"Was it smooth?"
"No. Hairy--fuzzy. Fuzzy! I'm beginning to get it. Wait, now... A thing like a teddy hear. It talked. It--why, of course! It was alive!"
"A pet, then. Not a toy."
"Oh, no," said the professor, and shuddered. "It was a toy, all right. My mother thought it was, anyway. It made me dream real."
"You mean, like Peter Ibbetson?"
"No, no. Not like that." He leaned back, rolled his eyes up. "I used to see myself as I would be later, when I was grown. And before. Oh. Oh--I think it was then-- Yes! It must have been then that I began to see all those terrible accidents. It was! It was!"
"Steady," said Catherine. "Tell me quietly,"
He relaxed. "Fuzzy. The demon--the monster. I know what it did, the devil. Somehow it made me see myself as I grew. It made me repeat what I had learned. It--it ate knowledge! It did; it ate knowledge. It had some strange affinity for me, for something about me. It could absorb knowledge that I gave out. And it--it changed the knowledge into blood, the way a plant changes sunlight and water into cellulose!"
"I don't understand," she said again.
"You don't? How could you? How can I? I know that that's what it did, though. It made me--why, I was spouting my lectures here to the beast when I was four years old! The words of them, the sense of them, came from me now to me then. And I gave it to the monster, and it ate the knowledge and spiced it with the things it made me do in my real dreams. It made me trip a man up on a hat, of all absurd things, and fall into a subway excavation. And when I was in my teens, I was right by the excavation to see it happen. And that's the way with all of them! All the horrible accidents I have witnessed, I have half-remembered before they happened. There's no stopping any of them. What am I going to do?"
There were tears in her eyes. "What about me?" she whispered--more, probably, to get his mind away from his despair than for any other reason.
"You. There's something about you, if only I could remember. Something about what happened to that--that toy, that beast. You were in the same environment as I, as that devil. Somehow, you are vulnerable to it and--Catherine, Catherine, I think that something was done to you that--"
He broke off. His eyes widened in horror. The girl sat beside him, helping him, pitying him, and her expression did not change. But--everything else about her did.
Her face shrank, shrivelled. Her eyes lengthened. Her ears grew long, grew until they were like donkey's ears, like rabbit's ears, like horrible, long hairy spider's legs. Her teeth lengthened into tusks. Her arms shrivelled into jointed straws, and her body thickened.
It smelled like rotten meat.
There were filthy claws scattering out of her polished open-toed shoes. There were bright sores. There were--other things. And all the while she--it--held his hand and looked at him with pity and friendliness.
The professor—
Jeremy sat up and flung the monster away. "It isn't funny!" he screamed. "It isn't funny, it isn't, it isn't, it isn't!"
The monster sat up and looked at him with its soft, bland, teddy-bear expression. "Be quiet," it said. "Let's make her all squashy now, like soft-soap. And hornets in her stomach. And we can put her--"
Jeremy clapped his hands over his ears and screwed his eyes shut. The monster talked on. Jeremy burst into tears, leapt from the crib and, hurling the monster to the floor, kicked it. It grunted. "That's funny!" screamed the child. "Ha ha!" he cried, as he planted both feet in its yielding stomach. He picked up the twitching mass and hurled it across the room. It struck the nursery clock. Clock and monster struck the floor together in a flurry of glass, metal, and blood. Jeremy stamped it all into a jagged, pulpy mass, blood from his feet mixing with blood from the monster, the same strange blood which the monster had pumped into his neck...
Mummy all but fainted when she ran in and saw him. She screamed, but he laughed, screaming. The doctor gave him sedatives until he slept, and cured his feet. He was never very strong after that. They saved him, to live his life and to see his real-dreams; funny dreams, and to die finally in a lecture room, with his eyes distended in horror while horror froze his heart, and a terrified young woman ran crying, crying for help…
THE SKILLS OF XANADU
First appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, July 1956
And the sun went nova and humanity fragmented and fled; and such is the self-knowledge of humankind that it knew it must guard its past as it guarded its being, or it would cease to be human; and such was its pride in itself that it made of its traditions a ritual and a standard.
