Collected Fiction

by Kris Neville

  Listen, though, you get smart. You just try not to. They have this special book. Sometimes, though, it’s not the book: it’s like at the drawer, just now. They’re not malicious, just dumb, some of the time.

  The damned awful things they do in this book conspiracy, though. The time I had with toilet training; they were going to flush me down the toilet. I thought they would. I really believe they would have. I was scared shitless. But something went wrong, lucky for me, and they didn’t, after all. I ought to be grateful to them, I guess, I’m still here. I still don’t know why they didn’t. They were going to.

  There were worse things. The tricks they play on me at night. You wouldn’t believe them. I once got so I couldn’t sleep at all, just waiting in the night. I had to sleep in the daytime. It’s better now. I get more sleep. I asked the other kids at playground; we talk. We make just a few words mean a lot. We know more words than we can use right, so what words we have have to work hard for us. Their parents have special books too.

  I’m always afraid they’ll do something to my penis. I break out in a sweat when I think about that. That’s why I’m so damned afraid at night. One of the reasons.

  I used to try to make friends with them, before I got so old. I tried to go get in bed with them, once. They’d fixed up this alarm system; or it came with the book or was part of this course the mailman brings, I think. Oh, it went off with all sorts of sounds and lights flashing and weird feelings. There I was, trapped, exposed alone on the floor, halfway to their bed, and I just peed all over the carpet.

  “Oh, Christ! It’s two o’clock in the morning!” That’s what he said. Here I was, as scared as anything, standing there, blinking my eyes, and he makes a stupid statement like that.

  “Make him feel guilty,” she said. “That’s what the book says.”

  “You’re a filthy shit!” he screamed at me.

  I guess I am. There must be some reason they want to cut my penis off. I heard them say, once, that all your real education takes place before you’re four years old: by then your character is established. I think maybe I’ll make it. It’s still such a long ways off, so long, so long. But maybe I really will make it, even if I’m a nervous wreck.

  So I don’t feel so good about myself. It could be worse.

  There is a place called India. You see it on the newscasts. I was afraid they’d send me there. I don’t know why I thought that, but I did. It kept me awake too. I went hungry one day, wouldn’t eat at all, just to see if I could take it. I couldn’t. They can’t either. They die. Several million are starving to death right now. I don’t know exactly how many that is. It’s more than ten.

  But apparently they never intended to send me to India.

  Or China.

  Or a place called South America.

  And people don’t starve to death where I live. Except in the slums, and that’s different. Whatever the slums are. So at least I’m spared that. It could be worse.

  On the newscasts, you see big machines making big piles of people and pee-peeing on them and burning them up. “Why they burn those people, Momma?”

  “Hush! It’s too awful. They breed like flies and they can’t feed themselves.”

  How do flies breed? What she mean by that? But I think they should let me watch: just to be sure they don’t breed like flies do, however that is, so they can continue to feed themselves. I would feed them, though, if it really came to that. I wonder about the Indian children, sometimes. Nobody ever mentions them. Maybe there aren’t any.

  Flies all fits in, somehow, but it’s not too clear to me. Last summer there was really this fly thing. Momma said it was because they couldn’t burn people fast enough, and there was a world-wide plague, and I remember how scared they were that we couldn’t keep it out. The time everybody had killing flies! It was all over the newscasts.

  It went on until it got monotonous. In fact, most newscasts aren’t very interesting after a while. They keep changing the places, but there’s still this big machine pushing up piles of people and setting them on fire. I like the ones on our space program better. We have a colony on Mars.

  We have to have.

  For some reasons.

  Most people go out every day, all the Poppas, and cheer for this program. I’ve never seen them do it, but I guess it’s like a football game. It’s called work. They pay him money for it that Momma writes checks on to pay for credit cards with. They must know what they’re doing.

  I’m coming along in figuring them out. Every once in a while I think I have it.

  I think they have a machine somewhere that makes time, or maybe a press that prints it like a book. They never mention this. Maybe I have to learn how they make electricity, first. They say I’m going to start learning about things like that pretty soon.

  And you really have to try to figure the big bastards out. Don’t ask me why. You do. You can’t do anything about them. They’re still going to batter you around. Shaping the personality, it’s called. But you have to keep trying, keep hoping. Every once in a great while you can get a conversation going with them. Usually about candy, unfortunately. You learn to like candy, though, and I guess that’s something. Sometimes I think it’s the most important thing in the whole world.

  But if they’d just stop and think every once in a while. If they’d just slow down and talk to you, it might be better. But they don’t stop to think. They’re always rushing. I give an example. I start up some of the electronic equipment in the basement. We got this electronic dirt remover. I put my bedclothes in it. Sheets, blanket, pillow. Don’t you think that wasn’t a job! Down two windy flights of stairs with them. Dropping them, picking them up, trying not to make any noise. House quiet. Real early. Everybody asleep.

  Off she goes! Beautiful!

  It don’t stop, though. Like it does for Momma. I hear the bedclothes being torn up. Rip, rip-rip, rip. I better go tell them.

  I go into their room. They are still asleep. I tiptoe toward Momma. She maybe won’t take it as bad as Poppa.

