Collected Fiction

by Kris Neville

  While Mr. Harrison was explaining all this, he had to take time out fairly frequently to declare that he did too love his Chickadee; to protest that he’d done it for her, and not just because he didn’t like cats; to point out that after all she did have four iridium-mink coats.

  Finally, a relative calm was restored. They kissed and made up. Together, they spent several hours in pushing and hauling. They stuffed all the closets. The duck blind went under a piano with the rabbits. The small Japanese automobile was parked in the bathroom. When, exhausted, they crept into bed, a navigable channel had been dredged through the hall, and part of the living room carpet was actually visible.

  “Oh, I do hope things’ll work out,” Mrs. Harrison sighed, as she turned out the light. “I’m still sort of scared. I can’t believe that your Bessie is just a mechanical brain. I—I think she’s alive.”

  Mr. Harrison slept rather poorly. First he dreamed that he was working on Bessie, installing Schroeder Bypasses and Dappleby Blocks. The Dappleby Blocks kept blowing up like balloons and exploding, and every time one would blow up, Bessie would purr and purr, and he’d reach for a wire and find whiskers instead, or a handful of fur. And then Winkler and Swartz would come in, and they’d dance around him carrying umbrellas over their heads. And Mr. Olson was there, singing Cuddlypets commercials in his concrete-mixer voice. And finally the fur and the whiskers came up all around Mr. Harrison, like tall grass, and Mr. Quandt opened up a big door and out came these critters wearing athletic supporters. And Mr. Olson was one of them, somehow, and he was singing:

  “Cudd-lee-pets, Cudd-lee-pets,

  Snuggle up to Cudd-lee-pets!

  Sweet as sugar, big as busses—

  CUDDLYHIPPOPOTAMUSES!”

  Mr. Harrison woke up, in an icy sweat. He took two sleeping tablets. Fifteen minutes later, he found himself in a police station, under a big, bright light which had something to do with the new psychiatric technique. Dr. Schroeder and Dr. Dappleby were dressed up as policemen, and they were holding him down while Mr. Olson read aloud from a list of the things Bessie had sent him, and every time he read one out Mr. Kerfoid erased a word from his B.S. diploma in Cyber-Surgery, until there weren’t any left and the diploma was blank. Then a steam whistle went off in his head, and his mind went all whirly, and the next thing he knew he was out on the street, on all fours, and he felt different somehow. He looked around at himself and saw that he was covered with iridium-mink fur. There was a collar around his neck, and a leash, and Dr. Schroeder was leading him—hop, skip, jump, hop, skip, jump. And he felt so grateful to Dr. Schroeder for feeding him all that wonderful, juicy, raw Syntho-horse that he rubbed up against him and purred. And then it wasn’t Dr. Schroeder any more, but a little Japanese auto pulling him into Bessie’s control room, which was a mouth full of teeth, and behind every tooth was a policeman, and they were all purring, purring, purr—

  Mr. Harrison was not in good shape when he rose. He gulped down his coffee, pretended to shave, and went off to Jonson, Williamson, Selznick, and Jones. He found Mr. Jonson, who looked at him queerly and made some remark about “godawful benders.”

  “Mr. Jonson,” he asked, as casually as he could, “did you ever hear of Charge Reference records getting into the permanent memory bank of one of those big department store brains? I mean so there’d be no control over what the machine did?”

  “That just couldn’t happen,” Mr. Jonson assured him. “It’s impossible. Only living creatures can function that way.”

  Mr. Harrison sighed.

  He forced himself to wait until noon. Then he hurried down to Moss-Eagleberg’s. Sure enough, there was only one subprofessional on duty in the control room, a wide, red-faced, cheerful sort of a fellow.

  “I’m from Jonson, Williamson, Selznick, and Jones,” Mr. Harrison said. “Did a job on this brain a while back. How’s she getting along?”

  “Say, you must be Mr. Harrison!” The man grinned, got to his feet, held out his hand. “Filmore’s the name. I heard all about you. Winkler told me all about how you brought Bessie back from the dead. Well, she’s just fine—she’s just purring along.”

