The Best of C.L. Moore & Henry Kuttner

by Henry Kuttner

  “It would mean wiping yourself out, you know,” Bill reminded him as steadily as he could, searching the angry eyes of this man who must never have faced resolute opposition before, and wondering if the man had yet accepted a truth that must seem insanely impossible to him. He wanted overwhelmingly to laugh, and yet somewhere inside him a chilly conviction was growing that it might be possible for the children of his unborn son, in a future that would never exist, to blast him out of being. He said: “You and your whole world would vanish if I died.”

  “But not unavenged!” The Leader said it savagely, and then hesitated. “But what am I saying? You’ve driven me almost as mad as you! Look, man, try to be sensible! Can you imagine yourself dissolving into nothingness that never existed? Neither can I!”

  “But if you could kill me, then how could your world ever have been born?”

  “To hell with all that!” exploded Dunn. “I’m no metaphysician! I’m a fighting man! I’ll take the chance!”

  “Please, Dr. Cory—” Billy pressed forward against the very surface of the cube, as if he could thrust himself back into his own past and lay urgent hands upon this man so like him, staring white-faced and stubborn into the future. Perhaps it was more than the desire for peace that spoke in his shaken voice. If Bill Cory, looking into that young face so like his own, had felt affection and recognition for it, then must not the boy know a feeling akin to it as he saw himself in Cory’s features? Perhaps it was that subtle, strange identification between the two that made the boy’s voice tremble a little as if with the first weakening of belief. When he spoke he seemed to be acknowledging the possibility of doubt, almost without realizing it. He said in that shaken, ardent voice:

  “Please, try to understand! It’s not death we’re afraid of. All of us would die now, willingly, if our deaths could further the common good. What we can’t endure to face is the death of our civilization, this marvelous thing that makes mankind immortal. Think of that, sir! This is the only right thing possible for you to do! Would we feel so strongly if we weren’t sure? Can you condemn your own race to eternity on one small planet, when you could give them the universe to expand in and every good thing science can offer?”

  “Father…father!” It was Sue again, frantic and far away.

  But before Bill could turn to her, Dunn’s voice broke in heavily over both the others. “Wait—I’ve made up my mind!” Billy fell back a little, turning to his Leader with a blaze of sudden hope. Bill stared. “As I see it,” went on Dunn, “the whole preposterous question hinges on the marriage you make. Naturally I can’t concede even to myself that you could possibly marry anyone but the woman you did marry—but if you honestly feel that there’s any question in your own mind about it, I’ll settle it for you.”

  He turned to nod toward a corner of the room in which he stood that was outside Bill’s range, and in a moment the blue-uniformed, staring crowd about him parted and a low, rakish barrel of blue-gleaming steel glided noiselessly forward toward that surface of the cube which was a window into the past-future that parted Bill and themselves. Bill had never seen anything like it before, but he recognized its lethal quality. It crouched streamlined down upon its base as if for a lunge, and its mouth facing him was a dark doorway for death itself. Dunn bent behind it and laid his hand upon a half-visible lever in its base.

  “Now,” he said heavily. “William Cory, there seems to be a question in your mind as to whether we could reach you with our weapons. Let me assure you that the force-beam which connects us can carry more than sight and sound into your world! I hope I shan’t have to demonstrate that. I hope you’ll be sensible enough to turn to that televisor screen in the wall behind you and call Marta Mayhew.”

  “M—Marta?” Bill heard the quiver in his voice. “Why—”

  “You will call her, and in our sight and hearing you are going to ask her to marry you. That much choice is yours, marriage or death. Do you hear me?”

  Bill wanted insanely to laugh. Shotgun wedding from a mythical future—“You can’t threaten me with that popgun forever,” he said with a quaver of mirth he could not control. “How do you know I’ll marry her once you’re away?”

