Can and Can'tankerous

by Harlan Ellison (R)

  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?”

  Sarna sensed the longing and the hunger devouring the creature.

  The half-Six laughed, and the sound roared and returned to its home in the throat of the half-Six. “You think you know. Multiply your pretty Terran sorrow by a billion times, and feel!”

  The half-Six allowed a segment of its thoughts to reach Sarna…just a minute fraction of what it felt…and the impact of it struck her with triphammer force, blacked out her senses, as she lay in the mind-power of the half-Six, spinning toward some unknown destination in time or space.

  When she awoke, cold and shivering, her mind ripped by the power-blast of emotion, she knew the depredations she had endured as a prostitute were as nothing to what she had glimpsed in the mind of the half-Six. She had seen a loneliness and a misery unbelievably sharp and tragic. And she had glimpsed something else; a strange strain that ran through the intellect of this creature, that made her fearful and wary. She had learned something that chilled her to the heart.

  What it was she had seen in that strange otherworldly mind, she could not even put into words for herself.

  For if it were true, then all this—everything—was sham, and waste, and futility. And worse.

  “We are here!” the half-Six gloated vaporously, as the hadj, the journey, the mylite ceased and they whipped through the cloud vapor around a small planet at the ridge of the Galaxy. In a moment they were down, and Sarna felt herself released from the power of the half-Six.

  They were on a jungle world, all colored riot of odd trees and vaguely troubling cyclopean shapes and forms that pained, even as they were imagined. Across the sky, long green trailers that might have been vines had they not been so thick and so high barred the view to the cloud covering. The ground itself was thick and soft and leathery.

  From the steaming jungle came the raucous cry of an animal with two heads. From beyond the sound came the moan and scream and dying wail of a bird-thing whose neck was being broken by another strange predator.

  “Here lie brothers Two and Four” said the half-Six.

  “You will find them,” said the creature. Sarna jerked rigidly, and her mouth went dry. Her body ached, and her shoulder where the radiation was spreading was a pulsing horror of pain, now that her thoughts were her own again. She was frightened by her past, and frightened by this creature that used her, and frightened by the weird and angry things she had seen in the past week.

  Her brain felt clouded, fogged, tight as a drumhead as though it were about to burst.

  “I—I’m very tired…” she said, and felt a blow of such force, such anger, that she was stunned momentarily. The half-Six screamed its rage.

  “You will do as I say! Am I not turning Mars back to you Earthmen to rule as you wish? I am good and benevolent! Why do you defy me?”

  Like a child stamping its foot, Sarna thought, remembering a particular child, a particular man, a particular time in Venezuela in a town without a name, and a life that was too foggy for clarity and happiness.

  “I—I’m s-sorry,” Sarna hurriedly placated the half-Six. “I’ll find them, only tell me how.”

  “We know where they are, but there are things it is best for us not to do, until we are One and Six. Our brothers lie hiding—as we have been hiding for three hundred thousand… Two of us lie in a swamp near here. We will go there. I will take you…

  “And we are here.” And they were there. At the edge of the limpid, phosphorescent swamp, fringed with feverishly undulating plants. A long-nosed elephantlike animal shoved its trunk into the scummy swamp, and they heard a great sucking sound as the beast drank up the filthy water.

  “Down there,” said the half-Six, “lie two more sections of my self. The eyes and the nerves of my whole One lie here. Without legs and mind, they could not escape.

  “Get them, and be careful neither Brother touches.”

  Sarna stood poised on the lip of the solid ground that verged on swamp, and her body would not obey her. She could not bring herself to leap into the filthy, sucking mire of the alien swamp.

  She suddenly wanted to die and escape all this.

  “Leap!” the half-Six demanded. She could not.

  The half-Six obliged her by blasting her mind with a belt of ferocious thought-power. Sarna slipped, with a sharp, high scream, over the edge, and went headfirst into the muck below.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Somehow she could see and breathe, and move without difficulty through the cloying, stinking muck of the swamp. Somehow, she was light and slipped effortlessly through the murk.

  A razor-beaked thing passed her, swiftly, hungrily.

  A huge, whalelike beast lay pulsing on the floor of the swamp with its tendrils swaying like water plant fronds. Even as she passed it, the whalelike creature’s mouth opened, and she saw a huge, crimson-glowing cavity, and the ivory structure of a rib cage.

  She shuddered and moved on.

  Where was she going?

  You are going to the pit in the swamp, a voice from nowhere said in her head. The half-Six was with her in thought, if not in form.

  “Where is this pit?” she asked the swampness about her.

  GO! the voice directed. Her feet, within the breather suit, turned to the left.

