Collected Fiction

by Kris Neville

  “Hertha, we’ve got to purify this air. Now listen. Listen carefully, Hertha. You’ve seen me dig up those plants on the outside?”

  “Yes, I watch when you go out. I always watch, Jimmy.”

  “Good. You’ve got to do the same thing. You’ve got to go out and dig up some plants. You’ve got to bring them in here and plant them the way I did. You know which ones they are?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He closed his eyes, trying to think of a way to make her see how vital a thing a tiny plant could be. The complex chemistry of it bubbled to the surface of his mind. He wanted to tell her why the plants died in the artificial human atmosphere and had to be replaced every week or so. He wanted to tell her, but he was growing weaker.

  “They purify the air by releasing oxygen. You understand?”

  She nodded her head dumbly.

  “You must bring in a great many plants, Hertha. Remember that—a great many. Don’t forget that. When you go outside, through the locks, we lose air. Air is very precious, so you must bring in a great many plants.”

  “Yes, Jimmy.”

  “And you must plant them as I did.”

  “Yes, Jimmy.”

  He began to talk faster, in a race with the growing fever.

  “I’ve gathered most of the oxygenating plants around the hut. So you may have to go into the forest to get enough.”

  “The—the forest?”

  “You must, Hertha! You must!”

  Her mouth twisted as if she were ready to cry. “For you. Yes, for you I will go into the forest.”

  The fever came back. His mind wandered away.

  HE was walking in the open air. He walked from Nineshime to Venus, down Venus to Windopole, up Windopole to “The Grand Eagle and Barrel.” He went in. Hertha came with him and sat down by his side at the bar.

  The bartender looked at him oddly. “She with you, Mac?”

  He turned to look at her; her dumb, brown eyes met his. He wanted to snarl: “Get the hell away! Leave me alone!” But he choked back the words. It was not Hertha he was angry with. She had done him no injury. She had merely followed him, perhaps because she knew of nothing else to do; perhaps because of temporary gratitude for the coins; perhaps in hope that he would buy her a drink. When the anger passed, he felt sorry for her again.

  He said, “Want a drink?”

  She shook her head without changing expression.

  He looked at her and shrugged and thought that after a while she would get tired and go away. He ordered, and the bartender brought a bottle and one glass.

  Hertha continued to stare at him; he tried to ignore her.

  He drank. He thought it would get easier to ignore her as the level of the bottle fell. It didn’t. He drank some more. It grew late.

  “I gotta explain,” he said, the liquor swirling in his mind.

  She waited, cow-eyed.

  “Ernest Dowson. Man’s name. He wrote a poem—Beata Solitudo. I wanna explain this. Man lived long, long, long, long time ago. You listenin’? Okay. That’s good. That’s fine. He said—it’s ver’ importan’ you should unnerstan’ this—he said how you put honor and labor out of your mind when you . . . you’re out here. What he meant, it’s . . . it’s . . . you see . . . Now I gotta make you see all this. So you listen real close while I tell it to you. There was a man named . . .”

  He wanted to explain how the frontier does things to people. He wanted to explain how society is a tight little box that keeps everything locked up and hidden, but how society breaks down and becomes fluid in the stars, and how people explode and forget what they learned in civilization, and how everything is unstable.

  “This man, his name’s—” he said.

  He wanted to explain how the harsh elements and brute nature and space, the God-awful emptiness and indifference and the sense of aloneness and selfishness and . . .

  There were a thousand things he wanted to tell her. They were all the things he had thought about as he followed the frontier. If he could get it all down right, he could make her see why he had to follow the frontier as long as there was anything left inside of him.

  Maybe the rest of the people out here were that way, too. Maybe he had seen it in Doris’ eyes tonight. Maybe that was why society broke down in the stars and civilization came only when men and women like him were gone.

  He did not want to know how the rest felt. He did not know whether it would be more terrifying to learn that he was alone, or that he was not alone.