  Mr. Harrison bit his lip. “That’s good. But maybe I’d better give her a checkup anyhow. There’ll be no extra charge. It’s part of our regular service.”

  “That’s mighty white of you, Mr. Harrison. Bessie’ll appreciate that.” Mr. Harrison counted to ten. He managed a smile. “Oh, by the way,” he said, opening his kit. “I seem to have forgotten my replacement transistors. They’re in a box on the seat of my car. It’s parked on the third-level lot. If I give you the key could you—?”

  “Get ’em for you? Say, I’ll be glad to, Mr. Harrison.”

  As soon as the man had departed, he closed the door, locked it, went down the stairs as fast as he could, and tore out the Schroeder Bypass and all its connections. Then he came up again, plugged in the mike, asked for the file on Mr. and Mrs. E. Howard Harrison. As soon as the numbers showed up on the typer, he flipped the switch from RECORD over to TOTAL ERASURE. The machine clicked and whirred. A little red light blinked three times. All the Harrison data had been removed, deleted, expunged.

  “Boy, that does it!” Mr. Harrison murmured in triumph. Joy and relief surged in his heart. He burst into song:

  “Pussycats are full of germs,

  Dogs have nasty fleas and worms,

  That’s not what I want to get—

  Mom, I want a CUDD-LEE-PET!”

  And, on the final note, he unplugged the typer, flipped the switches back where they belonged, and pulled out the mike. When the subprofessional came back with the spare transistors, he was packing his kit.

  Mr. Harrison went away whistling. He stopped at a phone on the way to the shop, and called up his wife, and told her that their troubles were over. All that afternoon, he worked like a beaver.

  He came home at his regular time. He rang the bell. Nobody answered. He knocked. When he thought he heard someone stirring inside, he called, “Chickadee, are you home?” several times. Finally, he took out his key and tried to open the door. Something seemed to be blocking it, something too heavy to shove.

  He frowned. He began to feel frightened. After hesitating a minute or two, he went downstairs to the apartment under his own, and persuaded the inquisitive elderly lady who lived there to let him through to the fire escape, promising to let her know right away if he found anything wrong.

  Luckily, the kitchen window hadn’t been latched. He crawled in. A glance was enough to inform him that something quite dreadful had happened. One end of the kitchen was filled with identical packages. They were stacked round the freezer, and they reached almost up to the ceiling. And that wasn’t all. On the table, weighted down, was a note.

  Slowly, with a horrible feeling of doom, Mr. Harrison read it.

  Dear Eberhard,

  I have been a good wife to you the best I know how even if you aren’t a real professional any more like Elmer Maginnis. If it was another woman I could forgive you I guess—but this is too much. I have gone home to Mother. I have taken only what really is mine, like my mink coats. You won’t be lonely, because your Bessie has everything. If you don’t believe me, just look in the living room.

  Your wife, Mignonetta (Chickadee)

  Like an automaton, Mr. Harrison went into the hall. He found it filled with huge square objects, and he clambered up over them. At the living room door he paused, struggling feebly against the compulsion to open it. He watched his hand reach for the knob, turn it, push the door ajar. He went in.

  There they were, as he had known they would be when he walked through the Syntho-horse packages in the kitchen and over the king-sized cat-boxes in the hall. They were everywhere—on and under the pianos, on the chairs, on the mantelpiece. They were sitting there happily, small, medium, and large, striped and mottled and spotted.

  The Cuddlypets saw Mr. Harrison. All together, they rose. They all started purring. They came padding towards him—


  There was love in their eyes.

  DUST THOU ART . . .

  Looking at these decadent beings of Earth, Matuska saw the future of his own people, the end to which they, too must come. But must it be thus?

  THE CEMETERIES on Earth in 2988—it was a bleak, rain-swept March day of that year when the colonists arrived in their spaceship and planted their flag (a ritual, for there was no one to contest ownership) in the moist land warmed by the rocket-blast—the cemeteries were ill-kept and markerless.

