Can & Can'tankerous

by Harlan Ellison

  “Your race is doomed on this planet,” the Six thing said.

  “How do you know that? You’re guessing, that isn’t so!” Sarna shot back, suddenly filled with rage at the statement; she had never been loyal to Earth, or patriotic, but somehow this little creature’s saying it made her defiant…

  “I know,” the Six thing said with massive imperturbability. “I know.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I am the Third. I am the Knower.”

  That made no sense to her, and she voiced a silent question.

  The Six thing received it, and replied. “I must explain my brothers to you. Each of us separately is nothing. We are parts of what you would call a gestalt entity. We are like the parts of a body. I am the knowing sense of that body. My brothers are the arms, the legs, the nerves, the muscles, and the eyes of the being. The Six are one. Separate we can do little, together we are powerful.”

  Sarna tried to grasp the concept of an entity that could only exist as six together, and not alone. She could not, and her next words reflected her confusion: “What can you do for me?”

  “Not for you. For your entire race on Mars.”

  “What, then, for them?”

  “I can return the planet to you. The Martians are a decaying race; they cannot hold it for more than a few hundred years at best. They are a peaceful people really, and they need someone to lean on. Under them, the planet will turn completely to desert, as most of it has done through the ages, through their own ineptitude. The Terrans deserve the chance here on Mars. Would you give them that chance, woman?”

  Sarna stared down at the little horror that spoke to her in thoughts as loud as words. Would she? What would it entail to save her race and give them a new world?

  What? “I will tell you,” the Third of the Six said, reading her mind. “You must reunite me with my brothers, and make certain we are joined. That is all. Then I can work with myself—as my other parts are myself, as I recognize my unified self when I am with them—to reverse this revolution, and turn Mars back to those of you left alive on it.”

  “I’m afraid,” Sarna objected. “I don’t think I can do it.”

  “But faith is more important. Darkness is great, but small light can do much.”

  Sarna sat on the edge of the chair and thought. She knew the Six thing was reading her, but she could not prevent it, and she wasn’t sure she would want to, even if she could. “Well—”

  “I will help you. I will direct you from beginning to end.”

  Sarna sighed in resignation. “I’ll do what you say.”

  The Six thing moved. It hopped weirdly, off balance, to the edge of the box and said, “Take me up.” Sarna took the creature in her hand, hesitantly. The Six thing said, “Are you still afraid?”

  Sarna nodded. “More so than before,” she said slowly.

  “Then close your eyes,” the Six thing said urgently.

  She did as he said, and felt a sharp pain in her forehead. It was gone in a moment, and when she opened her eyes, she found the Six thing was gone also.

  “Where are you?” she asked timorously, like a child lost in a great garden.

  “I am here,” the Six thing said, inside her head. “I am here to stay with you, when you need my help. I will direct you if you need help. Deus ex machina,” it said, and the equivalent of a Six thing chuckle rumbled through Sarna’s skull.

  “What should I do?” Sarna asked, perplexed. She had no idea where to start looking for the other Five, nor how she would overcome anyone who tried to stop her.

  “Take the weapon,” the Six thing said, and Sarna reached down to grasp the burper. She winced. Her arm was still pumping blood painfully. She ripped away the last inch of cloth that covered her shoulder and examined the wound.

  It was glowing.

  “I’m hot!” she screamed, seeing the dull yellow glow of burper radioactivity. “I’m dying, thing, help me,” she appealed to the creature burrowed within her jangling, frightened head.

  The Six thing said softly, “I can do nothing till at least three of my brothers and I are as One. Then I can stop the spread, and make you whole again. But now, I merely ‘know’ and cannot heal. That is the work of Four.”

  Sarna bit her lip and watched the raw wound ooze blood down her arm. It was quite painful, throbbing and glowing as only a burper wound could. She bit her lip again and ripped another piece of cloth from the hem of her skirt; she tied the two bits of fabric around her arm, and made certain the makeshift bandage would not come free.

