Melancholy Elephants

by Spider Robinson

  George Maugham returned home from work much later than usual, and in a sour frame of mind. He was tired and knew that he had missed an excellent home-cooked meal, and things had not gone well at work despite his extra hours of labor. His face, as he came through the door, held that expression that would cause his wife to become especially understanding.

  “Light on in the kids’ window,” he said crankily as he hung his coat by the door and removed his boots. “It’s late.”

  Luanna Maugham truly was an extraordinary woman. With only a minimal use of her face and the suggestion of a shrug and the single word “Grandpa,” she managed to convey amusement and irony and compassion and tolerant acceptance, and thereby begin diffusing his potential grumpiness. He felt the last of it bleed from him as she put into his hands a cup of dark sweetness which he knew perfectly well would turn out to be precisely drinking temperature. He understood how much she did for him.

  But he still felt that he should follow up the issue of their children’s bedtime. “I wish he wouldn’t keep them up so late,” he said, pitching his voice to signal his altered motivation.

  “Well,” she said, “they can sleep in tomorrow morning—no school. And he does tell fairy tales so well, dear.”

  “It’s not the fairy tales I mind,” he said, faintly surprised to feel a little of his irritation returning. “I just hope he’s not filling their heads with all that other garbage.” He sipped from his cup, which was indeed the right temperature. “All those hairy old stories of his. About the Good Old Days When Men Were Men And Women Knew Their Place.” He shook his head. Yes, he was losing his good humour again.

  “Why do his stories bother you so?” she asked gently. “Honestly, they seem pretty harmless to me.”

  “I think all that old stuff depresses them. Nightmares and that sort of thing. Confuses them. Boring, too, the same old stuff over and over again.”

  Mrs Maugham did not point out that their two children never had nightmares, or permitted themselves to be bored. She made, in fact no response at all, and after a sufficient pause, he shook his head and continued speaking, more hesitantly. “I mean…there’s something about it I can’t…” He glanced down at his cup, and perhaps he found there the words he wanted. He sipped them. “Here it is: if the Good Old Days were so good, then I and my generation were fools for allowing things to change—then the world that we made is inferior—and I don’t think it is. I mean, every generation of kids grows up convinced that their parents are idiots who’ve buggered everything up, don’t they, and I certainly don’t want or need my father encouraging the kids to feel that way.” He wiped his lip with the heel of his hand. “I’ve worked hard, all my life, to make this a better world than the one I was born into, and…and it is, Lu, it is.”

  She took his face in her hands, kissed him, and bathed him in her very best smile. “Of course it is,” she lied.

  “And that,” Grandpa was saying just then, with the warm glow of the storyteller who knows he has wowed ’em again, “is the story of how Princess Julie rescued the young blacksmith Jason from the Dark Tower, and together they slew the King of the Dolts.” He bowed his head and began rolling his final cigarette of the night.

  The applause was, considering the size of the house, gratifying. “That was really neat, Grampa,” Julie said enthusiastically, and little Jason clapped his hands and echoed, “Really neat!”

  “Now, tomorrow night,” he said, and paused to lick his cigarette paper, “I’ll tell you what happened next.”

  “Oh God, yes,” Julie said, smacking her forehead, “the Slime Monster, I forgot, he’s still loose.”

  “The Slime Monster!” Jason cried. “But that’s my favorite part! Grampa tell now.”

  “Oh yes, please, Grampa,” Julie seconded. In point of fact, she was not really all that crazy about the Slime Monster—he was pretty yucky—but now he represented that most precious commodity any child can know: a few minutes more of after-bedtime awakeness.

  But the old man had been braced for this. “Not a chance, munchkins. Way past your bedtimes, and your folks’ll—”

  A chorus of protests rained about his head.