The great dream was that wherever humanity settled, fragment by fragment by fragment, however it lived, it would continue rather than begin again, so that all through the universe and the years, humans would be humans, speaking as humans, thinking as humans, aspiring and progressing as humans; and whenever human met human, no matter how different, how distant, he would come in peace, meet his own kind, speak his own tongue.
Humans, however, being humans—
Bril emerged near the pink star, disliking its light, and found the fourth planet. It hung waiting for him like an exotic fruit. (And was it ripe, and could he ripen it? And what if it were poison?) He left his machine in orbit and descended in a bubble. A young savage watched him come and waited by a waterfall.
“Earth was my mother,” said Bril from the bubble. It was the formal greeting of all humankind, spoken in the Old Tongue.
“And my father,” said the savage, in an atrocious accent.
Watchfully, Bril emerged from the bubble, but stood very close by it. He completed his part of the ritual. “I respect the disparity of our wants, as individuals, and greet you.”
“I respect the identity of our needs, as humans, and greet you. I am Wonyne,” said the youth, “son of Tanyne, of the Senate, and Nina. This place is Xanadu, the district, on Xanadu, the fourth planet.”
“I am Bril of Kit Carson, second planet of the Sumner System, and a member of the Sole Authority” said the newcomer, adding, “and I come in peace.”
He waited then, to see if the savage would discard any weapons he might have, according to historic protocol. Wonyne did not; he apparently had none. He wore only a cobwebby tunic and a broad belt made of flat, black, brilliantly polished stones and could hardly have concealed so much as a dart. Bril waited yet another moment, watching the untroubled face of the savage, to see if Wonyne suspected anything of the arsenal hidden in the sleek black uniform, the gleaming jackboots, the metal gauntlets.
Wonyne said only, “Then, in peace, welcome.” He smiled. “Come with me to Tanyne’s house and mine, and be refreshed.”
“You say Tanyne, your father, is a Senator? Is he active now? Could he help me to reach your center of government?”
The youth paused, his lips moving slightly, as if he were translating the dead language into another tongue. Then, “Yes. Oh, yes.”
Bril flicked his left gauntlet with his right fingertips and the bubble sprang away and up, where at length it would join the ship until it was needed. Wonyne was not amazed— probably, thought Bril, because it was beyond his understanding.
Bril followed the youth up a winding path past a wonderland of flowering plants, most of them purple, some white, a few scarlet, and all jeweled by the waterfall. The higher reaches of the path were flanked by thick soft grass, red as they approached, pale pink as they passed.
Bril’s narrow black eyes flicked everywhere, saw and recorded everything: the easy-breathing boy’s spring up the slope ahead, and the constant shifts of color in his gossamer garment as the wind touched it; the high trees, some of which might conceal a man or a weapon; the rock out-croppings and what oxides they told of; the birds he could see and the birdsongs he heard which might be something else.
He was a man who missed only the obvious, and there is so little that is obvious.
Yet he was not prepared for the house; he and the boy were halfway across the parklike land which surrounded it before he recognized it as s
uch.
It seemed to have no margins. It was here high and there only a place between flower beds; yonder a room became a terrace, and elsewhere a lawn was a carpet because there was a roof over it. The house was divided into areas rather than rooms, by open grilles and by arrangements of color. Nowhere was there a wall. There was nothing to hide behind and nothing that could be locked. All the land, all the sky, looked into and through the house, and the house was one great window on the world.
Seeing it, Bril felt a slight shift in his opinion of the natives. His feeling was still one of contempt, but now he added suspicion. A cardinal dictum on humans as he knew them was: Every man has something to hide. Seeing a mode of living like this did not make him change his dictum: he simply increased his watchfulness, asking: How do they hide it?
