Can & Can'tankerous

by Harlan Ellison

  With the six-to-one ratio of marties to Terrans on the planet, there were stilettos to spare.

  But for those who put up a fight, or got away, or had been out of reach of a blade, the marties broke forth concealed burp guns and acid-sprayers, and combed the city from one end to the other. Each Dome had its fifth column, each Dome its saboteurs—its mortality rate.

  In the matter of one hour, the overthrow of the Earthmen had been completed. While Sarna sat brooding…

  She heard the burp gun fire in the street, and went to the boarded-up window. Through a chink in the boards, she saw three plastic-armored marties carrying burp guns, stalking methodically through the street, firing into windows and doorways.

  There was no sound from the Red Dog House. She went to the door and opened it a crack, the special way, back on its hinges.

  It was all that saved her.

  Three girls of the house, marties, had been waiting with blades drawn—waiting for her to come out, so they could add her to the other Terran dead heaped in the square. They had liked her, respected her, lived and worked with her—but she was an imp.

  The knives flashed down…where Sarna should have been. But the door had opened in the opposite direction, and the knives thrust into wood instead of flesh. Sarna pulled the door closed quickly. What was happening? Why had the girls tried to kill her? Who were these upper marties in the street, firing into buildings? Was the Dome going mad?

  She had no time to worry about it. A burst of burp fire splintered the wooden boards behind her, and she threw herself to the floor. Outside the door she heard the three martie whores yelling things at one another in Upper Mart, and then one of them was running down the corridor.

  Sarna lay there quivering, feeling the lump of the jewel box in her crotch-bag, and wondering what madness was afoot now. Was this tied up with the Six? The lump at her groin was too prominent. She withdrew the tiny box and secreted it in the waistband of her skirt.

  She heard one of the girls talking to the marties in the alley who had fired through her window. It was apparent what was happening. The martie prostitute was telling them there was someone inside they should kill. She heard raucous martie laughter, and it was followed by the crack of a burp gun butt against the boards of the window. She saw a crack appear in the boards, and they shivered. Another crack, and one of the boards splintered at the end. Still another, and one board flew free of the window, crashed to the floor. Through the slit where the board had been she could see the yellow face of a martie, wearing battle armor. The face was flowing with lust. She pulled herself out of the line of sight from the crack in the boards and reached up to her dressing table. Her hand closed around a long nail file.

  The marties outside were still shouting and laughing and smashing at the window boards. Then Sarna heard a sharp crack as one of the soldiers threw his entire weight against the boards. Two slabs of wood shattered completely in the middle, and the martie came through without direction or control. He fell to the floor a few feet from her, and Sarna leaped on him.

  She was trapped—two whores with knives outside one door, and soldiers outside the window. She did not know what had happened out there, but whatever it was, they wanted to kill her.

  She defended herself.

  The nail file came up, and came down, and the martie soldier lay pumping yellow blood through a deep, ragged gash in the back of his neck. Sarna looked away. She heard the sound of the other two soldiers trying to see what had happened to their companion inside. All the time she heard the filthy, guttural laughter of men loose in a conquered city—taking what prizes they could, raping what women they could find. Suddenly she realized completely what she had known unconsciously from the start: she was booty.

  If they got her, it had to be: torture and, finally, death. Finally. After. Long after she had lost the power to wish she was dead. She did not want to go that way… At her feet lay the martie’s burp gun.

  She dropped the sticky yellow nail file and picked up the lightweight weapon. For a second she laughed at herself, standing there, trying to decide which end did what. Then she realized the bell-mouth was the other end—the killing end.

  She took the weapon in her hands, as she had supposed the marties did it, and flattened herself against the wall beside the boarded window.

  A martie head appeared, turned in her direction.

  She blasted.

  The power drop from the burper struck the head, and the head exploded. The body was still outside, but she knew it must have dropped in front of the final martie soldier: she heard a shriek outside the window.

  She turned suddenly and blasted through the door of the room. Two intermingled screams and a thud followed. She had gotten at least one of those bitches out there.

  The door hung loose on three hinges, shattered in the center; she blasted away the fastenings, as the door split and fell outward with a crash. One of the martie whores sat on the floor, her hands crushed over her half-demolished face. Bits of bone stuck through where the drop had exploded, and her hair was singed to a fluff.

  Sarna heard sounds behind her. The third martie soldier was crawling through the window, screaming in Upper Mart, and blasting as he came. He was so infuriated, it was no trouble to pour a burp blast into him. He stepped halfway through the window and fell the rest of the way to the floor.

  Sarna did not wait to find out if he was dead.

  She ran through the whorehouse, the burp rifle before her like some deadly appendage, and once, when a door swung toward her, blown by the wind, she blasted it from its frame.

  She knew she would have to run.

  The front door of the Red Dog House stood open. She walked toward it slowly, watching for any movement from any direction; and when she was framed in the open space, realizing it was foolish to expose herself like that, but unable to do anything else, she stopped. Outside, it was a changed world. One hour had done much. The street was littered with rubble. Here and there she saw the outflung arms and twisted bodies of humans. There were no marties in sight.

  She began to walk.