  “Can it,” he said, in the tone that meant he was serious, and the storm chopped off short. He was mildly pleased by this small reflection of his authority, and he blinked, and when his eyes opened Julie was holding out the candle to light his cigarette for him, and little Jason was inexpertly but enthusiastically trying to massage the right knee which, he knew (and occasionally remembered), gave Grandpa trouble a lot, because of something that Jason understood was called “our fright us.” How, the old man wondered mildly, do they manage an instant one-eighty without even shifting gears?

  “You can tell us tomorrow, Grampa,” Julie assured him, with the massive nonchalance that only a six-year old girl can lift, “I don’t matter about it.” She put down the candle and got him an ashtray.

  “Yeah,” Jason picked up his cue. “Who cares about a dumb old Slime Monster?” He then attempted to look as if that last sentence were sincere, and failed; Julie gave him a dirty look for overplaying his hand.

  Little con artists, Grandpa thought fondly, there’s hope for the race yet. He waited for the pitch, enjoying the knee-massage.

  “I’ll make you a deal, Grampa,” Julie said.

  “A deal?”

  “If I can ask you a question you can’t answer, you have to tell about the Olden Days for ten minutes.”

  He appeared to think about it while he smoked. “Seven minutes.” There was no timepiece in the room.

  “Nine,” Julie said at once.

  “Eight.”

  “Eight and a half.”

  “Done.”

  The old man did not expect to lose. He was expecting some kind of trick question, but he felt that he had heard most, perhaps all, of the classic conundrums over the course of his years, and he figured he could cobble up a trick answer to whatever Julie had up her sleeve. And she sideswiped him.

  “You know that poem, ‘Roses are red, violets are blue’?” she asked.

  “Which one? There are hundreds.”

  “That’s what I mean,” she said, springing the trap. “I know a millyum of ’em. Roses are red, violets are blue—”

  “—outhouse is smelly and so are you,” Jason interrupted loudly, and broke up.

  She glared at her younger brother and pursed her lips. “Don’t be such a child,” she said gravely, and nearly caught Grandpa smiling. “So that’s my question.”

  “What?”

  “Why do they always say that?”

  “You mean, ‘Roses are red, violets—’?”

  “When they’re not.”

  “Not what?”

  She looked up at the ceiling as though inviting God to bear witness to the impossibility of communicating with grownups. “Blue,” she said.

  The old man’s jaw dropped.

  “Violets are violet,” she amplified.

  He was thunderstruck. She was absolutely right, and all at once he could not imagine why the question had not occurred to him decades earlier. “I’ll be damned. You win, Princess. I have no idea how that one got started. You’ve got me dead to rights.”

  “Oh boy,” Jason crowed, releasing Grandpa’s knee at once and returning to his bed. “You kids nowadays,” he prompted as Julie crawled in beside him.

  Grandpa accepted the inevitable.

  “You kids nowadays don’t know nothing about nothing,” he said. “Now in the Olden Days…”

  Grinning triumphantly, Julie fluffed up her pillow and stretched out on the pallet, pulling her blanket delicately up over her small legs, just to the knees. Jason pulled his own blanket to his chin, uncaring that this bared his feet, and stared at the ceiling.

  “…in the Olden Days it wasn’t like it is these days. Men were men in them days, and women knew their place in the world. This world has been going straight to hell since I was a boy, children, and you can dip me if it looks like getting
any better. Things you kids take for granted nowadays, why, in the Olden Days we’d have laughed at the thought. Sometimes we did.

  “F’rinstance, this business of gettin’ up at six in the goddam morning and havin’ a goddam potato pancake for breakfast, an’ then walkin’ twenty goddam kilometers to the goddam little red schoolhouse—in the Olden Days there wasn’t none of that crap. We got up at eight like civilized children, and walked twenty goddam meters to where a bus come and hauled us the whole five klicks to a school the likes of which a child like you’ll never see, more’s the pity.”

  “Tell about the bus,” Jason ordered.