  “You’ll keep your word,” said Dunn serenely. “Don’t forget, Cory, we know you much better than you know yourself. We know your future far more completely than you saw it. We know how your character will develop with age. Yes, you’re an honorable man. Once you’ve asked her to marry you, and heard her say yes—and she will—you won’t try to back out. No, the promise given and received between you constitutes a marriage as surely as if we’d seen the ceremony performed. You see, we trust your honor, William Cory.”

  “But—” Bill got no further than that, for explosively in his brain a sweet, high voice was sobbing:

  “Father, father, what are you doing? What’s happened? Why don’t you speak to me?”

  In the tension Bill had nearly forgotten Sue, but the sound of that familiar voice tore at him with sudden, almost intolerable poignancy. Sue—the promise to protect her had risen to his lips involuntarily at the very mention of danger. It was answer to an urgency rooted race-deep, the instinct to protect the helpless and the loved. For a moment he forgot the gun trained on him from the other window; he forgot Billy and the world behind him. He was conscious only of his daughter crying in terror for help—for help from him and for protection against him at once, in a dizzy confusion that made his head swim.

  “Sue—” he began uncertainly.

  “Cory, we’re waiting!” Dunn’s voice had an ominous undernote.

  But there was a solution. He never knew just when he first became aware of it. A long while ago, perhaps, subconsciously, the promise of it had begun to take shape in his mind. He did not know when he first realized that—but he thought he knew whence it came. There was a sureness and a vastness about it that did not originate in himself. It was the Cosmic Mind indeed in which his own small soul was floundering, and out of that unthinkably limitless Plan, along with the problem came at last the solution. (There must be balance…the force that swings the worlds in their orbits can permit of no question without an answer—)

  There was no confusion here; there had never been. This was not chance. Purpose was behind it, and sudden confidence came flooding into him from outside. He turned with resolution so calm upon his face that Billy sighed and smiled, and Dunn’s tense face relaxed.

  “Thank God, sir,” breathed Billy, “I knew you’d come to your senses. Believe me, sir, you won’t be sorry.”

  “Wait,” said Bill to them both, and laid his hand on the button beneath his desk that rang a bell in his laboratory. “Wait and see.”

  In three worlds and times, three people very nearly identical in more than the flesh alone—perhaps three facets of the same personality, who can say?—stood silent and tense and waiting. It seemed like a very long time before the door opened and Miss Brown came into the room, hesitating on the threshold with her calm, pleasant face questioning.

  “You want me, Dr. Cory?”

  Bill did not answer for a moment. He was pouring his whole soul into this last long stare that said good-bye to the young son he would never know. For understanding from some vast and nameless source was flooding his mind now, and he knew what was coming and why it would be so. He looked across the desk and gazed his last upon Sue’s familiar face so like his own, the fruit of a love he would never share with pretty Sallie. And then, drawing a deep breath, he gulped and said distinctly:

  “Miss Brown, will you marry me?”

  Dunn had given him the key—a promise given and received between this woman and himself would be irrevocable, would swing the path of the future into a channel that led to no world that either Billy or Sue could know.

  Bill got his first glimmer of hope for that future from the way the quiet woman in the doorway accepted his question. She did not stare or giggle or stammer. After one long, deep look into his eyes—he saw for the first time that hers were gray and
cool behind the lenses—she answered calmly.

  “Thank you, Dr. Cory. I shall be very happy to marry you.”

  And then—it came. In the very core of his brain, heartbreak and despair exploded in a long, wailing scream of faith betrayed as pretty Sue, his beloved, his darling, winked out into the oblivion from which she would never now emerge. The lazy green Eden was gone forever; the sweet fair girl on her knees among the myrtle leaves had never been—would never be.

  Upon that other window surface, in one last flash of unbearable clearness, young Billy’s incredulous features stared at him. Behind that beloved, betrayed face he saw the face of the Leader twisting with fury. In the last flashing instant while the vanishing, never-to-exist future still lingered in the cube, Bill saw an explosion of white-hot violence glare blindingly from the gun mouth, a heat and violence that seared the very brain. Would it have reached him—could it have harmed him? He never knew, for it lasted scarcely a heartbeat before eternity closed over the vanishing world in a soundless, fathomless, all-swallowing tide.

