The Year's Best Science Fiction 5

by Judith Merril

  “I suppose so.” The second Althean shuddered slightly. “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose it’s nothing more than projection on my part, but the mere thought of a prison...” He broke off and shuddered again.

  “I know,” said the other, sympathetically. “It’s something none of us have ever had to conceive of before. The whole notion of locking up a fellow-being is an abominable one, I’ll admit But for that matter, consider the creature itself!”

  “It wouldn’t do for him to be loose.”

  “Wouldn’t do! Why, it would be quite impossible. He actually murders. He killed three of our fellow-beings before we were able to subdue him.”

  The second Althean shuddered more violently than before, and it appeared for a moment as though he was about to become physically ill. “But why? What type of being is he, for goodness sake? Where does he come from? What’s he doing here?”

  “Ah,” said the first, “now you’ve hit upon it. You see, there’s no way of knowing any of those answers. One morning he was discovered by a party of ten. They attempted to speak to him, and what do you think his rejoinder was?”

  “He struck out at them, the way I heard it.”

  “Precisely! Utterly unprovoked assault, with three of their number dead as a result. The first case of murder on record here in thirty generations. Incredible!”

  “And since then ...”

  “He’s been a prisoner. No communication, no new insights, nothing. He eats whatever we feed him—he sleeps when the darkness comes and wakes when it goes. We have learned nothing about him, but I can tell you this for a fact. He is dangerous.”

  “Yes,” said the second Althean.

  “Very dangerous. He must be kept locked up. Of course, we wish him no harm—so we’ve made his prison as secure as possible, while keeping it as comfortable as possible. I daresay we’ve done a good job.”

  “Look,” said the second, “perhaps I’m squeamish. I don’t know. But are you sure he can never escape?”

  “Positive.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  The first Althean sighed. “The tower is one hundred thirty feet high. A drop from that distance is obviously fatal. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “The prisoner’s quarters are at the top of the tower, and the top is wider than the base—that is, the sides slope inward. And the sides are very, very smooth—so climbing down is quite impossible.”

  “Couldn’t he come down the same way he’ll go up? It only stands to reason.”

  “Again, quite impossible. He’ll be placed in his quarters by means of a pneumatic tube, and the same tube will be used to send him his food. The entire tower is so designed that it can be entered via the tube, and can only be left by leaping from the top. The food that he doesn’t eat, as well as any articles which he tires of, may be thrown over the side.”

  The second Althean hesitated. “It seems safe.”

  “It should. It is safe.”

  “I suppose so. I suppose it’s safe, and I suppose it’s not cruel, but somehow...Well, when will the prisoner be placed in the tower? Is it all ready for his occupancy?”

  “It’s ready, all right. And, as a matter of fact, we’re taking him there in just a few minutes. Would you care to come along?”

  “It might be interesting, at that.”

  “Then come along.”

  The two walked in silence to the first Althean’s motor car and drove in silence to the tower. The tower was, indeed, a striking structure, both in terms of size and of design. They stepped out of the motor car and waited, and a large motor truck drew up shortly, pulling to a stop at the base of the tower. Three Althean guards stepped out of the truck, followed by the prisoner. His limbs were securely shackled.

  “See?” demanded the first Althean. “He’ll be placed in the tube like that, and he’ll discover the key to his shackles in his quarters.”

  “Clever.”

  “We’ve worked it out carefully,” the first explained. “I don’t mean to sound boastful, but we’ve figured out all the angles.”

  The prisoner was placed in the tube, the aperture of which was located at the very base of the tower. Once inside, it was closed securely and bolted shut. The three Althean guards hesitated for several moments until a red light at the base indicated that the prisoner had entered his quarters. Then they returned to the motor truck and drove off down the road.

  “We could go now,” said the first. “I’d like to wait and see if he’ll throw down the shackles, though. If you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all. I’m rather interested now, you know. It’s not something you see every day.”