  Bam! I walk into this stupid new fly screen they have on and I forgot about. It shakes hell out of me, and I start to cry. Poppa sets up and screams, “You filthy shit!”

  “What time is it?” asks Momma.

  I don’t understand about all this time thing, but I tell her about the bedclothes.

  “My God!”

  Stark naked, both of them, down the stairs. They get in each other’s way.

  I trail after. It’s a lot of work, a little boy going down big stairs, trying to hurry. You have to be careful not to fall.

  Poppa got it turned off. “That was close. It could have blown up half the house.”

  “You filthy shit!” Momma screams at me.

  “Shut up, Hazel, this is serious. The kid could have killed himself.”

  I got a long lecture, right there, on how dangerous modern devices are. I wanted them to show me how to operate it right, so I wouldn’t do it wrong again. But they were too dumb to do that. No, just leave it alone! How can I learn if they won’t ever let me do anything? Why did they think I brought the bedclothes down in the first place?

  Momma says, “First we got to give you a personality—we got to fix it so you can grow up to be the kind of man you want to be. Then, after that, you start going to school to learn things. When you get to be four years old, you start to school to learn things. You’re only three and a half!”

  Do you know how long you’re three and a half? You’re three and a half forever. There isn’t any time at all. Something has gone wrong with their press, and they don’t know it.

  “What kind of man I want to be?”

  “The country needs scientists,” Poppa said. “We take a course from the government called: How to Make Scientists. How to shape personalities who want to understand how things work—who always have to figure things out, who aren’t happy unless they’re figuring things out. It’s a good personality. Don’t go on fiddling with this electronic gear any more or you’ll
get killed.”

  So that’s what I’m going to be, a scientist. I don’t know what the other choices were, but I guess it’s too late anyhow. They might have been worse, at least I like to think that. Like going to India.

  We kids at playground, we talk about the big bastards all the time. They used to be like us. Something happened to them that made them forget how to think.

  I guess I will too. I get big, like them, I won’t remember any of this, either. Lots of things I can’t remember, already. There was a time, so long ago I just about can’t remember, when Momma and Poppa loved me. That was in the beginning. But I guess maybe that’s what it said in the book to do, too. It was nicer, then, but I forget so much. So all this I’ll just forget. Because I’m not really me yet. They’re still making me.

  Right now, I think a lot about those people in India, I don’t know why I should. I think it would be sensible to set them down to a table and feed them. I think that would be a good thing to do. But I guess when I get interested in learning how things work I won’t think that way any more. And I guess I’ll just forget all this.

  I’m still standing here, crying, by the open drawer that’s filled with this strange world of things. I’ve finally gotten to her. “What do you want?”

  It’s too late to find out whether there really is candy in there. It always was. She’d never spend all that time to search through there with me. It’s too late to find out what this thing is for which there is no conceivable use. I’ve been crying so long, I feel hurt by it and I can’t stop crying.

  “What do you want?”

  I want to start forgetting. Like what they do to me, sometimes, at night, to shape my personality. You wouldn’t believe how bad I want to forget that. And it’s such a long time more, such a long, long, long time. I don’t know if I can last, sometimes. I’ve got to hurry up and start forgetting. “I want to hurry up and be four years old!”

  THE FOREST OF ZIL

  The forest whispered to itself dwelling on the perfection of its timelessness. And then man the intruder came to shatter the semi-silence—as if anyone, or, anything could touch the inviolability which was Zil!

  1

  ZIL was the first habitable planet found by the earthmen as they swept outward through space from Sol, in ever widening circles, seeking adventure.

  Zil was nothing but a forest, and when the scout ship set down, after a journey of three earth weeks, through at least 100 light years of conventional space-time, it set down on the tree tops rather than the surface. It was as though the whole planet were nothing but one great uniform growth, a green ocean of leaves covering everything.

  The situation defied a botanist of the expedition, McClair: for in the oxygen richness of the air, one would not expect the plants to survive. McClair rode with the first scout ship, and it was his privilege to first sample the breathability of the atmosphere. Prior analysis proved accurate.

  “It’s good air,” he reported, “and I feel fine.”

  Word went immediately to the mothership in orbit: success at last!

  “There’s a breeze, too,” said McClair, “the leaves are all moving and they make the strangest sound, a sort of zil, zil, zil, like that, a whispering.”

  2

  An investigation party, headed by the botanist, was stationed on the planet. The four men chopped away some of the upper branches of what appeared to be several separate trees and built themselves a structure more resembling a raft than a treehouse. They floated there, far above the surface of the planet, while the botanist continued his studies of the alien mono-ecology.

  The forest was a continuing source of wonder to McClair, but he was most bemused by its static quality; for the trees appeared nowhere within the circle of his limited exploration through the intertwined branches to bear fruit or show other means of reproducing themselves. All were of an identical species.

  The leaves, broad, green, glossy in the sunlight as though waxed, were no direct counterpart of the; leaves of earth trees, and yet, there were more similarities than differences. They contained, for example, material positively identified by chemical analysis on the mothership as chlorophyll.

