Collected Fiction

by Kris Neville

  The full, blinding light of insight came early in February; it dissolved all things into perspective.

  Throughout his association with the natives he had come to take for granted the absolute degree to which they could be trusted. They were careful never to take unacknowledged payment for their work unless he were present.

  He had therefore been surprised to see the jacket missing from his closet. Kinny had never taken anything but objects of aesthetic appeal. And since, just the day before, he had taken a vase (to brood over it, unknown to Matuska, by the dying fire until chill and lateness drove him to the robes and sleep), it was unlikely that he had also taken the jacket.

  Matuska discovered the jacket was missing as he dressed for the hunt. Shrugging, he put on the less warm one.

  “Your other jacket?” Kinny asked.

  “. . . it is not here.”

  Kinny’s lips tightened . . .

  That evening, after he had rested from the exertion of the day, Matuska went out to inspect again the ruins lying under the new-fallen snow. It was a clear, moonlight night. Beyond the forest, there was a splash of small animal-tracks where once cars had moved, and natives walked proud with power and civilization. A lonesome owl called throatily, to send field-mice scampering.

  Looking at the past lying before him, Matuska wanted to erect some eternal monument to deny impermanence. But he knew how impossible that would be. The sun itself would fade; all before him would vanish. There was nothing in the universe but defeat and irony. The cities of even his own race would grow cold and dead and crumble. As would all works all dreams, everything . . .

  He stood motionless for a long time in the frosty air. He turned away at last and skirted the native cemetery—still ageless and timeless, but as impermanent in the cosmic scale as snow is in sunlight. Beyond it he could see the sparkle of lights in the colony and hear (if he ceased walking: his feet made brittle crunches breaking through the frozen crust) if he listened closely, the hum and throb of the generator within the central compound.

  IT WAS early February, 2991 now, and Matuska’s last winter here. Limb-shattered moonlight lay across the snow.

  Panting thinly, he stood on the slight rise and looked down at the native village, monochromatic and lifeless with sleep. After long minutes he noticed the iron dark drops in the snow, almost at his feet. They trailed to the right, complimenting a set of shuffling tracks that came up from below.

  Skin prickling with dread, his eyes resting on them with terrible fascination, he followed the drops until he came to a female, naked, frozen, huddled in the snow, her body a mass of savage welts that could only have been administered by a community lashing. Her face was pillowed sleepily against her arm, and snow glistened in her stiff black hair. Why, the colonist thought in horror, it is the one who came to the compound just yesterday; I gave her a blue and orange blanket from the warehouse . . . Heartsick, he turned away.

  Tears formed in his eyes. He shuddered to think that this was the ultimate consequence of the knowledge he shared with the natives: savagery. He wanted to wring his hands in agony.

  It seemed to him then—and this was his insight—that even the self-delusion of building was preferable. Truth was not as important as falsehood; ignorance was a shield against suicide. He suddenly hoped that his own race would never discover the pathetic futility of erecting walls against the long night of eternity. He wanted to cry out: Never leave the cities! There is a love and a goodness in them! Because of that, they are worth while! Because of what they prevent, they are worth while! You must never leave them! Hear me! Hear me! You must never . . .

  The next morning, Kinny returned the jacket. “I have no use for it. You may have it back.”

  Matuska’s hand trembled.

  “We do not want to take too much,” Kinny said. “We must see that you retain enough for your own needs.”

  “I saw a dead female in the forest last night,” Matuska said softly.

  Kinny’s eyes did not meet his. “She was accused of stealing from her neighbor.” He hesitated. “There are some things we must not steal . . .” He shuffled his feet. “Her whole family should have received the same,” he said defiantly.

  Matuska said nothing. He went to the window, opened it, and breathed the clean air that seemed to promise spring.

  SPRING came early.

  Out in the new air, Kinny hopping slightly to his rear, Matuska asked gently, “The rest do not approve of you talking to me. Why are you all so distant from us?”