  Where that world had stretched so vividly a moment ago, now Marta’s violet gaze looked out into the room through crystal. Across the desk Sallie’s lovely, careless smile glowed changelessly. They had been gateways to the future—but the gates were closed. There would never be such futures now; there never had been. In the Cosmic Mind, the great Plan of Things, two half-formed ideas went out like blown candle flames.

  And Bill turned to the gray-eyed woman in the doorway with a long, deep, shaken sigh. In his own mind as he faced her, thoughts too vast for formulation moved cloudily.

  “I know now something no man was ever sure of before—our oneness with the Plan. There are many, many futures. I couldn’t face the knowledge of another, but I think—yes, I believe, ours will be the best. She won’t let me neglect the work we’re doing, but neither will she force me to give it to the world unperfected. Maybe, between us, we can work out that kink that robs the embryo of determination, and then—who knows?

  “Who knows why all this had to happen? There was Purpose behind it—all of it—but I’ll never understand just why. I only know that the futures are infinite—and that I haven’t lost Billy or Sue. I couldn’t have done what I did without being sure of that. I couldn’t lose them, because they’re me—the best of me, going on forever. Perhaps I’ll never die, really—not the real me—until these incarnations of the best that’s in me, whatever form and face and name they wear, work out mankind’s ultimate destiny in some future I’ll never see. There was reason behind all this. Maybe, after all, I’ll understand—some day.”

  He said nothing aloud, but he held out his hand to the woman in the door and smiled down confidently into her cool, gray eyes.

  Fruit of Knowledge

  It was the first Sabbath. Down the open glades of Eden a breeze stirred softly. Nothing else in sight moved except a small winged head that fluttered, yawning, across the glade and vanished among leaves that drew back to receive it. The air quivered behind it like a wake left in water of incomparable clarity. From far away and far above a faint drift of singing echoed, “Hosannah…hosannah…hosannah—” The seraphim were singing about the Throne.

  A pool at the edge of the glade gave back light and color like a great, dim jewel. It gave back reflections, too. The woman who bent over it had just discovered that. She was leaning above the water until her cloudy dark hair almost dipped into the surface. There was a curious shadow all about her, like a thin garment which did not quite conceal how lovely she was, and though no breeze stirred just now, that shadow garment moved uneasily upon her and her hair lifted a little as if upon a breeze that did not blow.

  She was so quiet that a passing cherub-head paused above the water to look, too, hanging like a hummingbird motionless over its own reflection in the pool.

  “Pretty!” approved the cherub in a small, piping voice. “New here, aren’t you?”

  The woman looked up with a slow smile, putting back the veil of her hair.

  “Yes, I am,” she answered softly. Her voice did not sound quite sure of itself. She had never spoken aloud before until this moment.

  “You’ll like the Garden,” said the cherub in a slightly patronizing tone, giving his rainbow wings a shake. “Anything I can do for you? I’m not busy just now. Be glad to show you around.”

  “Thank you,” smiled the woman, her voice sounding a little more confident. “I’ll find my way.”

  The cherub shrugged his colored wings. “Just as you say. By the way, I suppose they warned you about the Tree?”

  The woman glanced up at him rather quickly, her shadowy eyes narrowing.

  “The Tree? Is there danger?”

  “Oh, no. You mustn’t touch it, that’s all. It’s the one in the middle of the Garden, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—you can’t miss it. I saw the Man looking at it yesterday for quite a while. That reminds me, have you met the Man?”

  The woman bent her head so that the hair swung forward to veil her face. From behind it, in a voice that sounded as if she might be smiling, she said:

  “He’s waiting for me now.”

