“¿Sacred to you?” the Byzantine inquired. “It makes years that you do not—Anyway, people no longer live in that valley. And I also no longer have a time machine.”
“What happened to the people?” my friend asked.
“The railroad never came. Those who stayed were bought out or foreclosed by the Territorial Government when it was decided to let the country go back to fish and game.”
I suppose I should have kept in better touch with my native soil, but . . .
“You were an infant when your parents made a precipitate decision to leave,” the Byzantine said. “In those days they called you Jim.”
My mad friend gave me an odd look. “Born here? Never knew that.”
“It’s why we’re here now,” I explained. “As long as we had to disappear for a while I thought we might go someplace familiar.”
“A precipitate departure?” my friend asked.
I shrugged. “Have you ever seen statistics on cabin fever?”
The Byzantine, my mad friend, and several wives were all staring now. “It’s just the loneliness of these godawful winters,” I continued. “I can vaguely recall Himself and Mother snapping one another’s heads off. Then suddenly we were in town and they lived happily for the next forty years.”
“And they called you Jim?” the Byzantine persisted.
“I’ve been called worse.”
My mad friend turned on the Byzantine. “If it was a fish and game preserve, what were you doing there?”
The Byzantine turned on his fluorescent smile. “Rough fish,” he explained.
My mad friend was puzzled; but this much, at least, I could recall of my wild and wooly origins. “Perch, carp, suckers, anything not all that good to eat.” I could guess the rest. The small man was allowed all the fish he wanted because they were going to spread rotenone. After the poison biodegraded, Fish and Wildlife would restock the lake with naught but the most succulent of trout and grayling: an urbane and well-paved path back to nature. “But what freaks you about Jim?”
“Nothing,” the Byzantine said. “Despite forebodings, my dog and I passed a quiet night. It was not until next morning that I discovered slime tracks again. This time the windshield had a semicircular trace with a dot in the middle.” He scribbled on a cocktail napkin and handed it to me. I studied the drawing.
My mad friend took the napkin. “Jim!”
I stared.
“Arabic letter,” he said. “Pronounced jim unless you’re Bedouin and prefer gim.”
“You’re not Arab,” I told the Byzantine.
He shrugged. “After the Pythagoreans imposed their odd religious concepts onto the Greek alphabet there remained no way to indicate a hard j sound. In my century we had adapted the Arab jim into our koine alphabet.”
“Pythagoreans?” my friend echoed.
“Back when our time stream was still common,” the small man said. “To make their system work, the vowels and the planets had to be equal in number. They changed the eta into a vowel—a totally superfluous epsilon—and forced us to use a reversed apostrophe for an h. To illustrate God’s special favor to Pythagoras, modern Greek must use the equivalent of mt to render the d that was formerly the province of the delta, which has since become a voiced theta—and why one sees that orthographic monstrosity mpar since a beta can still render the v in taverna but not the English b in bar”
“Fascinating,” my mad friend growled. “But it’s still snail tracks.”
“You remember nothing?” the Byzantine asked me.
“I was only two.” But as I said it I was remembering. Couldn’t have understood at the time, I suppose. My memories would be of years later when they endlessly rehashed old arguments. Mother had been obsessed by the thought that something savage lurked just outside the cabin door waiting to devour me. Considering the cougar population, there was nothing paranoid in this notion.
“It remembered you,” the Byzantine said.
Un frisson. Yet, it seemed now that I had always known something about the old place that my parents had not understood. At two I had been adamant about not wanting to leave. Nor have I ever really been at home anywhere else. My mother thought I spent too much time among Indians. My father, who spoke no German, insisted that I had absorbed some strange Weltanschauung that saw nature as Gestalt instead of the sum of its parts.
“This snail is intelligent?” my friend asked.
“Rather more than we,” the Byzantine assured him. “And it was not a snail. The organism was amorphous, coherent only in an amoebalike way—as Visible as a rope of eggwhite in water.”