  Down Hippodrome Boulevard, toward the center of the Dome. The dual-face clock (Earth-Mars time) on the Esso Building was shattered. The front doors of the big building were broken, their glass in heaps about the base of the building. An Earthman lay halfway out the door, a knife in his back.

  She shuddered; it had to be the same all over Mars. She was an infidel in a foreign land. Oh, well, it was all the same: Mars, St. Paul, Chicago, Baffin Bay, Le Havre, she had worked them all. This was just one more place that she would have to mentally check off as “worked-out territory.”

  The box slipped, and fell from the waistband of her skirt. It clattered to the ground, and she picked it up in her left hand, closing her fist around it tightly. The burper swung at the end of her arm, her right hand tight to the firing stud. She heard the sound of footsteps, crunch-crunching over masonry and rubble, around the corner.

  Almost as though she had wished for it, an alley opened beside her. She ducked into it and crouched down behind a pile of garbage pods. She held the burper in one hand, ready to fire. The sounds of marching passed just beyond the alley, then faded off down the street.

  She emerged from the alley…and saw another martie patrol coming.

  A high, thin shriek in Upper Mart, and the sixteen of the patrol were after her. She ducked and skipped and weaved, rushing toward the Esso Building behind her, and ran through the jagged frame where the glassite doors had been, just as the marties poured around the corner. Burst after burst of the burpers struck the building, powdering and blasting the face of it. She ran inside and looked around frantically. One elevator door in the bank of eight stood open, and an Earthgirl operator lay twisted in a dead heap with a martie. Sarna tried rolling them away from the elevator, and could not move them.

  The marties were coming up fast. She had to do something.

  As a last resort she blasted at the bodies with the burper, and the arms that
blocked the elevator separated. She kicked the stumps away, thrust home the door, and shot the elevator up, to the very top of the twenty-story building.

  She gasped for breath as the elevator door opened, for it had been an office, and all the Terran workers were dead, slumped over their desks, murdered by their coworkers.

  She saw one of the martie burp blasts had ricocheted a bit of masonry off her arm, and it was bleeding. In the next shaft she could hear an elevator starting up slowly, stopping at each floor. Then another. They were coming after her.

  She ran to one of the desks, painfully and with strain lifted the white-collar corpse from the chair, and dumped it through the broken window beside the desk. The body flopped onto the ledge outside the window, and Sarna prayed they would not see it—or if they did, would not think too long on it. She thrust the burper and the box with the Six thing into a space between the desk and a filing cabinet, and lay down across the desk, half-slumped out of the chair, her bloody arm revealed.

  In the pleasure-domes she had learned how to feign sleep—or unconsciousness—if the client situation required such sham. She slitted her eyes, down to the veriest thinness. To any but the most minute examination, her eyes were closed behind thick, camouflaging eyelashes. Yet she could still see what danger might come toward her.

  She lay there like a corpse, praying silently they would think she was already dead.

  The elevator door opened with a sigh.

  CHAPTER THREE

  They came out, seven of them fully-dressed in plastic- mesh battle armor, burpers leveled across the room. A few hurried words in Upper Mart, and they spread out across the room. Oddly, they touched no bodies, and it was that, Sarna knew later, that saved her. The marties had a fetish; death was death, and to touch it was to spread it. If you wanted to die, touch a corpse. They touched nothing, but moved through the entire floor of the building, searching thoroughly. For a moment she was sure one of them—a short, very light yellow martie with high cheekbones—was going to find the burper and box she had hidden. But he passed cautiously around her desk, and missed seeing the little space between desk and cabinet.

  She watched him go.

  They met in front of the elevator banks and looked at the empty car in which she had escaped. They knew she was here.

  The leader was a swarthy yellowskin, and he made hand movements and sounds that led Sarna to believe they were going back over the same area again. They started forward, and she knew they would find her this time. She tensed, and for an instant she wanted to make a fist with the hand hanging over the side of the desk. She restrained herself, hoping with a feverish tenseness they would miss her again.

  At that moment, while she was locked within the terror of her mind, she heard shots from outside, ringing up from the street. Then a shout from below, and a long string of fluid Upper Mart. The soldiers in the office looked at one another, and wide, elfin smiles burst across their faces. With jubilation they clapped each other on the back, and rushed past Sarna to look down into the street. One martie inadvertently brushed her back with his arm, recoiled in disgusted horror, and for a second she worried that he would feel her body heat. But the martie was too repulsed, wanted no one to notice his shame, and he joined his companions at the window. He shivered for moments, as the others hooted and jeered and screamed at one another and their companions in the street; then they rushed back to the elevators and went down.

  She heard them stopping on lower floors to pick up the rest of their patrol, and a few minutes later the augmented group in the street sent up a cheer and howl.

  Sarna chanced a look. She got up and edged to the window. Immediately she knew what had happened.

  The body of the office worker had slipped off the ledge; the slope of the ledge had caused it, or rigor mortis, perhaps, for the girl had not been dead too long. In any case, the body had fallen, and the nervous martie patrol had fired on it as it fell. They had not been able to identify it as anyone other than Sarna—for they had only caught a glimpse of her as she had run away. The knife wound in the corpse had been obscured by the fall and the blasting, and had any sign of it been left, the shots they now ruthlessly poured into the pulped flesh would have obscured it effectively.