  She walked for a long time and, finally, saw an immense shadow on the floor of the swamp, perfectly round and black as the flesh of the swamp creature. She walked to the edge, and from the pit she heard the piteous mewling of something below. “I won’t go down there!” She trembled at the edge. Then the force of the half-Six mind struck her and she was falling, tumbling, spinning into the blackness of the pit. Her mind played her strangely at that delirious moment, for as she fell, she remembered the first time, and the first place, when her life had been planned for her, and the face; and the face of the man was oddly the face of Third with its frog-mouth, and she screamed shrilly, for her mind was snapping and she knew it. What new horrors this creature had in waiting she could not even suspect, for it seemed that with each added segment of the gestalt, the Six grew more frenzied, more vicious, more unpleasant. And more powerful.

  Then she was down, sinking thigh-deep in swirling ebony muck that rose up about her like a cape of velvet. She stood quite still for a moment, letting the sediment slowly swirl down to rest. She felt the weird tingle of expectancy all through her body—aching and flaming from the wounds she had received, both mental and physical—and found she was wishing for the release of death again.

  She waited in the womb of the swamp.

  For what she did not know.

  Then she saw them swimming toward her.

  Fantastically, unbelievably, they were the last things she would have imagined. The first was a human being, as normal as herself; a man, with gray hair and wide blue eyes, and a strong, handsome body. He was clothed in an abbreviated breechclout affair, with a leather strap that came around his waist and over his shoulder. Another, around his head, like a thick circlet. Swimming beside the man was what looked like a cloud of syrupy, milky effluvium. Sarna wildly conceived of it as spittle, with more body. It flowed along beside the man, and as the two neared Sarna, she involuntarily brought up her hands to protect herself.

  The man halted, backstroked, and stood down in the black muck.

  “I am Two, the eyes,” the man said, his body-form shifting as though seen through a film.

  The milky substance kept moving, flowing, surrounding her. Before she could fully shift her attention from the man to the translucent ooze, it had overwhelmed her. Her body tingled, then smarted, then prickled, then burned fiercely. In her brain she heard the now-man
iacal laughter of the half-Six above the pit. She has met the nerves, Four, it gloated, and rolled in on itself with vast amusement.

  Four enclosed her, and choked her and burned her, and then all three of them were rising. She fainted at some point along the way…and did not regain consciousness until they were out of the pit and up from the bottom of the swamp.

  When she looked again, she was on dry land, and the man and the white, milky substance had joined the ball that was half-Six. It was a larger ball now—bigger than her body, but smaller than the individual man that had been Two.

  The sickly-colored pink-gray-black-off-green-orange ball that was the Six minus one—Five, it would be—rolled in the sticky, humid air of the jungle world.

  “Wh-what is this place?” Sarna asked, realizing for the first time that they had set down on a world new to man, for Earthmen had not penetrated beyond Pluto, and this world was obviously not of the Solar System.

  “Do you not recognize this world?” asked the Six- minus-one.

  “No…what…”

  Then they revealed the truth to her, and it registered, and she was startled, for it was Earth itself. Earth, as it would be in another hundred years. Not crowded with level-cities and spires and the free commerce of the New System under Terra Central, but a stinking, steaming jungle, filled with weird beasts and slimy swamps.

  “What have you done?” she screamed at them.

  “Nothing…yet,” the Six-minus-one chuckled, and withdrew her from the Earth of one hundred years hence.

  “But we have Five to rescue first, before we decide what will be done in this universe,” said the almost-Six.

  Then there was a snap, and a wrench, and they were back on the rubble-strewn street of the Mars Dome.

  She looked around and saw the Esso Building, and the dead Earthmen lying in the gutters, and the bands of marties patrolling the streets. A huge, soft globular ball rolled and rolled in the air.

  “Mars. You are back, we are back, we are nearly whole and Six!” screeched the high-whine voice of the almost-Six as it tumbled and hurled and spun in the air. “After millennia, I am almost myself.”

  Sarna wanted to be sick. Now she knew what she had done; she had allowed herself to be deluded by this insane creature behind its mask of helpfulness. And so simply…so like a human!

  Now she knew why the Six had been split apart by Time and Chance and the works of Man. For the Six was an insane creature; it was old, true. Over a million years old, but the moods it suffered were childish. No, the Six was not an infant—it was incredibly ancient.

  And in its senility, it had reverted to a second childhood!

  And yet…why was she involved? Sarna was confused, sick with misery and a sense of overwhelming tragedy. She was certain now that the Six would kill her once it had found its final segment, wherever it might be. The life she had led had been a shadowy thing, at core unpleasant and degrading, yet she had respected herself, and that had kept her from regretting too much. But to die like this; to have been the dupe of an insane creature beyond imagination, who would now rule the Universe like a crazyhouse, with Mars no fit place for Man or martie, who could alter Earth so billions died, and Terra Central was smashed, and only jungle left—jungle in which the time-flow would warp itself so that two segments of the Six could live there and not live there, out of time, waiting for a Terran prostitute named Sarna to come and bring them to the others.

  It was all so hideous, such a travesty, and she wondered inside herself when they would kill her.

  “Kill you?” asked almost-Six.

  “Yes,” she said defiantly, and her mind was so filled with terror that she could barely keep from trembling. “You’ll kill me; you’ll kill everyone; you’re insane; when you have no further use for me!”