“And did this creature communicate by Urim and ThumminT “The casting of divine lots requires hands,” the Byzantine said. “It took me days to still primordial terrors and understand this thing meant me no ill—wished only to communicate.”
“It had ears?” This was the first time my mad friend had really emerged from himself since that damned helicopter.
The Byzantine waggled his finger. “Nor was it a telepath. It could see certain images on the surface of my mind; but despite centuries in that lake awaiting rescue, it was only partially able to bridge an interspecies cultural gap.”
While I wondered what in hell the Byzantine was talking about, my mad friend was a quantum jump ahead. “Do you—did you—will you use question marks in 25th-century koine punctuation?”
The Byzantine waggled his finger again. “Greek had evolved until declarative and interrogative forms were obvious without punctuation.”
This, at least, I could understand. Question marks are really unnecessary in English, whereas in most Romance tongues the identical phrasing of question and answer really demands an advance l as well as the terminal? to warn the reader. What I could still not understand was what we were doing on the edge of the Arctic talking about monsters on the old homestead.
“So that Arabic jim dredged from your eidetic system was a question,” my mad friend concluded. “It thought you were a mature Jim returned home.” Studying me, he added, “ ’Twould help explain a mental set always thirty degrees out of plumb with local gravity.”
“All the world is odd save me and thee,” a wife quoted.
The Byzantine had been drinking steadily, but he was not half seas over. Totally coherent, he continued, “Once I learned to visualize my remarks in writing it was easier.”
“He could make pages of printout appear in your mind?”
“He?” a wife asked.
“Saints preserve us from the libbers,” my friend growled. Several wives returned to their discussion of the ecological implications of fake fur.
“Probably ‘she’,” the Byzantine said. “Her body must have covered the whole lake bottom. Her answers were written on the water—glutinous phrases changing as fast as I could read. She offered anything for help to get off planet.”
“So now we don’t even have to invent our own fantastic new weapons.” I did not find the prospect cheering.
“Should have asked her how to get your time machine plugged back in,” my friend said.
The Byzantine regarded us with the terrifying expression of someone washed in the blood of the lamb and born again. “It was an intelligence far beyond ours,” he declaimed.
I sighed. The Byzantine had been dropping in and out of our lives for a generation. It is always sad to see an old friend come apart.
“Once aerodynamics demonstrated the fallacy of wings in vacuo saucers replaced angels,” my mad friend said.
The Byzantine nodded vigorously. “One must remember that angelos is just the Greek for messenger, and hence evangel for good news or gospel or—”
“So you’re copping out and laying all the blame on some dispatch rider from the Supreme Indifference?” I asked. My friend made a ritual gesture of exorcism and picked up his coffee. It was cold. Then abruptly the room was cold once more as the Mountie reappeared and strode toward our table. This time he addressed himself to my mad friend and me. “Sorry,” he said in En
glish. “I had you confused with somebody else.”
Which meant he had bounced a few inquiries off a comsat and gotten the official Ottawese to lay off. A wife exchanged a quiet smile with an Indian across the room. “You understand, of course,” I said, “that I must still write my report.”
“I understand you perfectly, sir,” the Mountie said. “May I offer you all a ride?”
My mad friend gave him a sharp glance and decided the offer was less sinister than it sounded. The Byzantine was already slipping into a coat. “You must see it,” he insisted. “It’s only—”
“I know how many miles it is,” I said. We had been cooling our heels in this tiny town for over a week, and for some reason I had not yet drummed up the gumption to rent a 4-wheel and go look at this remnant of my past. “Who’s laying on transportation?”
“Fish and Game,” the Byzantine explained. “Now that it’s thawed they’re heading out to restock the lake. There’s plenty of room on the truck.”
“Truck?” a wife inquired with mounting horror.