  “It was big enough for sixty kids to play in, and it was warm in the winter, sometimes too warm, and God Himself drove it, and it smelled wonderful and just the same every day. And when it took you home after school, there was none of this nonsense of grabbing some refried beans and goin’ off to haul rock and brush for the goddam road crew for fifty cents a week, I’ll tell you that. Why, if a feller had tried to hire me when I was your age, at a good salary, mind you, they’d have locked him up for exploiting me! No sir, we’d come home after a hard day of learning, and we’d play ball or watch TV or read a book, whatever we felt like—ah Christ, we lived like kings and we never even knew it!

  “You, Julie, you’ll have children before you’re sixteen, and a good wife and mother you’ll be—but in the Olden Days you might have been an executive, or a doctor, or a dancer. Jason, you’ll grow up to be a good farmer—if they don’t hang you—but if you’d been born when I was, you could have made movies in Thailand, or flown airliners to Paris, or picked rocks off the goddam face of the Moon and brought ’em home. And before any of that, you both could have had something you’re never going to know—a mysterious, terrible, wonderful thing called adolescence.

  “But my generation, and your father and mother’s, we threw it all away, because it wasn’t perfect. The best I can explain it is that they all voted themselves a free lunch, democratic as hell, and then tried to duck out when the cheque arrived. They spent every dime they had, and all of your money besides, and they still had to wash some dishes. There was two packs of idiots, you see. On one side you had rich sons of bitches, excuse my language, and they were arrogant. Couldn’t be bothered to build a nuclear power plant to specs or a car that worked, couldn’t be bothered to hide their contempt. Why, do you know that banks actually used to set out, for the use of their customers, pens that didn’t work—and then chain them in place to prevent their theft? Worse than that, they were the dumbest aristocrats in the history of man. They couldn’t be bothered to take care of their own peasants. I mean, if you want a horse to break his back for you, do you feed him, or take all his hay to make yourself pillows and mattresses?

  “And then on the other side you had sincere, well-meanin’ folks who were even dumber than the rich. Between the anti-teckers and the no-nukers and the stop-fusion jerks and the small-is-beautiful types and the appropriate-technology folks and the back-to-the-landers they managed to pull the plug, to throw away the whole goddam solar system. The car might have got us all to a gas station, running on fumes and momentum—but now that they shut the engine down there ain’t enough gas left to get it started again…”

  The old man’s cigarette was too short to keep smoking. He pinched it out between two fingers, salvaged the unburnt tobacco, and began to take up his tale again. Then he saw that the children were both fast asleep. He let his breath out, covered them, and blew out the candle. He thought about going downstairs to ask his son-in-law how things had gone in the fields, whether the crop had been saved…but the stairs were hard on the old man’s our fright us, and he really did not want to risk hearing bad news just now. Instead he went to the window and watched the moon, lonely now for several decades, and after a time he cried. For the children, who could never never hope that one day their grandchildren might have the stars…

  Not Fade Away

  Not Fade Away

  I became aware of him five parsecs away.

  He rode a nickel-iron asteroid of a hundred metric tons as if it were an unruly steed, and he broke off chunks of it and hurled them at the stars, and he howled.

  I manifested at the outer periphery of his system and waited to be noticed. I’m sure he had been aware of me long before I detected him, but he affected not to see me for several days, until my light reached him.

  I studied him while I waited. There was something distinctly odd about his morphology. After a while I recognized it: he was wearing the original prototype, the body our ancestors wore! I looked closer, and realized that it was the only body he had ever worn.

  Oh, it had been Balanced and spaceproofed and the skull shielded, of course. But he looked as if when Balancing was discovered, he had been just barely young enough for the process to take. He must have been one of the oldest of the Eldest.

  But why keep that ridiculous body configuration? It was hopelessly inefficient, suited only to existence on the surface of fairly large planets, and rather poorly to that. For a normal environment, everything about it was wrong. I saw that he had had the original sensory equipment improved for space conditions, but it was still limited and poorly placed. Everything about the body was laid out bilaterally and unidirectionally, creating a blind side. The engineering was all wrong, the four limbs all severely limited in mobility. Many of the joints were essentially one-directional, simple hinges.

