His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  "I'll look about then," said Colt forlornly. He wandered away from the fire in the direction of a yellow felt tent. There he was delighted to catch words of Cantonese.

  "Greetings, son of Han," he said to the venerable speaker.

  The fine old Mongol head turned; Colt felt himself subjected to a piercing, kindly scrutiny by two twinkling little black eyes. The ruddy little mouth smiled. "Sit down, son. It's a long time between new friends."

  Colt squatted by the fire obediently; the venerable one took a long pull from a bottle of suntori, a vile synthetic Japanese whisky. Wiping his mouth with the back of a wrinkled, yellow hand, he announced, "I'm Grandfather T'ang. This is my son, rang Gaw Yat. If you let him he'll talk you deaf about the time he was on the long march with the Eighth Route Army. He claims General Chuh Teh once ate rice with him."

  T'ang Gaw Yat smiled obediently and a little tolerantly at his father's whimsy. He was a fine-looking Chinese, big-headed and straight-faced, with little wrinkles of laughter playing about his mouth. "What my father says," he confided, "is strictly true. It was a full thousand miles from—"

  "What did I tell you?" broke in the old man. "The slave is his wife, and the smartest one of the lot." He indicated a small Chinese woman of the indeterminate age between twenty and fifty.

  She said in English hardly accented, "Hello. You do speak English, don't you? These barbarians don't know anything but their village jargon and Canton talk." The smile took the edge from her harsh words.

  Colt introduced himself, and answered endless questions on the state of China, military, political and economic.

  "Hold off," ordered the woman at last. "Let him have his turn. Want to know anything, Mr. Colt?"

  "Wouldn't mind knowing how long you've been traveling."

  "Stupid question," broke in Grandfather Han. "Just what one expects from a foreign devil. The splendor of the night closes about him and he would know how long we've been on the march! Have a drink—a small one." He passed the bottle; Colt politely refused.

  "Then maybe you'd like a little game—" There clicked in his palm two ivory cubes.

  "Please, Father," said T'ang Gaw Yat. "Put those away."

  "Pattern of ancient virtue!" sneered the old man. "O you child of purity!"

  "Grandfather is very lucky," said the woman quietly. "He started on the caravan with nothing but those dice and many years of gambling experience. He is now one of the richest men on the line of march. He owns two herds of sheep, a riding camel of his own and the best food there is to be had."

  "And drink," said the son somberly.

  "Tell you what," said the old man. "You can have some of my V.S.O.

  stock—stuff I won from a Spaniard a month back." He rummaged for a moment in one of the tent pockets, finally emerged with a slender bottle which caught the firelight like auriferous quartz. "Danziger Goldwasser—le veritable," he gloated. "But I can't drink the stuff.

  Doesn't bite like this Nipponese hellbroth." He upended the bottle of suntori again; passed the brandy to Colt.

  The American took it, studied it curiously against the fire. It was a thin, amber liquid, at whose bottom settled little flakes. He shook them up into the neck of the bottle; it was like one of the little globular paperweights that hold a mimic snowstorm. But instead of snow there were bits of purest beaten gold to tickle the palate and fancy of the drinker.

  "Thanks," he said inadequately. "Very kind of you."

  "Curious, isn't it," said the woman, "how much the caravan life resembles a village? Though the wealth, of course, is not in land but in mercantile prospects—" She stopped as Colt caught her eye. Why, he wondered, had she been rattling on like that?

  "The wisdom of the slave is the folly of the master," said Grandfather T'ang amiably. "He is happy who learns to discount the words of a woman."

  "Suppose," said the woman slowly and quietly, "you learn to mind your own business, you poisonous old serpent?"

  "They can't stand common sense," confided the old man.

  Colt felt, painfully, that he had wandered into a family quarrel. He bolted with a mumbled excuse, hanging onto the bottle of brandy. He stood for a moment away from the trail and stared down the long line of fires. There were more than a thousand, snaking nearly out of sight. The spectacle was restful; the fires were a little blue, being kindled largely out of night-soil briquettes.

  The sky was quite black; something had overcast the deep-ranked stars of the plateau. No moon shone.

  Colt settled against the lee of a rock in a trance. He heard winds and the hiss of voices, soft in the distance. It was the quiet and complaining Tajiki dialect. He could hear it and understand it. It was absurdly simple, he thought abstractedly, to pick out the meanings of words and phrases.

  "Such a night," one was saying, "as in August. You remember?"

  "I remember." Then, dark and passionate, "The limping, bloody demon!

  Let him come near and I'll tear his vitals!"

  "Surely you will not. He is the tearer in his evil work. We are the torn—"

  Colt sat up with a start. What the hell! He couldn't understand Tajiki, not one little word of it! He had been dreaming, he thought. But it didn't melt away as a dream should. The memory of the overheard conversation was as sharp and distinct as it could be, something concrete and mysterious, like a joke that hadn't been explained to him.

  Then there was a sort of heavenly grumbling, like a megatherial word or more. Colt twisted and stared at the zenith; could see nothing at all. The rumbling ended. Colt saw black little fingers all down the line rise and attend, twisting and staring and buzzing to each other.

  2

  He hurried to the fire of his European friends. They were sprawled on blankets, their bodies a little swollen from the enormous meal they had eaten. Colt saw the bare bone of the joint, scraped by knife edges. The Occidentals were unconcernedly smoking.