“More like a bus, actually,” the Mountie said. From his sudden affability I decided we still retained some clout in spite of crashed choppers and other unpleasantnesses. The Mountie struggled not to ruffle the visiting dignitaries no matter how Indian. Someone had sent him a rocket which we could employ in behalf of the locals. “Really, it’s quite comfortable,” he assured our wives. “And wouldn’t you like to see where your husband first entered the world?”
While wives digested this I digested the Mountie’s detailed knowledge.
Once away from the licensed premises, the heated bus was comfortable enough. It also gave my mad friend time to digest the Byzantine’s story. “First contacts fall into one of two categories,” he observed. “Either the monsters devour us without cavil or condiment—or one retreats into the prelogic of fairy tales and three wishes. What did the monster offer you?”
“Look who’s turning into a critic,” I growled.
But the Byzantine’s reply did not fit my mad friend’s schema. As the bus bounced over frost-hardened ruts he said, “No deal.”
“Didn’t even offer to lay the whole world at your feet?” my mad friend asked disappointedly.
“The alien could not read thoughts or transmit its own to me,” the small man said. “It could only see clearly visualized images in my mind. It took me days to understand that words and phrases on the lake surface were not answers—only reflections from the surface of my own mind. It was even longer before the thing understood that I am not Jim.”
My mad friend muttered something about The Importance of Being Earnest.
Having written a little SF, it has always been part of my job to speculate on what an alien’s prime concern might be. Surely not ‘take me to your leader’ or ‘Dr. Livingstone?’ It had never occurred to me that a visitor from another star might be concerned primarily in distinguishing between myself and a small dark man whose life continually intersects mine.
“People actually lived in this country?” a wife demanded as we bounced from one boulder to the next.
I ignored the remark.
“One day I closed my eyes and concentrated on the image of myself writing who are you and where from?” the Byzantine continued.
“After that we began to communicate.”
“What annoys me about this plot,” my mad friend said, “is the assumption that man was too stupid to work things out for himself—that civilization was handed to him by some creature totally beyond the bounds of Theology and Free Will.”
There are occasions when I agree with my friend. “Especially,” I added, “since all the truly important discoveries were made before the invention of writing.”
“Save perhaps stirrups and the horsecollar,” my friend amended.
Wives were looking at us with that expression saved for husbands who are being especially obtuse.
“How many species of animal have been domesticated lately?” I explained.
“But the thing at the bottom of the lake did offer information?” My friend addressed the Byzantine. “In exchange for what?”
The small man shrugged. “It would be centuries before Earth could offer a ship of sufficient size. She asked to be left in peace.”
“Aha! Non-proliferation treaties,” my friend said. I caught a single sharp glance in the mirror from the blue-uniformed man who drove. If the Mountie was listening he was being professional about it.
“I suppose in return for no more nuclear reactors and not burning any more coal or petroleum or damming any more rivers to stop the flow of sand to the beaches we were going to be handed a cheap, pollution-free source of unlimited energy?”
“We have it.” The Byzantine glanced upward where the sun contended with clouds. “The thing in the lake offered the technology. Also—” Hours of drinking were finally catching up with the small man. His speech was slurring deeper into Sephardic dialect where every ess becomes an esh. “If only someone had listened,” he complained. “It was too complex for me. If there had been engineers to evaluate and record . . .”
“How many other fates did it save us from?” my mad friend asked.
“Everything,” the Byzantine mourned. “It came from an older place. War, overpopulation, pollution—all the unhappinesses and injustices had solutions.”
“Final solutions?” my mad friend grunted.
But the Byzantine was insistent. “Simple ways to keep population below food production. Nobody had to die. All the suffering could have ended.”
“Could have?” The little man was so intense I began to wonder if there might actually be something out there in the lake. My mother had certainly thought so.
The small man extracted a flask from his coat pocket and drank deeply. He put his face into the crook of his arm and it was a moment before I saw he was weeping. “Look,” I consoled. “All is not lost. We’re going out with you to look, aren’t we?”