  “Now?” she asked, helplessly, feeling more like a puppet than a savior of her race on Mars.

  “To the Telemites,” the Six thing advised, nestled warm and gnarled beside the gray bulk of her brain. “One of my brothers lies buried there, the deed done before the explosion. We go.”

  And they did go, hardly with any volition on Sarna’s part. They walked from the Esso Building and stalked openly down the street, and when the Six thing said, “Turn right,” she did it immediately, for as she stepped back into a doorway on the right turn, a horde of martie revolutionaries came streaming across the path she had just left.

  It happened that way many times on the way across the Dome, and finally, long after she would have realized the truth of the situation, had she not been half somnambulistic, she knew what “knowing” entailed for the Six thing. It saw the future.

  Soon the rocketport came into sight; first the sleek needle-prows of the interplanet ships rising above the skyline of the Dome’s city, and then the buildings of the port itself, rising in gray somber solitude at the edge of the blast-cups.

  Then, when she was past the surrounding cleared strip between city and port, she saw the squat, ugly body of the interDome ships, and the long-range cross-Mars ships. “We go to the Telemites aboard that one,” the Six thing informed her, directing her eyes to the medium-sized intercontinental rocket set in a shallow caldera off toward the far end of the port strip.

  “How will we get aboard…will they have to see me?”

  “We go aboard as cargo,” the Six thing assured her.

  “How?”

  “You will see,” the creature said confidently. “Be sure to wait in the shadow of the guard post for a moment before you try to enter.”

  “Night” was falling in the Dome as the regulated weather and day-shift mechanisms swung their globes to dark and dusk. Sarna crouched low instinctively, skirting the high, clear plastoid fence around the port. She broke and ran low to the ground, the burper before her, muzzle out, watching for guards. One martie in battle armor passed to the left, his back turned, and she stopped, bundling low into a ball, in hopes he would not see her. Then the guard post was before her, and she waited in the shadows around the bulge of the shack for a second.

  In a few moments, a complement of martie soldiers went out the gate and down toward the city, singing raucously of their new freedom.

  Sarna watched them go, then edged out around the side of the shack. The lone guard was watching the men go off toward the city, and he hardly saw the woman before she brought up the stock of the burper and smashed him in the head. The martie tumbled face forward onto his own pike.

  It was an ornamental weapon, meant for show and not use, and the shaft broke before his body was halfway impaled.

  Sarna waited. “What do I do now?”

  “The loading ramp…by the dumbwaiter.”

  She sprinted across the field, detouring when the Six thing advised it, and found herself by a stack of plastic crates at the foot of the loading ramp, running like a conveyor belt to the feeder lines that raised the crates the rest of the way to the ship’s dumbwaiters, for eventual cargo loading in the lasarettes of the ships. “Punch intercon #9,” the Six thing advised. “That is our ship to the Telemites.”

  She pressed the stud that read intercon #9, and as the first plastic crate slipped past on its way down the ramp, she climbed onto the feeder belt and slipped inside the first empty she could find.
With weight in it, it would go the full way to the ship, across the field, and she would make sure she was loaded into the cargo hold when she got to the ship.

  The weight detectors leveled along the way passed her crate, did not sort it out and send it back to the empty pool, and she made the ship without event. Crouched down inside the huge crate, she waited, knowing the plastic carton would be inspected.

  It was, finally. One short blast took care of the checker, and she was on the dumbwaiter, into the ship.

  “I don’t know how to operate a rocket,” she objected.

  “Yes, you do,” the Six thing said. “I will know for you.”

  She left the dumbwaiter and entered the ship.

  The ship left the Dome three minutes later, Sarna in the acceleration couch, calmly operating the sphincter lock that would send the intercontinental rocket out through the Dome, into the thin Martian air.

  It was night outside the Dome. Genuine night, the waiting night. And Sarna was on her way to find the Six.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The second Six thing was buried beneath a pile of twisted steel and crumpled plastoid at the base of a huge black mountain near the foothills of the Telemite chain.