  The almost-Six laughed and rolled about, and hurled itself at a martie, who died screeching as the ball that was the Six-minus-one passed through his body. “You still do not know! You still think we have tolerated your puny Terran self because you are a human, is that it?” asked the almost-Six.

  “What are you talking about?” Sarna asked, suddenly confused. The radiation pains were gone from her arm; her head was suddenly clear.

  “You are the last segment of my entity,” screamed the almost-Six insanely. “You are Five, the arms! You did not think this was your form, did you? Have not your racial memories been released from the crypt of your brain where they have lain unused for a million years? Do you not wish to return to your body, your actuality, your place as ruler of the Universe?”

  Pain!

  Sarna screamed. Her hands clawed at the sides of her face and ripped at her blonde hair, and then suddenly the barriers shattered in her mind and a flood of memories poured back.

  A million years of memories.

  A million years of changing and altering and being a tree and a starfish and an unnamed bit of dirt and a strange thought-pattern on one world and a light-cycle on yet another, and finally being Sarna the prostitute.

  It all opened to her, and she screamed and screamed and screamed as she realized there had been nothing normal in all her life. That she was not under thirty years old, but was over a million. Senile and reeking with the decay that only age beyond Forever can bring…and she wanted death again, as violently as she could, and as completely.

  “Yes! Yes! I will merge with you! I will join my brothers, my body, my one, my all!” she screamed, and then all the flaming cosmic power of her mind joined with theirs, and the joining was the last link in the mental armor that made the six into the Six. The ball rolled in the sky, for now its full potential had been reached and surpassed. It spun huge and sentient, the six separate parts as one being.

  Inside the Six somewhere, the little section that had been the mind-matter of Sarna the imp from the Red Dog House plotted and schemed, and thought.

  Duped?

  Yes, easily, by an intellect as old as the stars and as mad as time rampant. As evil as the Coalsack and as self-centered as a sun.

  A sun! That was the answer. The secret. The only way out. That was the way it had to be, the way she would make it!

  For Sarna there was no future as a segment of an insane gestalt entity reliving its youth by decimating the Universe; that was no life, but an eternal death.

  The answer lay in the Sun.

  She willed the body of the Six to rise, to leave the atmosphere of Mars. She willed Three to mylite them into space, and once there she set the body revolving about the Sun with great speed and great verve.

  “Oh, what a pleasure, to dive into the Sun—oh what great joy! To go that way all warm and bright!”

  The other five heard, and the single soul that was the center of the Six concurred. How clever was Five, how very very clever to think of this new pleasure for our jaded soul.

  Mars, Sarna thought to herself. How I let myself be led by emotion into believing it was Terran property; by what right does Earth rule the planet Mars…?

  By what right does any race enslave another? To let Terra rule the marties—even if they are a decaying race and will bungle the job—would be as rotten as to let this creature of which I am part and soul rule the Universe. Let the marties die their own way, with nobility if they wish, or not, if they wish. That is their right. They were on Mars first, they are first to ruin it if they wish.

  So it should be with Earth, and so it should be with any man or any world or any intelligence.

  And then, without regret, yet sustaining a scintilla of love and pity for Sarna—whom she had been and who would be no more—she plunged with her Six into the Sun.

  And was no more.

  And they died happily ever after.

  What happened was that my entire

  right side had given out, and was paralyzed.

  I didn’t know it.

  I lay there for exactly fifteen minutes.

  Then I heard Susan and my associate pull

  up in the driveway, about twenty feet

  beh
ind me. The door was standing wide open

  and I was lying in the front hall.

  They came in and they stood over me.

  The first words I heard were

  “Why are you lying on the floor?”

  To which I, in horribly Harlan-esque terms,

  responded instantly—in the same words with which

  Napoleon responded when asked why he’d invaded

  Russia in the winter and gotten his ass whupped—

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  INTRODUCTORY NOTE:

  INCOGNITA, INC

  For the 455th time, I was watching King Kong. They had this map from the old Norseman in the boat.

  Where’d he get the map?

  Every one of these shows, there’s a map. Who makes these maps?

  Who is the map maker? Who is the graphologist? Who is the nautical linesman?

  I decided to do “Incognita Inc.”

  I love doing magic shoppe stories.

  INCOGNITA, INC

  You’ve asked me to file the report, so that’s what I’m doing. But this is also my resignation notice. It was a miserable, meanspirited job you stuck me with, and I hated even the idea of doing it. But I did it. I did as I was told, I suppose, because I’ve been with WorldSpan (formerly Blackstar Holdings [Pty.] [Ltd.]) since you recruited me out of the U. of Chicago twenty years ago, and like a good obedient dog I was part of that generation between the Baby Boomers and GenX that believed Daddy Corporation would take care of me all the way to senescence. And I was your good little running dog, did whatever you asked, didn’t weigh the ethical freight, swallowed hard sometimes as I watched the knives go in, but I just intoned the mantra I don’t want to get involved, it ain’t none of my business. I ate those fat paychecks and never got bulimic.