  The native came less than a week after their arrival. He was a squat, hairy, ugly brute. Matuska was the only one who had bothered to study the spy-tapes and learn the language, so he spoke to the native’. The native made it known that the cemetery to the west was the natives’ cemetery; that the natives would continue to use it; and that the colonists were not to interfere. The native, having said what he had come to say, departed.

  “Why did you leave the cities?” Matuska cried after him. There was no answer.

  Aside from that, the natives ignored the colony completely, for more than a year. When they moved in the forest, hunting with arrows and spears, they refused to see the colonists hunting with weapons infinitely more powerful, more accurate, and more deadly than their own.

  In the cemetery, the mounds continued to weather away. Each new grave disinterred unmarked bones. Dry, tangled brambles shackled the older mounds to the earth and drew them down with the dead fingers of promised obscurity. And the newer mounds, those hacked out of the raw, frozen earth during the colonists’ first winter, were being compressed by snow and rain and wind-driven sleet. Except for the most recent graves, the cemetery was always a thicket. It had been, for no one could tell how many years.

  Matuska was as nearly acclimated as he would ever be to the heavy air and the high gravity. On the first anniversary of their arrival, he stood in the cemetery among the natives and watched them prepare to bury a youth killed during the hunt, a youth whose death had been heralded by the beating of cymbals at dawn—sounds heard even within the central house of the compound where Matuska lived—heard faintly, distantly, like the far-off, brassy throbbing of a giant heart. Towering over the silent natives, trembling with the miserable cold, Matuska waited for the grave to be finished; for the body to be lowered; for the first clod to fall on the naked chest.

  A native on his left fingered an ageless steel knife. The dog at the native’s side whined for its dead master; the native petted it and murmured wordlessly.

  Matuska bowed his head, listened, heard the clod, then turned and walked toward the central house, leaning into the sheeting rain, moving his feet with difficulty through the sticky mud.

  “You must not continue to go out among them unarmed,” a colonist told him when he entered the compound.

  “I’m safe,” Matuska said. He knew that the natives dared not test the universality of the law they knew so well among themselves: violent retribution.

  Wet and miserable he stood at the window, moving his hands vaguely, crying sadly without sound or tears.

  As custom provided, the native with a knife slit the dog’s throat; for all his lesser height, his arms could have held Matuska’s frail body as easily as they had held the struggling dog.

  Slowly, when all was done—when the mounds were heaped and the equipment gathered—the natives separated in silence, awkward, heavychested creatures moving with odd, shuffling steps.

  They had completed a ritual of greatest consequence, if Matuska could only understand it. He clenched his hands against the window-ledge as they vanished from sight, one by one, into the dreary forest.

  He wanted desperately to thrust himself upon them in such a way that they could no longer ignore him; he wanted to beat with his fists against the hairy chests, against the barrier of indifference, until he was recognized. The world of his co-colonists was a world he could not penetrate. He was alone, alone, outside of everything.

  He was possessed of monstrous and incommunicable knowledge. Bottled up without outlet, it had come to infuse his whole being, until nothing in his life was uncolored by it. It became so mixed up with everything else that even he no longer completely understood it.

  He had conceived an obsession about the natives: they, also, were possessed of the same knowledge.

  FOUR MONTHS later, when the cemetery was drying with parched wind; when the leaves were curling; when the grass was brown, the natives buried their chieftain. That summer, it was 2989 now, a black-and-white mocking bird perched in the dead oak at the far end of the mounds and sang mournfully in the moonlight, reproducing all the various sounds of bird-life without pause, from dark to daybreak, for the better part of a month. It was killed by a native who crept silently upon it with drawn bow.

  Matuska could not escape his cultural commitment; most of his waking-hours were devoted to the routine labors of establishing the colony. He had seen the natives near at hand only once between the burial in March and the burial in July. He came upon two of them at the edge of the ruined city—smelling the strong, unwashed reek of them an instant before he saw them facing each other on the sun-dappled grass. A fitful breeze rustled the leaves intermittently. He was a mile upwind from their filthy, squalid village, so the native odor was unexpected; Matuska stopped at once, watching, listening.