“Tan! Tan!” the boy was shouting. “I’ve brought a friend!” A man and a woman strolled toward them from a garden. The man was huge, but otherwise so like the youth Wonyne that there could be no question of their relationship. Both had long, narrow, clear gray eyes set very wide apart, and red—almost orange—hair. The noses were strong and delicate at the same time, their mouths thin-lipped but wide and good-natured. But the woman— It was a long time before Bril could let himself look, let himself believe that there was such a woman. After his first glance, he made of her only a presence and fed himself small nibbles of belief in his eyes, in the fact that there could be hair like that, face, voice, body. She was dressed, like her husband and the boy, in the smoky kaleidoscope which resolved itself, when the wind permitted, into a black-belted tunic.
“He is Bril of Kit Carson in the Sumner System,” babbled the boy, “and he’s a member of the Sole Authority and it’s the second planet and he knew the greeting and got it right. So did I,” he added, laughing. “This is Tanyne, of the Senate, and my mother Nina.”
“You are welcome, Bril of Kit Carson,” she said to him; and unbelieving in this way that had come upon him, he took away his gaze and inclined his head.
“You must come in,” said Tanyne cordially, and led the way through an arbor which was not the separate arch it appeared to be, but an entrance.
The room was wide, wider at one end than the other, though it was hard to determine by how much. The floor was uneven, graded upward toward one corner, where it was a mossy bank. Scattered here and there were what the eye said were white and striated gray boulders; the hand would say they were flesh. Except for a few shelf- and table-like niches on these and in the bank, they were the only furniture.
Water ran frothing and gurgling through the room, apparently as an open brook; but Bril saw Nina’s bare foot tread on the invisible covering that followed it down to the pool at the other end. The pool was the one he had seen from outside, indeterminately in and out of the house. A large tree grew by the pool and leaned its heavy branches toward the bank, and evidently its wide-flung limbs were webbed and tented between by the same invisible substance which covered the brook, for they formed the only cover overhead yet, to the ear, felt like a ceiling.
The whole effect was, to Bril, intensely depressing, and he surprised himself with a flash of homesickness for the tall steel cities of his home planet.
Nina smiled and left them. Bril followed his host’s example and sank down on the ground, or floor, where it became a bank, or wall. Inwardly, Bril rebelled at the lack of decisiveness, of discipline, of clear-cut limitation inherent in such haphazard design as this. But he was well trained and quite prepared, at first, to keep his feelings to himself among barbarians.
“Nina will join us in a moment,” said Tanyne.
Bril, who had been watching the woman’s swift movements across the courtyard through the transparent wall opposite, controlled a start. “I am unused to your ways and wondered what she was doing,” he said.
“She is preparing a meal for you,” explained Tanyne.
“Herself?”
Tanyne and his son gazed wonderingly. “Does that seem unusual to you?”
“I understood the lady was wife to a Senator,” said Bril. It seemed adequate as an explanation, but only to him. He looked from the boy’s face to the man’s. “Perhaps I understand something different when I use the term ‘Senator.’”
“Perhaps you do. Would you tell us what a Senator is on the planet Kit Carson?”
“He is a member of the Senate, subservient to the Sole Authority, and in turn leader of a free Nation.”
“And his wife?”
“His wife shares his privileges. She might serve a member of the Sole Authority, but hardly anyone else—certainly not an unidentified stranger.”
“Interesting,” said Tanyne, while the boy murmured the astonishment he had not expressed at Bril’s bubble, or Bril himself. “Tell me, have you not identified yourself, then?”
“He did, by the waterfall,” the youth insisted.
“I gave you no proof,” said Bril stiffly. He watched father and son exchange a glance. “Credentials, written authority.” He touched the flat pouch hung on his power belt.
Wonyne asked ingenuously, “Do the credentials say you are not Bril of Kit Carson in the Sumner System?”
Bril frowned at him and Tanyne said gently, “Wonyne, take care.” To Bril, he said, “Surely there are many differences between us, as there always are between different worlds. But I am certain of this one similarity: the young at times run straight where wisdom has built a winding path.”