My mad friend touched my arm and shook his head. While wives dithered over the unstrung Byzantine I looked a question. “Have you forgotten why we’re going out to restock the lake?” my friend asked.
“What difference could a few fish make to something that size?” And then I remembered the rotenone. So they had been poisoning the fish—as well as anything else that lived in the lake. If the Byzantine’s BEM had ever existed, it most assuredly didn’t now.
“Why’d you leave?” I asked. “If you were that sure you might’ve gotten your pet to put on a show and convince the poisoners.”
“Cold,” the small man blubbered. “My dog and I could no longer live in the camper. As the lake began freezing our savior began to slow down too. We were to resume in the spring.”
My mad friend and I looked at each other. Either the Byzantine had finally drunk himself round the bend or we must accept the alternative—that there really had been something out there, that humanity had screwed up its last best hope. Esau sold out for a mess of pottage. What was Fish and Game getting for a mess of cutthroat trout?
The bus cum fish tank was grinding gears over this memory of a road, creating enough noise to make it doubtful whether the driver and mountie had overheard us. I guessed it no longer made any difference. We were subdued when the truck reached the end of the trail and, after careful maneuvers over soft ground, backed around to dump a cascade of fingerling trout into the lake.
I wandered about trying to remember the place. There were faint hints of where the cabin had been, but there was no nostalgia in the second-hand recollections of my parents.
“Wishful thinking,” my mad friend was muttering. “All in mortal peril and we’ve forgotten how to pray.”
Coming from him, this was a damaging admission. I turned from his despair to watch the last fingerlings slip and flip down the chute from tank to lake. Despite springtime it seemed a drearily hopeless end to a day. Poor Byzantine. Poor humanity.
“¡Mira!” a wife shrieked. From her volume it had to be at least a bear. But s
he was pointing at the lake. The Byzantine turned and then everybody was looking as the newly stocked fingerlings swam in formation. Their numbers were spelling out JIM.
1990
Strong Blood
It was during that time of year when wise folk stay in camp and slurp pemmican soup, which can be tasty if the women who pound the dried meat and suet are fortunate enough to find a stand of wild onions. Otherwise, the concentration of fat and protein with barely enough berries to stave off scurvy is nourishing, but with about as much gustatory appeal as wet cardboard.
Ten-year-old Jer6me wished he was in winter camp somewhere enjoying unlimited pemmican but instead, he squatted, incompletely sheltered from the mild but biting wind by a single ‘lope hide at his back. The primary was too low and the gas giant too occulted. Defying the faint breeze, an ice mist lay tenaciously over the real ice.
An hour ago the boy had heard the feint, hair-raising howls of a tas-wolf pack on the prowl. But they must have gone the other way for he had heard nothing since. The cold was so severe that he was forced every few minutes to poke his spear down through the yard-thick ice to keep the hole open. He had done this enough times to eradicate the last whiff of blood from his spear, which probably accounted for the tas-wolves’ lack of interest. The boy was about to clear ice again when he felt a tug on the line.
He held his breath, praying this one would hook itself instead of just stealing bait. The fish nibbled and played with the bait, seemed to reject it, and finally bit. Jerome gave a jerk and knew he had it. Hauling hastily, he had the fish halfway up the hole when it jammed against the unbroken ice. From the bony, spearshaped head he knew it was a jack. Not the best eating but the boy was in no position to quibble. Holding the line with one hand, he struggled to chip fresh frozen ice and enlarge the hole with the other.
At first the fish struggled but by the time he had cleared the hole it had frozen into an awkward half moon straining shape that forced him to chip the hole even wider. Finally the foot-long jack lay beside him on the windswept ice, tentacles frozen in mid-writhe like some narcissistic Medusa. Jerome studied the brighter portion of the sky where Cat’s Eye struggled vainly to punch through the mist and knew it would turn colder in another hour. He tossed the fish into his sack along with the other two and began trudging back to camp.
Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 30