  "What was that racket?" he asked, feeling a little silly. "What was it—do you know?"

  "Thunder," said McNaughton noncommittally.

  "Oui," agreed M. Lodz, puffing a long, tip-gilt cigarette. "Did it frighten you, the thunder?"

  Colt pulled himself together. There was something evasive here, something that sought to elude him. "It was peculiar thunder," he said with glacial calm. "There was no lightning preceding it."

  "The lightning will come soon," said Lodz furtively. "I tell you so you will not be alarmed."

  "You have your lightning after your thunder here? Odd. In my country it's the other way around." He wasn't going to break—he wasn't going to swear

  "But how boring," drawled the Pole's wife. "Never a change?"

  He wasn't going to break

  Then the peculiar lightning split the skies. Colt shot one staggered, incredulous glance at it, and was dazzled. It was a word, perhaps a name, spelled out against the dead-black sky. He knew it. It was in some damned alphabet or other; fretfully he chided himself for not remembering which of the twenty-odd he could recognize it could be.

  Colt realized that the Occidentals were staring at him with polite concern. He noticed a shred of meat between the teeth of Mme. Lodz as she smiled reassuringly—white, sharp teeth, they were. Colt rubbed his eyes dazedly. He knew he must be a haggard and unseemly figure to their cultured gaze—but they hadn't seen the words in the sky—or had they—?

  Politely they stared at him, phrases bubbling from their lips:

  "So frightfully sorry, old man—"

  "Wouldn't upset you for the world—"

  "Hate to see you lose your grip—"

  Colt shook his head dazedly, as though he felt strands of sticky silk wind around his face and head. He turned and ran, hearing the voice of Raisuli Batar call after him, "Don't stray too far—"

  He didn't know how long he ran or how far he strayed. Finally he fell flat, sprawled childishly, feeling sick and confused in his head. He looked up for a moment to see that the caravan fires were below some curve of rock or other—at any rate, w
ell out of sight. They were such little lights, he thought. Good for a few feet of warm glow, then sucked into the black of High Pamir. They made not even a gleam in the night-heavy sky.

  And there, on the other side of him and the caravan, he saw the tall figure of another human being. She stood on black rock between two drifts of snow.

  Colt bit out the foil seal of the brandy bottle and pulled the cork with his fingers. After a warm gulp of the stuff, he rose.

  "Have a drink?"

  She turned. She was young in her body and face, Mongoloid. Her eyes were blue-black and shining like metal. Her nose was short, Chinese, yet her skin was quite white. She did not have the eyefold of the yellow people.

  Silently she extended one hand for the bottle, tilted it high. Colt saw a shudder run through her body as she swallowed and passed him the tall flask with its gold-flecked liquor.

  "You must have been cold."

  "By choice. Do you think I'd warm myself at either fire?"

  "Either?" he asked.

  "There are two caravans. Didn't you know?"

  "No. I'm just here—what's the other caravan?"

  "Just here, are you? Did you know that you're dead?"

  Colt thought the matter over slowly; finally declared, "I guess I did. And all those others—and you—?"

  "All dead. We're the detritus of High Pamir. You'll find, if you look, men who fell to death from airplanes within the past few years walking by the side of Neanderthalers who somehow strayed very far from their tribes and died. The greatest part of the caravans comes, of course, from older caravans of the living who carried their goods from Asia to Europe for thousands of years."

  Colt coughed nervously. "Have another drink," he said. "Then let's see this other caravan. I'm not too well pleased with the one I fell into."

  She took his hand and guided him across the snow and black rock to back within sight of his own caravan. He stared, eager and hungry to see. As she pointed with one tapering finger it seemed that many things were clearer than they ever had been before. He saw that the long line of lights was not his caravan but another in the opposite direction, paralleling his.

  "There you will see their caravan master," she said, putting her face next to his. He looked and saw a potbellied monster whose turban was half as high as its wearer. Its silhouette, as it passed before a fire, was indescribably unpleasant.

  "Evening prayer," said his guide, with a faint tone of mockery.

  He studied them as they arranged flares before a platform flung together out of planks and trestles; he also saw them assemble a sort of idol, fitting the various parts together and bolting them securely. When the thing was perhaps two-thirds assembled he turned away and covered his face, repelled.

  "I won't look at the rest of it now," he said. "Perhaps later, if you wish me to."

  "That's right," she said. "It isn't a thing to look at calmly. But you will see the rest of it one time or another. This is a very long caravan."

  She looked down and said, "Now they are worshiping."

  Colt looked. "Yes," he said flatly. They were worshiping in their own fashion, dancing and leaping uglily while some dozen of them blew or saw fantastic discords from musical instruments. Others were arranged in a choir; as they began to sing Colt felt cold nausea stirring at the pit of his belly.

  Their singing was markedly unpleasant; Colt, who enjoyed the discords of Ernest Bloch and Jean Sibelius, found them stimulatingly revolting.

  The choir droned out a minor melody, varying it again and again with what Colt construed to be quarter-tones and split-interval harmonies.

  He found he was listening intently, nearly fascinated by the ugly sounds.

  "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 fight 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 point 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 bac
k 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 suntors 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.