  Sarna sat down and breathed deeply. For a while, she was safe.

  It was almost as though the death of the little Yellow had started it all. The marties had been quiet for years now, had not given anyone any trouble. Then the Central men had opened the lich farms out in the Telemites and—now that she thought of it—there had been rumors of unrest among the natives. Then the Yellow had died, she had been left with the Six thing, and now the revolution. All in one whirlwind of pandemonium. Her head ached, and her arm was a sliver of red-hot pain where the masonry had grazed her.

  She ripped a piece of cloth from the blouse of an elderly accountant lying against a water reservoir in the corner, and tied up her arm, wincing at the pain.

  Then she sat down to think. To regain her equilibrium. She ran a dirty hand through her blonde hair and let a sigh escape.

  It was a great old life.

  She went to retrieve the box and the burper.

  The box lay in the palm of her hand, and again she thought of what was inside, and the chill of strangeness clawed at her. She was fascinated by it, and at the same time amazed at how she was able to carry it around without fear or concern.

  A sound escaped the box. A soft, scrabbling sound. It was awake.

  It slept most of the time now; not dormant, as when she had first received it, nor sluggish as it had become once it awakened after its great sleep, but merely resting—as though summoning all its resources for some great effort to come.

  She put her ear to the box. The scrabbling stopped. It said tinnily, “I would talk with you.”

  She started, dropping the jewel box on the tiled floor. Her face was blood-empty beneath the blonde hair. Her eyes were wide with fright. The thing in the box had spoken; there was no doubt about that. It had spoken, in clear, slightly tinny-sounding English. Not Terra-pidge or Upper Mart or any of the fringe dialects, but good solid English. When she thought of what languished in that box, of what the Six thing was, her face froze over till she thought the muscles would tear.

  “I would speak to you now,” the Six thing piped again.

  She could not see into the jewel box, but she was certain a small red eye—one of seven—was watching her through one of the tiny air holes bored in the top of the container. She made a hesitant movement toward the box, then drew her hand back.

  The voice piped up again tinnily. “You have nothing to fear from me. I am but One. I lack of Five to be whole.”

  She did not understand, but there was a tremor of aloneness in the voice. She unsnapped the lock and removed it. For a second she kept her hand flat on top of the lid, afraid to allow herself to open the container. Then she flipped it open and gasped again. A week had dulled her recollection of just how scabrous and revolting the Six thing was.

  It sat crouched back on its jointed legs, looking like some weird alien frog-thing. Its head was bald, and more spherical than oblate. The mouth was revoltingly humanoid—pink, small lips, a human tongue, and white, even teeth except for one abnormally long spike in the center of the bridgework; a spike that hung down, protruding from the mouth like a stalactite.

  Seven eyes, red and tiny and seeming to hold all the malevolence—and strangely, all the knowledge—of the Universe, ringed the froglike head. Seven lidless eyes with heavy flesh rings around them, puffing them out.

  No nose, no chin, no ears.

  Its body was a parody of the human form. Small and wrinkled and such a hideous shade of brown that it was almost the color of dried blood. Its arms were crooked, all four of them, and its legs would not long support the gross body, so it crouched back on the wrinkled stems, jointed at odd places.

  Sarna stared at the Six thing with mounting apprehension, and the Six thing stared back impassively.

  “Shoc
k holds one of the Six in thrall for very long,” the Six thing piped up in perfect English. And she saw its gash mouth had barely moved, and realized it was not speaking at all, but was perhaps telepathic. “When the burying detail brought two of us too close together, without another to work as a damper, the cavern exploded, and I was thrown out and away from that place. It was a very long time until I regained my senses. Then I was in this box.”

  All this made sense to Sarna. It tied in with what Ayto had said about the invisible place in the Telemites exploding and finding the Six thing stunned outside. She listened as the creature beat on, its words clear in her mind.

  “My Five are waiting for me somewhere,” the Six thing said. “My Five are waiting and I must join them—

  “A million years ago we were young and ruled all this.” Its gnarled hand of three fingers came up and around, and Sarna realized with a great shock that the Six thing was saying it was a million years old. “But the portents were not right for us, and we were split apart, kept apart, kept from wholeness and the power. Wehna, wehna, wehna.” It chanted a word that would not even mentally translate for Sarna, though it seeped sadness and woe.

  “It has been a very long time, a very long time,” the creature said. Not a flicker of movement passed over the bestial, seven-eyed face, yet there was such depth, such an eternity of sadness and longing, Sarna’s heart cried, and despite the scabrous look of the thing, she was tempted to soothe it.

  The Six thing must have caught her thought, for its next words were rigidly unemotional. “We have been apart through chance and through intent, but we are near to merging. We can be of service to one another, woman of Earth.”

  Sarna had sunk into a dreamlike listening state, and the words, addressed directly to her, brought her out of it with a snap. The Six thing was talking to her, and he was offering her a deal of some sort. “What do you mean? I don’t understand.”