Bril sat silently and thought this out. It was probably some sort of apology, he decided, and gave a single sharp nod. Youth, he thought, was an attenuated defect here. A boy Wonyne’s age would be a soldier on Carson, ready for a soldier’s work, and no one would be apologizing for him. Nor would he be making blunders. None!
He said, “These credentials are for your officials when I meet with them. By the way, when can that be?”
Tanyne shrugged his wide shoulders. “Whenever you like.”
“The sooner the better.”
“Very well.”
“Is it far?”
Tanyne seemed perplexed. “Is what far?”
“Your capital, or wherever it is your Senate meets.”
“Oh, I see. It doesn’t meet, in the sense you mean. It is always in session, though, as they used to say. We—”
He compressed his lips and made a liquid, bi-syllabic sound, then he laughed. “I do beg your pardon,” he said warmly. “The Old Tongue lacks certain words certain concepts. What is your word for—er—the-presence-of-all-in-the-presence-of-one?”
“I think,” said Bril carefully, “that we had better go back to the subject at hand. Are you saying that your Senate does not meet in some official place, at some appointed time?”
“I—” Tan hesitated, then nodded. “Yes, that is true as far as it—”
“And there is no possibility of my addressing your Senate in person?”
“I didn’t say that.” Tan tried twice to express the thought, while Bril’s eyes slowly narrowed. Tan suddenly burst into laughter. “Using the Old Tongue to tell old tales and to speak with a friend are two different things,” he said ruefully. “I wish you would learn our speech. Would you, do you suppose? It is rational and well based on what you know. Surely you have another language besides the Old Tongue on Kit Carson?”
“I honor the Old Tongue,” said Bril stiffly, dodging the question. Speaking very slowly, as if to a retarded child, he said, “I should like to know when I may be taken to those in authority here, in order to discuss certain planetary and interplanetary matters with them.”
“Discuss them with me.”
“You are a Senator,” Bril said, in a tone which meant clearly: You are only a Senator.
“True,” said Tanyne.”
With forceful patience, Bril asked, “And what is a Senator here?”
“A contact point between the people of his district and the people everywhere. One who knows the special problems of a small section of the planet and can relate them to planetary policy.�
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“And whom does the Senate serve?”
“The people,” said Tanyne, as if he had been asked to repeat himself.
“Yes, yes, of course. And who, then, serves the Senate?”
“The Senators.”
Bril closed his eyes and barely controlled the salty syllable which welled up inside him. “Who,” he inquired steadily, “is your Government?”
The boy had been watching them eagerly, alternately, like a devotee at some favorite fast ball game. Now he asked, “What’s a Government?”
Nina’s interruption at that point was most welcome to Bril. She came across the terrace from the covered area where she had been doing mysterious things at a long work-surface in the garden. She carried an enormous tray—guided it, rather, as Bril saw when she came closer. She kept three fingers under the tray and one behind it, barely touching it with her palm. Either the transparent wall of the room disappeared as she approached, or she passed through a section where there was none.
“I do hope you find something to your taste among these,” she said cheerfully, as she brought the tray down to a hummock near Bril. “This is the flesh of birds, this of small mammals, and, over here, fish. These cakes are made of four kinds of grain, and the white cakes here of just one, the one we call milk-wheat. Here is water, and these two are wines, and this one is a distilled spirit we call warm-ears.”
Bril, keeping his eyes on the food, and trying to keep his universe from filling up with the sweet fresh scent of her as she bent over him, so near, said, “This is welcome.”
She crossed to her husband and sank down at his feet, leaning back against his legs. He twisted her heavy hair gently in his fingers and she flashed a small smile up at him. Bril looked from the food, colorful as a corsage, here steaming, there gathering frost from the air, to the three smiling, expectant faces and did not know what to do.
“Yes, this is welcome,” he said again, and still they sat there, watching him. He picked up the white cake and rose, looked out and around, into the house, through it and beyond. Where could one go in such a place?
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