  Swaggering with warmth and vitality, Kinny seemed not to hear.

  “Your people cannot control a male like they can the females, isn’t that right? Isn’t that why they don’t like for you to come? They’re afraid that, if you work for us, you may accidentally reveal the secret.” He felt a lump rise in his throat. “You don’t want to see it destroy our cities, too. You . . .” Kinny broke stride. “I do not work for you,” he slid. He walked a few steps in silence, bent for a rock, sent it whirling away in a long arc, waited for it to ricochet from the tree-trunk. “I do not work for you . . . You are very useful, and yet it is all so . . . so difficult . . .”

  “What do you? mean?”

  Kinny turned away from him then: not in anger, merely no longer wishing to be bothered with questions. “I do as I please,” he called back to the colonist. He walked proudly, defiantly, master of the planet: that was the important thing.

  Matuska felt a lump continue to tighten in his throat.

  l

  He felt drawn to the ruins. He went as often as he could. He dug just beyond the first broad cross street in the foundation of a forgotten building. He uncovered a queer piece of electrical equipment. He could not understand its function. He cleaned it until it shined and placed it on his table. He pointed it out to Kinny, and waved his hands, and tried to explain how he felt.

  “They made many useless things long ago,” Kinny said. “We do not bother with them any more.”

  “Don’t you see . . . I understand,” Matuska protested. “It’s not necessary to pretend. I know; I understand why you left the cities. You can talk freely to me.” It seemed to Matuska that he had lived with the horrible knowledge for so long that he was the father of it. He felt a great love for the natives, and a great desire to undo the disaster that the knowledge (and he himself, indirectly and unwittingly) had caused. And strangely he was no longer alone.

  “You must listen, Kinny. We’re all wrong. Not wrong. I mean . . .” Words struggled to rise. He had to convey not only the idea but all the undercurrents of it. He had to convey his emotions. “You’ve got to regain your faith in the cities. Turn away from truth; stop looking at its hideous face. Stop it, stop it. Reality doesn’t matter; it’s the dream and the delusion that matters . . . You’ve got to understand this, Kinny.”

  “There’s nothing to understand,” Kinny said.

  “Listen, listen, listen . . . I’ve got to make you believe this. Before I leave.

  I’m going to leave very soon now. You’ve got to find meaning again. There’s so little time left; that’s the . . .”

  Kinny suddenly appeared agitated. “You are going to leave?”

  “Yes. I’ve got to leave, now that my work is done. I have so little time left.

  And Kinny, as if some hidden barrier were suddenly lowered—some unvocalized, even unadmitted necessity removed—went to the colonist and began to pat his head and caress his skin and.croon softly to him in rhythmic, non-sense syllables.

  Matuska was motionless with uncomprehending amazement.

  And the native voice from the doorway came with sharp disapproval: “We should not become fond of them. You should go away now.”

  Kinney jumped back and whirled guiltily. Matuska, waiting with his heart in his throat, breathed almost soundleassly.

  Kinny turned back to the colonist. “I do as I please.” He touched the colonist’s head. “This one is going away.”

  As if the emotions he was showing might entail
some abhorrent obligation, the female said, “One must watch one’s feeling. The Chieftain will not like it.”

  And then, for a moment, they both seemed puzzled. Something had been put into words, some moral commitment expressed, that they knew to be correct; but they could not understand the reason for dreading. They knew that the Chieftain would disapprove equally of Kinny’s conduct, without knowing any more than themselves whence his disapproval arose.

  “It is natural,” Kinny said belligerently, stroking Matuska’s shoulder. “Let me alone.”

  MATUSKA saw him only twice more. Once alive—the next day, the day preceeding the native hunt—and once dead at the cemetery.

  The day after the hunt, Matuska awakened to the cymbals at dawn. Ha lay listening on the brink of sleep until he was roused by the loud rattling at his door. He arose to answer it.