  “Oh?” said the cherub, impressed. “Well, you’ll find him over by the orange grove east of the Tree. He’s resting. It’s the Day of Rest, you know.” The cherub tilted an intimate eyebrow heavenward and added: “He’s resting, too. Hear the singing? He made the Man only yesterday, right out of this very earth you’re standing on. We were all watching. It was wonderful—Afterward, He called the man Adam, and then Adam named the animals—By the way, what’s your name?”

  The woman smiled down at her own veiled reflection in the water. After a moment—

  “Lilith,” she said.

  The cherub stared, his eyes widening into two blue circles of surprise. He was speechless for an instant. Then he pursed his pink mouth to whistle softly.

  “Why,” he stammered, “you…you’re the Queen of Air and Darkness!”

  Smiling up at him from the corners of her eyes, the woman nodded. The cherub stared at her big-eyed for a moment longer, too overcome for speech. Then, suddenly, he beat his rainbow pinions together and darted off through the trees without another word, the translucent air rippling in a lazy, half-visible wake behind him. Lilith looked after him with a shadowy smile on her face. He was going to warn Adam. The smile deepened. Let him.

  Lilith turned for one last glance into the mirror of the pool at the strange new shape she had just put on. It was the newest thing in creation—not even God knew about it. And rather surprisingly, she thought she was going to like it. She did not feel nearly as stifled and heavy as she had expected to feel, and there was something distinctly pleasant in the softness of the breeze pouring caressingly about her body, the fragrance of springtime sweet in her nostrils, the grass under her bare feet. The Garden was beautiful with a beauty she had not realized until she saw it through human eyes. Everything she saw through them, indeed, was curiously different now. Here in this flesh all her faculties seemed refocused, as if she, who had always seen with such crystal clarity, now looked through rainbows at everything she saw. But it was a pleasant refocusing. She wished she had longer to enjoy her tenancy in this five-sensed flesh she shared with Adam.

  But she had very little time. She glanced up toward the bright, unchanging glory above the trees as if she could pierce the floor of heaven and see God resting on the unimaginable splendor of the Throne while the seraphim chanted in long, shining rows about him. At any moment he might stir and lean forward over Eden, looking down. Lilith instinctively shrugged her shadowy garment closer about her. If he did not look too closely, he might not pierce that shadow. But if he did—A little thrill of excitement, like forked lightning, went through the strange new flesh she wore. She liked danger.

  She bent over the pool for one last look at herself, and the pool was a great, dim eye looking back at her, almost sentient, almost aware of her. This was a living Garden. The translucent air quivered with a rhythmic pu
lsing through the trees; the ground was resilient under her feet; vines drew back to let her pass beneath them. Lilith, turning away through the swimming air after the cherub, puzzled a little as she walked through the parting trees. The relation was very close between flesh and earth—perhaps her body was so responsive to the beauty of the Garden because it aped so closely flesh that had been a part of the Garden yesterday. And if even she felt that kinship, what must Adam feel, who was himself earth only yesterday?

  The Garden was like a vast, half-sentient entity all around her, pulsing subtly with the pulse of the lucent air. Had God drawn from this immense and throbbing fecundity all the life which peopled Eden? Was Adam merely an extension of it, a focus and intensification of the same life which pulsed through the Garden? Creation was too new; she could only guess.

  She thought, too, of the Tree of Knowledge as she walked smoothly through the trees. That Tree, tempting and forbidden. Why? Was God testing Man somehow? Was Man then, not quite finished, after all? Was there any flaw in Eden? Suddenly she knew that there must be. Her very presence here was proof of it, for she, above all others, had no right to intrude into this magical closed sphere which was God’s greatest work. Yet here she walked through the heart of it, and not even God knew, yet—

  Lilith slanted a smile up through the leaves toward the choruses of the seraphim whose singing swelled and sank and swelled again, unutterably sweet high above the trees. The animals watched her pass with wide, bewildered eyes, somehow not quite at ease, although no such thing as fear had yet stirred through the Garden. Lilith glanced at them curiously as she passed. They were pretty things. She liked Eden.