  Stranger still, the body was grotesquely, comically overmuscled. Whenever his back happened to be turned to his star, the forty-kilo bits of rock he hurled achieved system escape velocity—yet he was able to keep that asteroid clamped between his great thighs. What individual needs that much strength in free space?

  Oddest of all, of course, his mind was sealed.

  Apparently totally. I could get no reading at all from him, and I am a very good reader. He must have been completely unplugged from the Bonding, and in all my three thousand years I have met only four such. He must have been as lonely as any of our ancestors ever was. Yet he knew that the Bonding exists, and refused it.

  A number of objects were tethered or strapped to his body, all of great age yet showing signs of superb maintenance. It took me several days to identify them all positively as utensils, several more to realize that each was a weapon. It takes time for things to percolate down out of the Race Memory, and the oldest things take the most time.

  By then he was ready to notice me. He focused one of his howls and directed it to me. He carefully ignored all the part of me that is Bonded, addressing only my individual ego, with great force.

  “GO AWAY!”

  “Why?” I asked reasonably.

  “GO AWAY AT ONCE OR I WILL END YOU!”

  I radiated startled interest. “Really? Why would you do that?”

  “OH, GAAAH…”

  There was a silence of some hours.

  “I will go away,” I said at last, “if you will tell me why you want me to.”

  His volume was lower. “Do you know who I am?”

  I laughed. “How could I know? Your mind is sealed.”

  “I am the last warrior.”

  “Warrior? Wait now…‘warrior.’ Must be an old word. ‘Warrior.’ Oh—oh. You kill and destroy. Deliberately. How odd. Are you going to destroy me?”

  “I may,” he said darkly.

  “I see. How might I dissuade you? I do not believe I am old enough to die competently yet, and I have at least one major obligation outstanding.”

  “Do you lack the courage to flee? Or the wit?”

  “I shall attempt to flee if I find it necessary. But I would not expect to succeed.”

  “Ah. You fear me.”

  “‘Fear’…no. I recognize the menace you represent. I repeat: how might I dissuade you from ending me? Is there something I can offer you? Access to the Bonding, perhaps?”

  His reply was instant. “If I suspect you of planning to initiate the Bonding process with me, I will make your death a thing of
unending and unspeakable agony.”

  I projected startlement, then masked it. “What can I do for you, then?”

  He laughed. “That’s easy. Find me a fair fight. Find me an enemy. If he or she or it is as strong as me, I will let you go unharmed. If stronger, I will give you all I own and consecrate my death to you.”

  “I am not sure I understand.”

  “I am the last warrior.”

  “Yes?”

  “When I chose my profession, warriors were common, and commonly admired. We killed or destroyed not for personal gain, but to protect a group of non-warriors, or to protect an idea or an ideal.”

  I emanated confusion. “Against what?”

  His answer was days in coming. “Other warriors.”

  “How did the cycle get started?”

  “Primitive men were all warriors. Then there came a time when the average man had to be forced to kill or destroy. Before long, he could no longer be forced. A Balanced human in free space cannot be coerced, only slain. Can you visualize circumstances which would force you to kill?”

  “Only with the greatest difficulty,” I said. “But you enjoy it? You would find pleasure or value in killing me?”

  A week passed. At last he smote his asteroid with his fist, sharply enough to cause rock to fly from its other side. “No. I lied. I will not kill you. What good is a fight you can’t lose?”

  “Why did you…‘lie’?”

  “In order to frighten you.”

  “You failed.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Why did you wish to frighten me?”

  “To compel you to my will.”

  “Hmmm. I believe I see. Then you do urgently wish to locate an enemy. I am baffled. I should have thought a warrior’s prime goal to be the elimination of all other warriors.”

  “No. A warrior’s prime goal is to overcome other warriors. I am the greatest warrior that our race has raised up. I have not worked in over five thousand years. There is no one to overcome.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you know what the R-brain is?”

  “Wait. It’s coming. Oh. I know what the R-brain was. The primitive reptile brain from which the human brain evolved.”