  * * * *

  They waited. After several minutes, a pair of shackles plummeted through the air and dropped to the ground about twenty yards from the two Altheans.

  “Ah,” said the first. “He’s found the key.”

  Moments later, the second pair of shackles followed the first, and the key followed soon thereafter. Then the prisoner walked to the edge of the tower and leaned over the railing, gazing down at them.

  “Awesome,” said the second Althean. “I’m glad he can’t escape.”

  The prisoner regarded them thoughtfully for several seconds. Then he mounted the railing, flapped his wings, and soared off into the sky.

  * * * *

  WHAT NOW, LITTLE MAN? by Mark Clifton

  from Fantasy and Science Fiction

  It is just about ten years now, since Mark Clifton hit the science fiction world like a cloudburst, pouring out a seemingly inexhaustible flood of provocative, exciting, irritating, and informative thinking. I know of no contemporary author, with the possible exception of Robert Heinlein ten years earlier, who has exercised so much developmental influence, not just on the readers, but in the basic thinking of other writers in the field. There was a short spell, I recall, when some disgruntled souls referred to Astounding (now, Analog) as The Clifton House Organ.

  For the past almost five years, other work has kept him too busy to leave much time for s-f. Now it would seem the spring floods are back, or so one hopes, on the basis of this story and the new Doubleday novel, Eight Keys to Eden.

  * * * *

  The mystery of what made the goonie tick tormented me for twenty years.

  Why, when that first party of big game hunters came to Libo, why didn’t the goonies run away and hide, or fight back? Why did they instantly, immediately, almost seem to say, “You want us to die, Man? For you we will do it gladly!” Didn’t they have any sense of survival at all? How could a species survive if it lacked that sense?

  “Even when one of the hunters, furious at being denied the thrill of the chase, turned a machine gun on the drove of them,” I said to Paul Tyler, “they just stood there and let him mow them down.”

  Paul started to say something in quick protest, then simply looked sick.

  “Oh, yes,” I assured him. “One of them did just that. There was a hassle over it. Somebody reminded him that the machine gun was designed just to kill human beings, that it wasn’t sporting to turn it on game. The hassle sort of took the edge off their fun, so they piled into their space yacht and took off for some other place where they could count on a chase before the kill.”

  I felt his sharp stare, but I pretended to be engrossed in measuring the height of Libo’s second sun above the mountain range in the west. Down below us, from where we sat and smoked on Sentinel Rock, down in my valley and along the sides of the river, we could see the goonie herds gathering under their groves of pal trees before night fell.

  Paul didn’t take issue, or feed me that line about harvesting the game like crops, or this time even kid me about my contempt for Earthers. He was beginning to realize that all the old-timer Liboans felt as I did, and that there was reasonable justification for doing so. In fact, Paul was fast becoming Liboan himself. I probably wouldn’t have told him the yarn about that first hunting party if I hadn’t sensed it, seen the way he handled his own goon
ies, the affection he felt for them.

  “Why were our animals ever called goonies, Jim?” he asked. “They’re ... Well, you know the goonie.”

  I smiled to myself at his use of the possessive pronoun, but I didn’t comment on it.

  “That too,” I said, and knocked the dottle out of my pipe. “That came out of the first hunting party.” I stood up and stretched to get a kink out of my left leg, and looked back toward the house to see if my wife had sent a goonie to call us in to dinner. It was a little early, but I stood a moment to watch Paul’s team of goonies up in the yard, still folding their harness beside his rickshaw. I’d sold them to him, as yearlings, a couple of years before, as soon as their second pelt showed they’d be a matched pair. Now they were mature young males, and as handsome a team as could be found anywhere on Libo.