  The Telemites were a strange formation on a planet as old as Mars. On worlds as ancient as Mars, the mountains sink gradually into the plains, featureless and smooth. But somewhere late in the planet’s history, a freak volcanic center of activity had thrust them black and forbidding from the heart of the planet, and they had not yet sunk to grassy sward.

  The Central men had built their stronghold in these mountains. Through the combined sciences of Terran ingenuity and the scraps left over from Martian technology, they had constructed an invisible stronghold—built to last ten thousand years. But before ten thousand years could pass, the men of Central had come across the Six, and had seen in them either a great threat or a great weapon. They had separated them, tried to bury them alive in lead caskets, beneath the very blackstone foundations of the stronghold.

  There had been an accident, and two of the Six things had been joined, without the dampening factor of a third, and so the Telemite stronghold had been crushed before it had really been born. Ten thousand years gone.

  Sarna brought the rocket to a tail-in on the russet desert that lay at the very foothills of the mountains. Her head throbbed from the pressure of the Six thing within, but the voice inside kept her moving, kept her performing as she should.

  “There are breather suits racked alongside the port,” the Six thing said, directing Sarna’s feet aft.

  Sarna slipped into one of the clear plastic suits that expanded over her body, clinging tightly, save for the teardrop hood that covered her head, feeding air to her through a tiny hose embedded in the arm of the suit.

  She undogged the port and pressed the stud that sent the electric ladder down to the ground.

  “This way,” the Six thing said, leading her toward the ebony hulk of the Telemites. They walked for half an hour. When the towering façade of the Telemites hung over them, the Six thing stopped her.

  They were among rubble and shattered walls now, and Sarna looked around at the remains of what had been the largest structure on Mars. At a point a few feet from them, the rubble stopped abruptly. Sarna noted it with interest: the edge where the rubble and walls cut off was not jagged as it was here in the exploded section, but sharp and clean, as though a knife had cut through cleanly.

  She walked over and touched the edge.

  There was no edge.

  The wall was there. Beyond her vision. She took a step, and was brought up short against the unseen wall. Her nose bumped the hard surface with pain. “The other side of the stronghold,” the Six thing explained. “There is no one there now. They are dead. The effects.”

  “E-effects? What effects?” Sarna trembled.

  “When the Six are joined improperly, against nature’s way, the effects can be…unpleasant.” She knew the translation of the last word was inadequate. Third had not meant “unpleasant.”

  “Where is your…brother?” Sarna hesitated. “Is he here?”

  The Six thing said, “Take that long piece of metal there. Yes, that one. Now pry up this chunk of wall. Careful, there, don’t let the sharp edge bite into the ground. Yes. Fine. Now…roll it away on the piece of metal.”

  The chunk of wall slipped up the levering rod and fell to the side with a crash. A shallow trench was revealed.

  “Take your piece of metal and get into the trench.”

  Sarna climbed down, and when the Six thing said, “Dig!” she began thrusting the flat-ended shaft of metal into the loose dirt. She dug that way for several minutes, till she felt something solid. Then a clink, and she was told by the Six thing that she had reached the crypt.

  “Remove it by hand,” Third said. Sarna got down on her knees and began scrabbling in the dirt. She soon uncovered a dark-metal box, buried in the ground.

  “They did not have time to bury him too deeply. They were afraid.”

  “Wh-where are the Central men who were here?” Sarna asked.

  “Inside,” said the Six thing.

  “Inside the invisible walls?”

  The Six thing affirmed her thought. “Yes. Forever. They are inside forever, and they will never die.”

  “I don’t understand,” Sarna said, lifting the box from its pit. “Are they alive in there? How can they be? Do they have food?”

  “No,” the Six thing replied, with vengeance in his voice. “They have nothing inside. Nothing. Bare walls, and no food, little air. Yet they will live forever, trapped inside. They would have kept the Six apart. We have had our revenge. And they are blind.