  But just for tonight, he could tell the alien creature beside him. It would be safe to tell her—if the idea had not rusted inside of him so long that there were no longer any words to fit it.

  But first he had to make her see his home planet and the great cities and the landscaped valleys and the majestic mountains and the people. He had to make her see the vast sweep of the explorers who first carried the race to a million planets, who devised faster-than-light ships and metals to make the ships out of, metals to hold their forms in the crucible beyond normal space. He had to make her see the colonists who tied all the world together with spans of steel commerce and then moved on in ever-widening circles. He wanted to give her the whole picture.

  Then he wanted to explain the surge, the restlessness of the men at the frontier. Different men, he thought; from the womb of civilization, but unlike their brothers. The men who pushed out and out. Searching, always searching. He was afraid to find out if their reasons were the same as his. For himself, he had seen a thousand planets and a thousand new life-forms. But it was not enough. There were the vast, blank, empty, indifferent reaches of space beyond him, and that was what drove him on.

  This he wanted to say to Hertha: No matter how far you go, the thing that gets you is that there’s nothing that cares; no matter how far, the thing is that nothing cares; the thing is that nothing cares. It gets you. And you have to go on because some day, somewhere, there may be—something.

  But he lost the trend of his thoughts completely, and he had another drink.

  “Decent people come out here . . .”

  What was he going to say about decent people?

  “Stupid!” he cried, slapping her in the face.

  She rubbed her cheek. “Stupid?”

  He wanted to cry, for he had not known that he was brutal. “Can’t you see?” he screamed, and it was necessary to explain it to her; and then it was not necessary. “You’re like the awful, indifferent, mindless blackness of space, unreasoning!”

  “Unreasoning,” she repeated carefully.

  “You’re Hertha!”

  “I’m Hertha,” she said.

  THE period of calmness that returned after the fever was crystal and lucid, preceding, he knew, a severe, prolonged seizure.

  “I’m afraid,” she told him, shivering, “but I will go.”

  He watched her get into the light surface suit, clamp down the helmet with trembling hands. He was shaking with nervousness as she hesitated at the lock. Then she pulled it open. It clicked behind her. He heard the brief hiss of the oxygen replacing the air that had whooshed out.

  And he felt sorry for her, alone, terrified, on the scaly, hard surface of the tiny satellite. He closed his eyes, pictured her walking past his strip mine, past the gleaming heap of minerals ready for the transport.

  He felt tears in his eyes and yet he could not entirely explain his feelings toward her—half fear, sometimes half affection. But more important than that: Why was she with him? What were her feelings? Had some sense of gratitude made her come? Affection?

  He could not understand her. At times she seemed beyond all understanding. Her responses were mindless, almost mechanical, and that frightened him.

  He remembered her dumb, apologetic caresses and her pathetically clumsy tenderness—or reflex; he could never be sure—and her eager yet reluctant hands and the always slightly hurt, slightly accusing look in her eyes, as if at every instant she was ready for a stinging blow, and her great sighs, muted as if
fearing to be heard and . . .

  He was drunk, screaming meaninglessly, and the bartender threw him out. The pavement cut his face. When he awoke, it was morning and he was in a strange room and she was in bed beside him.

  She said, “I am Hertha. I brought you home. I will go with you.”

  The paralysis set in. He could not move. The tears froze on his cheeks, and he lay inert, thinking of her almost mindlessly fighting for his life in the alien outside.

  Then she was back in the hut. So soon?

  She looked at him, smiled through the transparent helmet at him. He could hear the precious oxygen hiss in to compensate for the air that had been lost when she entered.

  He could see her eyes. They were proud. Relieved, too, as if she had been afraid he would be gone when she returned. He felt she had hurried back to be sure that he was still there.

  She knelt by the flower bed and, without removing her suit, she held up the plant proudly. He could see the hard-packed dirt in the roots. Fascinated, he watched her scrape a planting hole. He watched her set the plant delicately and pat the soil with care.

  Then she stood up.

