bellevue. Don�
�t say that in public—stick to the Ineluctable Modality if you know what’s good for you.”

  “Tut,” said the Persian regretfully. “He’s working on you.”

  The detective looked around the room. “Meaning who?” he demanded.

  “Runi Sarif. He’s trying to reach your mind and turn you against me.”

  “Balony,” said Fitzgerald coarsely. “You get yourself registered as a religion in twenty-four hours; then find yourself a place to live. I’ll hold off any charges of fraud for a while. Just watch your step.” He jammed a natty Homburg down over his sandy hair and strode pugnaciously from the office.

  Joseph Kazman sighed. Obviously the detective had been disappointed.

  That night, in his bachelor’s flat, Fitzgerald tossed and turned uneasily on his modern bed. Being blessed with a sound digestion able to cope even with a steady diet of chain-restaurant food and the soundest of consciences, the detective was agitated profoundly by his wakefulness.

  Being, like all bachelors, a cautious man, he hesitated to dose himself with the veronal he kept for occasions like this, few and far between though they were. Finally, as he heard the locals pass one by one on the El a few blocks away and then heard the first express of the morning, with its higher-pitched bickering of wheels and quicker vibration against the track, he stumbled from bed and walked dazedly into his bathroom, fumbled open the medicine chest.

  Only when he had the bottle and had shaken two pills into his hand did he think to turn on the light. He pulled the cord and dropped the pills in horror. They weren’t the veronal at all but an old prescription which he had thriftily kept till they might be of use again.