  Here, at the rim of the forest, at the edge of the city, with lost glory crumbling about him, he peered at their brute eyes and lax faces seeking reassurance that he was not alone.

  He held his breath as they circled, knife-armed, ready to leap and slash each other because of some insult, some hot word, some abridgement of pride. Matuska cried out in anguish, rushing, stumbling toward them.

  Both dropped into a defensive crouch at the unexpected sound. And Matuska was between them, towering over them—great, sad-eyed, waiting, not caring if they flung themselves upon him or not.

  Their breathing was loud and their breath was stale. Their eyes darted uneasily from his figure and away, and for several heart beats the scene was frozen.

  And then the danger was past.

  The natives vanished into the forest. After a timeless period, there was thrashing in the grass and then silence. Matuska shuddered.

  One native, bloody and proud, came back to the clearing. Unaware of the stink of his grimy body, he surveyed the land combatively. He was master of the planet. Nothing gave him pause; nothing challenged his superiority; nothing made him slave.

  The week after the bowman shot the mocking-bird, Matuska attended the funeral of the chieftain. The natives clustering at the graveside no longer had the sweet odor of stale sweat about them; they were scrubbed clean, as if to meet some obscure challenge they only dimly understood. Invisible, Matuska stood, head bowed, waiting for the first clod to fall; then he turned away in order not to witness the execution of the chieftain’s dog.

  2

  THE THIRD summer after the colonists arrived, the natives sent an emissary. The colony had expanded, had become fat and prosperous and rooted. The compound was now weathered, and the raw wood of the buildings was warped and cracking. Within another three years, smelters would be opened; the top-soil would be strained for metals; huge gouts of flame would lave the night sky, and the million-voiced roar of furnaces would shake the forest, In the third summer (2990 now) the first stage of colonization was entering its final phase. The farm-lands lay fertile miles eastward. There were vast stands of corn-like grain and of native wheat (of which the colonists were fond); terrestrial and alien vegetables queerly intermixed in the neat-rowed truck-gardens near the compound.

  Soon, in their mastery of the land, the colonists would eliminate the forest westward. Already an abrazed, fuzed-quartz road stretched through it like a ruled line, to end at the distant mountaintop where the relay-station pointed its aerial finger to the stars. The first stage was passing; the groundwork was laid. A hundred towering silos stood filled and waiting for the second-stage colonists.

  In ten years, the compound would be a city of
shiny metal and brilliantly-colored plastic; great roads would extend radially outward like clutching fingers, grasping, possessing, retaining the conquered land. But for now, at the end of the first stage, the native cemetery (at Matuska’s insistence) remained untouched—a landmark; an anchor to the past; a representation of the old verities to which the natives still clung with tenacious faith, and no longer understood.

  They sent a female. Males were the emissaries between hostile tribes.

  The female was tall and fairskinned, lithe and willowy; her hair was combed and knotted neatly in the back; her skin was scrubbed, and the crudely-woven dress she wore was immaculate.

  She walked up the hard-surfaced street, keeping equidistant from the log houses on either side. She stopped once and spoke; the colonist, not understanding her words, gestured her on.

  Matuska left his window and hurried to the central doorway.

  She stood before him, erect, breathing easily, her head coming scarcely to his shoulder. “You are the one who comes to the burials?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have come for some clothing material,” she said.

  “Why did you abandon the cities?”

  “I have come for some clothing material,” she repeated.

  “Why . . .?” But he read in her eyes the futility of questions.

  “. . . Come with me,” he said.

  “I will follow you; you know the way.”

  She stood aside for him. She followed close behind him as he led her down the main street of the compound to the community warehouse.

  She showed no flicker of surprise, no twitch of envy, as she surveyed shelf upon shelf of clean-smelling merchandise. Without breaking stride, she went to the nearest counter, picked up a packet of brightly-colored plastic yardage and nodded curtly. “This will do,” she said, hugging it to her body. She moved quickly toward the door.