  A strange native was standing fearlessly in the dim, morning-cool corridor. His face was infinitely weary. And he stepped uninvited across the threshold as if across the barrier between life and death.

  “Kinny was killed in the hunt.”

  Shocked by the sudden impact of sickness and sorrow, Matuska moved his lips soundlessly.

  “Come,” the native said sternly.

  Matuska’s mind hummed dully with disbelief. There was the sense of unreality that always crowds upon the knowledge of final, personal loss. It was impossible that Kinny’s awkward arms were stilled; they had been so alive and active. “I will come immediately.”

  Sad, trembling now, his face wrinkled, almost crying, the native said, “Hurry. We are waiting to bury him.” The voice was unsteady. With sudden shame, he squared his shoulders as the master of the planet should.

  And drawing his wrap around him, still in his night robe, Matuska prepared to leave. Grief and bitterness and defeat filled him. The gravity clawed at him with lifeless fingers. He tried to tell himself that even with Kinny dead, even in the few remaining weeks he had left on the planet, he could still somehow convince the natives to return to their cities.

  Matuska unarmed and unsuspecting, preceeded the native down the corridor to the funeral-dirge of cymbals, heard from the direction of the cemetery, like the far-off, brassy throbbing of a giant heart.

  WORSHIP NIGHT

  That versatile and ever unpredictable man, Kris Neville, has written just about every type of science-fantasy that you can name; but one kind he has made distinctively his own: the subtle, small-scale, underplayed story of human personality as it is revealed by the stresses of the future. The many readers who have acclaimed Old Man Henderson and Bettyann as true specimens of future “quality” fiction will find the same intimate sensitivity in this moving study of a social historian poised in tragic loneliness between two cultures a galaxy apart.

  LOOKING DOWN at the desk, Wilma ran a wrinkled hand over the wood, feeling the texture of it. “How was work this morning?”

  “Fine.”

  Without turning to him, she said, “It’s been nice this morning. There was a breeze coming in from the swamp.”

  “It was nice down at the office, too.”

  “Well,” she said, “I guess you may as well phone for the trans.”

  George walked to the phone. With one hand resting on it, he paused. “I thought maybe the air was a little stale.”

  Facing him, leaning against the desk, she said, “I guess it was a little stale. The swamp is burbling again. That makes it smell stale.”

  “You get so you don’t mind, though.” His hand was still on the phone. “You hardly notice it.”

  “You come to expect it.”

  “Remember how you used to hate the kia birds?”

  Rubbing her hand behind her on the desk, she turned her attention to the window. “They don’t scream as loud as they used to. The one on the roof top over there, he’s been sitting all morning without once crying.”

  “Well, I better phone for the trans.”

  “All right, we’re ready, I guess.”

  He pressed the button for the direct circuit to the lobby. “This is George. We’re ready to leave now.” He replaced the instrument.

  “The bags are over there,” she said. “I sent the rest of the things on this morning.”

  He looked in the direction of her gesture.

  “Your papers. I thought we should keep them with us. I sent everything else.”

  He crossed to her side. “We’re ready, aren’t we?”

  Wilma looked steadily at the divan. “There’s a very worn place on the left arm. You used to sit on that side all the time.”

  He nodded, watching her.

  “The sunset,” she said, “always fell across our swinging mirror. If you stamped your foot to shake it, the light would swing in a half arc across the ceiling: from that corner to that little crack.”

  He went to the bags. His old body bent under their weight. “You never know how heavy the papers you’ve been saving are.” He turned wearily toward the door. “The trans ought to be there by now.”

  “I’m ready.” She looked once more around the room. Then suddenly she said, “I’ve forgotten something. Go on, I’ll get it.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  “It’s right here.” She moved toward the bed room. “A packet of cjei,” she called gayly. “It’s Worship Night.”

  “I’d forgotten.”