  I shook my head and marveled, oh, for maybe the thousandth time, at the impossibility of communicating the goonie to anyone who hadn’t seen them. The ancient Greek sculptors didn’t mind combining human and animal form, and somebody once said the goonie began where those sculptors left off. No human muscle cultist ever managed quite the perfect symmetry natural to the goonie—grace without calculation, beauty without artifice. Their pelts varied in color from the silver blond of this pair to a coal black, and their huge eyes from the palest topaz to an emerald green, and from emerald green to deep-hued amethyst. The tightly curled mane spread down the nape and flared out over the shoulders like a cape to blend with the short, fine pelt covering the body. Their faces were like Greek sculpture, too, yet not human. No, not human. Not even humanoid, because—well, because, that was a comparison never made on Libo. That comparison was one thing we couldn’t tolerate. Definitely, then, neither human nor humanoid.

  I turned from watching the team which, by now, had finished folding their harness into neat little piles and had stretched out on the ground to rest beside the rickshaw. I sat back down and packed my pipe again with a Libo weed we called tobacco.

  “Why do we call them goonies?” I repeated Paul’s question. “There’s a big bird on Earth. Inhabits some of the South Sea islands, millions of them crowd together to nest. Most stupid creature on Earth, seems like, the way they behave on their nesting grounds. A man can hardly walk among them; they don’t seem to know enough to move out of the way, and don’t try to protect themselves or their nests. Some reason I don’t know, it’s called the Goonie Bird. Guess the way these animals on Libo behaved when that hunting party came and shot them down, didn’t run away, hide, or fight, reminded somebody of that bird. The name stuck.”

  Paul didn’t say anything for a while. Then he surprised me.

  “It’s called the Goonie Bird when it’s on the ground,” he said slowly. “But in the air it’s the most magnificent flying creature known to man. In the air, it’s called the albatross.”

  I felt a chill. I knew the legend, of course, the old-time sailor superstition. Kill an albatross and bad luck will haunt you, dog you all the rest of your days. But either Paul didn’t know The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or was too tactful a young man to make it plainer. I supplied the Libo colony with its fresh meat. The only edible animal on the planet was the goonie.

  * * * *

  Carson’s Hill comes into the yarn I have to tell—in a way is responsible. Sooner or later almost every young tenderfoot finds it, and in his mind it is linked with anguish, bitterness, emotional violence, suppressed fury.

  It is a knoll, the highest point in the low range of hills that separates my valley from the smaller cup which shelters Libo City. Hal Carson, a buddy of mine in the charter colony, discovered it. Flat on top, it is a kind of granite table surrounded by giant trees, which make of it a natural amphitheater, almost like a cathedral in feeling. A young man can climb up there and be alone to have it out with his soul.

  At one time or another, most do. “Go out to the stars, young man, and grow up with the universe!” the posters say all over Earth. It has its appeal for the strongest, the brightest, the best. Only the dull-eyed breeders are content to stay at home.

  In the Company recruiting offices they didn’t take just anybody, no matter what his attitude was—no indeed. Anybody, for example, who started asking questions about how and when he might get back home—with the fortune he would make—was coldly told that if he was already worrying about getting back he shouldn’t be going.

  Somehow, the young man was never quite sure how, it became a challenge to his bravery, his daring, his resourcefulness. It was a bait which a young fellow, anxious to prove his masculinity, the most important issue of his life, couldn’t resist. The burden of proof shifted from the Company to the applicant, so that where he had started out cautiously inquiring to see if this offer might suit him, he wound up anxiously trying to prove he was the one they wanted.

  Some wag in the barracks scuttlebutt once said, “They make you so afraid they won’t take you, it never occurs to you that you’d be better off if they didn’t.”

  “A fine mess,” somebody else exclaimed, and let a little of his secret despair show through. “To prove you are a man, you lose the reason for being one.”

  That was the rub, of course.

  Back when man was first learning how to misuse atomic power, everybody got all excited about the effects of radiation on germ plasm. Yet nobody seemed much concerned over the effects of unshielded radiation in space on that germ plasm—out from under the protecting blanket of Earth’s atmosphere, away from the natural conditions where man had evolved.