  In the atmosphere, storms came and went, and humidity varied while the oxygen content hung at a constant 30 per cent, with nitrogen contributing most of the remainder: no detectible carbon dioxide. It was as though, long ago, the carbon dioxide had been used up and now the forest was locked immobile in time. McClair could fill several notebooks with anomalies, but the solution of them defied him.

  By the third day, they had penetrated down to the lower branches. At last, Johnson caught the first glimpse of the surface, and he called back: “Dirt, as far as I can see. Nothing but dirt.” The three other men joined him. The branches terminated some twenty feet from the surface, and they all peered down through the speckled gloom. “Want to drop down?”

  The last descent was accomplished with a rope, and when Johnson found solid footing and the rope went slack, he called up, “Seems safe enough, come on down!”

  McClair followed, with Carlson behind him. The fourth man, Reading, remained on the lower branch as an observer.

  McClair had expected an endless carpet of dead leaves, but if leaves had fallen, the continuous organic processes had long ago removed them. He bent to the slightly moist earth for a soil sample, and then looked up. Far above, the spreading branches, gently moving, rustling, zil, zil, zil, and for a moment, he was inexplicably overcome with a superstitious fear.

  In his immediate view, there were literally hundreds of tree trunks, of varying dimensions, some apparently far older than others. It was as though, with time, the forest had come progressively to dominate the planet, strangling other life forms, until now only the trees remained, total masters of the environment, and they were frozen and timeless.

  Time has a different meaning here, thought McClair.

  He said: “This might be a rich find for archeologists.” He wondered what history might unfold from fossil life hidden in the rich, dark soil.

  “We’re going to have to clear these trees out first,” said Johnson. “With the high oxygen, we, might do it with selective burning, what do you think?”

  McClair, wondering what effect the sudden introduction of new carbon dioxide would have, as a growth promoter, said, “We’re going to have to be pretty damned careful. The whole thing seems so in balance. It might start to collapse, if we interfere.”

  Aside from their voices, and the zil, zil, zil of the leaves, there were no other sounds. “Let’s try that small one over there, first,” said McClair, pointing to one of the trees a good distance away. “I think we can drop it part way at least. It’s far enough away so it won’t be supporting the house.”

  Johnson brought out the laser and studied the tree a moment. “I’ll nick it and then cut.”

  A moment later, the tree toppled, introducing a new sound, tearing upper branches loose, showering the ground with twigs and leaves. It hung at a forty-five degree angle, suspended from supporting branches of its neighbors.

  “See if you can section it,” said McClair. “I want to count the rings.” Saying this, he felt again the irrational and superstitious fear, and he was desperately afraid that all the trees were going to prove of the same age—or agelessness.

  3

  Zil was the first habitable planet found by the earthmen. A thousand balanced terrariums, generations ago, had left Sol, caught in the rigidity of Einsteinian space and time, and now, at last, one had reached a destination where planetary life might once again be possible. The ship itself was weathered by space, and its lifetime could no longer be predicted by its inhabitants: although there was growing fear among them that no time beyond the present, between the stars, remained. It was Zil or disintegration in further transit. So much time had elapsed in the crossing of space that even their language had changed, and the original motivations were lost in antiquity.

  The earthmen sent down an exploratory team, and the reports of
the giant trees and the breathable atmosphere came back. The order went out to investigate the possibility of clearing a site to permit landing all the cargo of the interstellar ship.

  The Captain, this done, turned to his library of ship’s logs with a weary sigh. The library extended backward in time beyond the memory of ancestors, and he felt suddenly kinship with long ago earth, surviving now merely in myth, and he removed from the shelf the very first of the log books, describing in the cold and formal phrases he knew so well, farewell to the planetary system of Sol.

  He stood at the culmination of some vast, racial memory and dream, which promised the eternal continuity of mankind. The first giant step was taken. All was now assured. Generations from now, when the surface of Zil had been cleared, and mankind had established its mastery of this planet, other interstellar ships, perhaps of improved design, would be launched against the long eternity of the universe. He stood facing an endless beginning.

  On the surface, the landing crew felled the first tree.

  The Captain studied the blank pages of the book in his hands, wondering why this empty, yellowing volume had been stored at all. He removed the book that had stood beside it, and it, too, was filled mostly with blank pages except for a few entries at the very end of it. These entries, too, were gone, and he wondered why, reaching for the third early log book, two empty volumes had been so long preserved.

  4

  On earth, Ed Long, sixteen years old, closed a science fiction book, having just read a story of man’s first trip to the moon. The Great Depression had come to trouble affluent America, in the year 1929, but Ed was caught already with dreams of the future in his mind, and he went out into the night air, to look up at the skies, and marvel at the wonders that man would someday, perhaps not in his lifetime, but someday, encounter.

  At length, his mind overflowing with endless and timeless speculations, he returned to his room and the light there, somewhat hungry after the meager evening meal. Time to study. It could not be avoided further. History was his hardest subject, and there was a test tomorrow. He brought out his school book and wondered for a moment before he settled down to the study why it was that the printed pages were so interleaved with blank ones.