  “Careful there,” the Six thing chided her, and she realized for the first time just how adolescent the thing sounded, how like a juvenile it acted. Was this great gestalt entity as powerful and omnipotent as it made itself sound?

  She set the box on level ground, and the Six thing said, “Let me have your mind completely. Stop now. Stop holding back! Let me have your thoughts entirely…ah…yes, that’s it…now don’t be afraid.”

  Her mind suddenly went blank. She could see and hear and feel, but nothing was routed through her brain. Then she saw her hands come to rest on the box with the Six thing within, and then they went through the metal. Not by opening the lid, or prying off the double locks, but by plunging into the metal itself.

  The hands came out slowly, and cupped in them was the First of the Six. It was a star.

  It glowed with unbearable brilliance in her hands. The First was unlike anything she had ever seen; it was not form or shape or reality, really, but a glowing ball of unnamed substance pulsing in her cupped hands. Pulsing golden, without sound and without heat.

  “Brother!” cried the Third, and Sarna screamed as an excruciating pain crushed her skull in a blinding flash, a vise of agony. Then both the Six things were in her hands, the Third in her left, the blazing star of the First in her right, and she was staggering drunkenly as the after-effects of the Third leaving her head stunned her.

  She moaned and stumbled, falling against a bit of wall left standing. “Clumsy human, be careful!” the Third castigated her viciously.

  What have I gotten into? Sarna moaned silently.

  “Now we must find my four other parts,” the Third said; and at that moment the brilliant star waxed brilliant.

  “My brother says we mylite now, to the third of my parts, Brother Six himself, the sinews of my self.

  “You will carry us, one in each hand, so we do not touch, lest we have another explosion.”

  “What is to mylite?” Sarna asked.

  “To go, to mylite, you understand, to move through space. Brother First is the legs of the gestalt entity. We will show you. Mylite, First!”

  And the night whirled with whiplash scintillation, with complex figurations, with alien sounds as Sarna was lifted screaming from the soil of Mars and thrown into the void.

  Thrown and screeching
to the night as the First glowed oh so brightly in her hand.

  They came to rest in space, near a white dwarf star that burned only slightly less fiercely than the star that was the First in Sarna’s hand.

  “Here we will find the Sixth,” the Third caroled, capering about on the palm of Sarna’s hand like a demented toad. The star in her left hand glowed and flickered, glowed and pulsed, glowed and dimmed, then glowed triumphantly.

  Spinning in space was the globule of water that was the Sixth. The muscles, the strength of the Six. It was a teardrop, crystal and blue and shining with light from the white dwarf below them. It hung and spun, revolving like a minute satellite, crystalline and watery.

  The two in her hands laughed, and then the star that was One flew off her palm and touched the droplet of water. A coruscating rainbow of invisible particles bombarded Sarna, left her breathless, and then passed, whipping out into the Galaxy, to be dispersed to the ends of the Universe. And when the flickering pinwheels that had robbed Sarna of her sight were gone, there were no longer three separate entities, a droplet of water, a star, and a gnarled frog-thing; but one oddly joined ball of matter, gray and black and off-green and rose-tint, all lumped and joined and entangled, as though several small beings were hugged together for warmth; this was the first growing half of the Six.

  The ball rolled toward her in the vacuum of space.

  She stood there, hung there, poised there, on nothing but the thoughts of the half-Six, waiting for the being to do with her what it would.

  “Now I have my mind, my legs, and my sinews.” The creature spoke in one voice that was the voice of the first Six thing plus other strange tones. “We must find my three brothers and merge them to whole—then we will be ready to…”—it hesitated, as though one segment of its self was warning the other not to say something—“…to return Mars to the Terrans.”

  Fear clawed softly at her, and passed as the half-Six whirled her through space and space and space to another part of the Galaxy. “We have been widely separated by the vagaries of Time and Chance and Man,” said the half-Six as they spun unhampered through space. “We have been apart, kept apart by a million races and a million light-years. Can you understand what unfulfillment has eaten at my parts? Can you know, Earthwoman?”