  He had put down the bags. “I just noticed that stain over there, Wilma. The ink stain I made, remember? I wonder if they’ll be able to take it off after we’ve gone?”

  “I could never get it off.”

  Awkwardly they stood staring at each other.

  “I left some bread on the sill for the kia birds again,” she said. “I suppose they’ll come over, when we leave. They always wait until I’m not watching.”

  “I guess we better go.”

  “You’ll have your hands full. I’ll get the door.” She brushed past him, touching his sleeve lightly with her hand. She opened the door inward. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Watson.”

  “Why! You startled me! George, it’s Igi!”

  “Good afternoon, Igi.”

  “Good afternoon, sir.” Igi peered down at George with his great, gentle, nearsighted eyes. “I came to wish you goodby, sir.”

  “That’s very kind of you.” George put down the two bags, looked up, and cleared his throat.

  Igi looked beyond them into the vacant rooms. “It will seem strange to have someone else living here.”

  “You come visit us often, Igi,” Wilma said.

  “That’s very kind of you, ma’am.” He remained motionless.

  “Well, thank you, thank you very much.” George extended his hand. “And you be sure to come like Wilma said.”

  Igi took the hand firmly. “Goodby, sir.”

  “Goodby.”

  “Take care of yourselves, both of you.”

  “We will,” Wilma said.

  George bent for the bags.

  “Please,” Igi said, reaching down.

  “No.” George laid a restraining hand on Igi’s wrist. “I couldn’t let the manager carry my bags.”

  “Of course I will, sir,” Igi said firmly.

  In the elevator going to the roof, the operator said, “Goodby, Mrs. Watson. Goodby, Mr. Watson. All of us here will miss you.”

  “Goodby,” said the cook, waiting on the roof.

  “Goodby,” said the off-duty clerk.

  “Fly carefully,” said Igi to the transpilot.

  In the trans, they stared out at the city, rapidly spinning away like unreeling yarn.

  “I’ll miss it,” he said, blinking.

  They were over the old, precolonial section: the small houses, the unpaved streets, the ageless, antecommercial quiet. Back lay the new keji factories, the space port, the tall, colonial style hotel, the huge, functional tower of Colonial Administration. The new city towered in the sunlight, sparkled at plastic windows, square, blunt, and sightless.

  “I suppose I’ll miss the job,” he said.
“I’d thought, I’d expected, some of them would have come down to see us off. After twenty years, I’d sort of expected something like that.”

  “We’ll soon have new friends in Jeuni.” Wilma reached across for his hand; she let hers rest lightly over his. “Like Igi and the hotel staff.”

  “I guess they’re saying we’ve gone native,” he said. “It’s not fair to you, Wilma. To make you come away like this. It’s not fair to have to uproot you like this.”

  “Nonsense, don’t talk like that.”

  From the space port a gleaming cargo ship struggled skyward, slowly, heavily at first, gradually accelerating in flame until it became a blur, a streak, a point; and at last only a smoky tracer fluttering uncertainly in the air, collapsing.

  “I shouldn’t have bought the house. We should have used the money to go back to Earth,” George said. “They all thought I was crazy not to take the chair in history they offered me back there.”

  “Don’t, don’t,” she said quietly.

  “Well, that’s past, Wilma. That’s over, now. We’re cut off from them for good, I guess. They didn’t even come down to tell us goodby.”

  They were over the eternal swamp, burbling its gases. Below, pontooned up, the movable road wound like a tattered ribbon toward the work camp; and in the sunlight they saw a group of natives, tiny specks, chopping down the straight, slender keji, and on the road ribbon a long car, loaded with cut logs, headed toward the factories in the city.

  “You have many things to write about,” Wilma said. “Let’s think about that. Let’s think about the future. The past is dead, it doesn’t matter, we’re not a part of it any more.”

  “Yes,” he said, staring down at the camp smoke. “That’s right. We have to live in the future.”