  He tried to move, to cry out. He could not.

  He watched her until she went out of the range of his fixed eyes. She was going to the airlock again.

  After a moment he heard the familiar hiss of oxygen.

  She was going to get a great number of plants.

  But one at a time.

  THE OPAL NECKLACE

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Come here, my child.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Here. Out the window—the swamp. You see the swamp?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  The old witch flung open the casement. “Listen!” Night was coming down. Long shadows fingered their way over the bayous. Water, heavy with vegetation, lapped faintly against the stunted mangroves. Bull frogs opened their bass symphony, echoing and re-echoing from farther and farther away as others from the far side chimed in. Tiny tree frogs chirped; crickets grated their eerie notes. A loon, laughing mournfully, flapped across the tree tops.

  “And you want to leave it? Answer me!”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  The old witch cackled, and her thin, cracked voice drifted out over the swamp. “You can’t leave it,” she said. “You can’t leave it. Its water is your blood, and its air is your lungs.” She closed the window against the mosquitoes. The air was hot and humid and sour. “It’s you! You can’t leave it, do you hear? Do you hear?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  The witch sniffed. “You’re swamp. If you leave it, you’ll leave something of yourself here. You’ll have nothing left to hold you together: the wind and the world will tear you to pieces. Love? Love can’t hold you together, my child; not for long, my child. Only the swamp and the shadows and the darkness can.” She flitted across the room to the old, rough-hewn table. She picked up a string of jewels. “Opals. People don’t string opals,” she cackled, pointing a bony finger at the girl, “They’re bad luck. You know that?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “You think you want power over him,” the witch said. “Don’t you?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “But you don’t know what you want, do you? Oh, you may think you know. Yes. But you don’t. No—you don’t. But you’ll find it!”

  The girl’s teeth were chattering. Chuckling, the old witch bent and lit a yellow tallow candle with a kitchen match. The flame spiraled straight up, giving off faint, gray smoke and a sharp greasy odor. She cocked her head listening. “Hear them boys singing?” she rasped. “Hear them? That’s you, too. Hear them?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Yes Mother, yes Mother, yes Mother,” the witch mimicked, “is that all you can say: yes Mother? Are you afraid of me? Is that it?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  The witch threw back her head and laughed shrilly; her talon-like fingers pawed the air with mirth. Then, as the laughter sobbed away, she began to chant, “Shelia Larson’s afraid! Shelia Larson’s afraid! Shelia Larson’s afraid!” She spun to face the girl; her face writhed in delight. Her eyes sparkled. Her wrinkled, grimy cheeks flushed with pleasure. “Did they teach you to be afraid of witches out there?” She waved her hands in a circle to indicate the world beyond the swamp. “No, no, no. No, they taught you to laugh at me out there, didn’t they? But when you came back, and when you wanted something, it was: yes Mother this, and yes Mother that, and you’ll be glad enough when I do it. You’re swamp, you hear!”

  The witch was suddenly in front of her; one of her filthy hands circled Shelia’s arm. “Stop shaking, stop shaking, stop shaking,” she chuckled, peering up into the girl’s face. “Did you bring the money, eh?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  The old witch let her hand fall away. “Put it on the table. Put it on the table.”

  Shelia crossed the room and placed the stack of silver coins next to the string of opals. The coins clinked together as she took her hand away. They gleamed dully in the candle light.

  The old witch went to the table, and Shelia backed away. The witch picked up the opals, let them flow from one hand to the other. She crooned to them.

  “Did you bring his hair, his nail parings?”

  “Some dried blood, Mother.” The old witch cackled. “Good, good, good. Give it me!” She extended the bony hand, took the paper, peered at the brownish drops on it.

  From the table the old witch selected a long, slender knife. Carefully she scraped the dried blood into a cracked pewter jar. She dipped into another jar, added something to the blood. Then her hands began to fly, adding, testing, mixing. Finally she stirred.