  There could be no normal colony of man here on Libo— no children. Yet the goonies, so unspeakably resembling man, could breed and bear. It gave the tenderfoot a smoldering resentment against the goonie which a psychologist could have explained; that wild, unreasoning fury man must feel when frustration is tied in with prime sex—submerged and festering because simple reason told the tenderfoot that the goonie was not to blame.

  The tide of bitterness would swell up to choke the young tenderfoot there alone on Carson’s Hill. No point to thinking of home, now. No point to dreaming of his triumphant return—space-burnt, strong, virile, remote with the vastness of space in his eyes—ever.

  Unfair to the girl he had left behind that he should hold her with promises of loyalty, the girl, with ignorance equal to his own, who had urged him on. Better to let her think he had changed, grown cold, lost his love of her—so that she could fulfill her function, turn to someone else, some damned Company reject—but a reject who could still father children.

  Let them. Let them strain themselves to populate the universe!

  At this point the angry bitterness would often spill over into unmanly tears (somebody in the barracks had once said that Carson’s Hill should be renamed Crying Hill, or Tenderfoot’s Lament). And the tortured boy, despising himself, would gaze out over my valley and long for home, long for the impossible undoing of what had been done to him.

  Yes, if there hadn’t been a Carson’s Hill there wouldn’t be a yarn to tell. But then, almost every place has a Carson’s Hill, in one form or another, and Earthers remain Earthers for quite a while. They can go out to the stars in a few days or weeks, but it takes a little longer before they begin to grow up with the universe.

  Quite a little longer, I was to find. Still ahead of me, I was to have my own bitter session there again, alone—an irony because I’d thought I’d come to terms with myself up there some twenty years ago.

  * * * *

  It is the young man who is assumed to be in conflict with his society, who questions its moral and ethical structures, and yet I wonder. Or did I come of age late, very late? Still, when I look back, it was the normal thing to accept things as we found them, to be so concerned with things in their relationship to us that we had no time for wonder about relationships not connected with us. Only later, as man matures, has time to reflect—has something left over from the effort to survive ...

  When I first came to Libo, I accepted the goonie as an animal, a mere source
of food. It was Company policy not to attempt a colony where there was no chance for self-support. Space shipping-rates made it impossible to supply a colony with food for more than a short time while it was being established. Those same shipping-rates make it uneconomical to ship much in the way of machinery, to say nothing of luxuries. A colony has to have an indigenous source of food and materials, and if any of that can also be turned into labor, all the better. I knew that. I accepted it as a matter of course.

  And even as I learned about my own dead seed, I learned that the same genetic principles applied to other Earth life, that neither animal nor plant could be expected to propagate away from Earth. No, the local ecology had to be favorable to man’s survival, else no colony. I accepted that, it was reasonable.

  The colony of Libo was completely dependent on the goonie as the main source of its food. The goonie was an animal to be used for food, as is the chicken, the cow, the rabbit, on Earth. The goonie is beautiful, but so is the gazelle, which is delicious. The goonie is vaguely shaped like a human, but so is the monkey which was once the prime source of protein food for a big part of Earth’s population. I accepted all that, without question.

  Perhaps it was easy for me. I was raised on a farm, where slaughtering of animals for food was commonplace. I had the average farm boy’s contempt for the dainty young lady in the fashionable city restaurant who, without thought, lifts a bite of rare steak, dripping with blood, to her pearly teeth; but who would turn pale and retch at the very thought of killing an animal. Where did she think that steak came from?

  At first we killed the goonies around our encampment which was to become Libo City; went out and shot them as we needed them, precisely as hunters do on Earth. In time we had to go farther and farther in our search for them, so I began to study them, in hope I could domesticate them. I learned one of their peculiarities—they were completely dependent upon the fruit of the pal tree, an ever-bearing tree. Each goonie had its own pal tree, and we learned by experiment that they would starve before they would eat the fruit from any other pal tree.