  When the mixture was to her satisfaction, she sprinkled white powder over the opals. “All his joys,” she chanted. “All her husband’s joys. One, two, three, four. Into the opals, go into the opals. Five, six, seven, eight . . .” One by one she polished them between her fingers. Then she dropped the string into the pewter jar. The opals made little bubbles in the syrupy, brownish liquid. Her cracked voice rose and fell in a Cajun chant. It whined and whispered and shrieked. She drew out the opals, dried each one carefully. The thin, tough silk cord on which they were strung was blood red. She handed the opals across the table.

  “Go, go, go,” she chanted softly.

  “Hurry, hurry, hurry,” the carnie called, his voice flat and monotonous. “Yes sir, step right this way! I’m giving away money at this booth! I’m kee-razy! Yes, over here’s the crazy man! . . . What’s that, sonny, whatcha say, sonny? You don’t believe I’m crazy? Then step right up and I’ll show you a picture of my wife . . . Yes sir, yes sir. Over here’s the crazy man, giving away money! Yes, he’s giving it away!”

  The ground was black, packed hard by a thousand trampling feet, cluttered over with cigarette butts, gum wrappers, candy sticks, torn paper. There were swirling lights and happy holiday bunting and pink cotton candy. A calliope piped out its shrill notes to blend with the pleased child screams. A rifle cracked over and over in the shooting gallery.

  Shelia Larson and her husband Gib, hand in hand, forced their way through the swirling crowd.

  “Hootchy-kootchy girls, right this way. See the show that made Paireee . . .”

  “You want to try the rollercoaster again, honey?” Gib said.

  Laughing, Shelia pushed the hair out of her face. “Not now,” she gasped.

  “Let’s toss pennies then. Come on.” Gib elbowed his way up to the booth. He turned to his wife. “Happy?”

  “Yes,” she said, her face shining, her eyes sparkling.

  “Give me some change,” he told the pitch man. The man counted out the pennies, and Gib gave half of them to Shelia. They laughed and tossed the coins at the colored squares. They won nothing, and when the pennies were gone they moved on, she clinging to his elbow possessively.

  “Oh, look! They have a snake house!” Shelia cried, tugging at his coat. “Let’s go!”

 
Gib smiled down at her. “Look at snakes after only five days of being married to me?”

  “I want to,” she pouted.

  He shrugged. “Well . . .”

  The weird whine of a snake charmer’s pipe called from the snake house. It was from a record, and there was a monotonous tick-tick-tick in it.

  Gib bought two red pasteboard tickets and they entered through the tent flap.

  There was sawdust on the floor inside. In the center of the tent there was a shallow pit surrounded by a two-foot canvas over which spectators might peer down at the writhing reptiles. Only one man was watching, but he was watching in motionless fascination.

  The man in the pit was handling a four-foot black snake. He paid no attention to the spectators. He let the snake coil around his arm and bring its head level with his face. The snake weaved back and forth, its tongue flickering furiously. It ducked its head and snapped it forward a few inches, almost as if it were trying to kiss the man on the lips. The pit man pushed its head away gently.

  Shelia leaned forward, her eyes bright, her breath coming sharply.

  “Let me see it!” she said to the pit man, holding out her hand.

  The pit man turned to stare at her. “These are dangerous, lady.” She narrowed her eyes and glanced around the pit contemptuously. “Snakes like these?” she asked, her voice low and throaty.

  “Don’t bother the man, Shelia,” Gib suggested.

  She turned her jet black eyes to her husband’s face. “I want that snake.”

  Gib smiled indulgently. “I think we’d better go.”

  She ignored him and turned back to the pit man. Again she held out her hand. Their eyes locked. For a moment, they both stood motionless. Then he wavered.

  “Okay, lady,” he said, crossing the pit to her. “It’s your funeral.”

  She reached out caressingly for the black snake, and it slithered onto her arm. She petted its scaly, sinuous body, and its tongue darted over her hand. She brought its head up, petting it softly just back of the jaws and laughing into its moving tongue.