A Century of Science Fiction

by Damon Knight

  The storm lasted four days. Helen exhausted her household tasks and sat restlessly thumbing through the few books she knew by heart—they had allowed her to remove all her personal possessions, all the things she had chosen on a forgotten and faraway Earth for a ten-year star cruise. For the first time in years, Helen was thinking again of the life, the civilization she had thrown away, for Robin who had been a pink scrap in the circle of her arm and now lay sullen on the hearth, not speaking, aimlessly whittling a stick with the knife (found discarded in a heap of rubbish from the Starholm) which was his dearest possession. Helen felt slow horror closing in on her. What world, what heritage did I give him, in my madness? This world has driven us both insane. Robin and I are both a little mad, by Earth’s standards. And when I die, and I will die first, what then? At that moment Helen would have given her life to believe in his old dream of strange people in the wood.

  She flung her book restlessly away, and Robin, as if waiting for that signal, sat upright and said almost eagerly, “Helen—”

  Grateful that he had broken the silence of days, she gave him an encouraging smile.

  “I’ve been reading your books,” he began, diffidently, “and I read about the sun you came from. It’s different from this one. Suppose—suppose there were actually a kind of people here, and something in this light, or in your eyes, made them invisible to you.”

  Helen said, “Have you been seeing them again?”

  He flinched at her ironical tone, and she asked, somewhat more gently, “It’s a theory, Robin, but it wouldn’t explain, then, why you see them.”

  “Maybe I’m—more used to this light,” he said gropingly.

  “And anyway, you said you thought you’d seen them and thought it was only a dream.”

  Halfway between exasperation and a deep pity, Helen found herself arguing, “If these other people of yours really exist, why haven’t they made themselves known in sixteen years?”

  The eagerness with which he answered was almost frightening. “I think they only come out at night, they’re what your book calls a primitive civilization.” He spoke the words he had read, but never heard, with an odd hesitation. “They’re not really a civilization at all, I think, they’re like—part of the woods.”

  “A forest people,” Helen mused, impressed in spite of herself, “and nocturnal. It’s always moonlight or dusky when you see them—”

  “Then you do believe me—oh, Helen,” Robin cried, and suddenly found himself pouring out the story of what he had seen, in incoherent words, concluding, “And by daylight I can hear them, but I can’t see them. Helen, Helen, you have to believe it now, you’ll have to let me try to find them and learn to talk to them. . .

  Helen listened with a sinking heart. She knew they should not discuss it now, when five days of enforced housebound proximity had set their nerves and tempers on edge, but some unknown tension hurled her sharp words at Robin. “You saw a woman, and I—a man. These things are only dreams. Do I have to explain more to you?”

  Robin flung his knife sullenly aside. “You’re so blind, so stubborn.”

  “I think you are feverish again.” Helen rose to go.

  He said wrathfully, “You treat me like a child!”

  “Because you act like one, with your fairy tales of women in the wind.”

  Suddenly Robin’s agony overflowed and he caught at her, holding her around the knees, clinging to her as he had not done since he was a small child, his words stumbling and rushing over one another.

  “Helen, Helen darling, don’t be angry with me,” he begged, and caught her in a blind embrace that pulled her off her feet. She had never guessed how strong he was; but he seemed very like a little boy, and she hugged him quickly as he began to cover her face with childish kisses.

  “Don’t cry, Robin, my baby, it’s all right,” she murmured, kneeling close to him. Gradually the wildness of his passionate crying abated; she touched his forehead with her cheek to see if it were heated with fever, and he reached up and held her there. Helen let him lie against her shoulder, feeling that perhaps after the violence of his outburst he would fall asleep, and she was half asleep herself when a sudden shock of realization darted through her; quickly she tried to free herself from Robin’s entangling arms.

  “Robin, let me go.”

  He clung to her, not understanding. “Don’t let go of me, Helen. Darling, stay here beside me,”'he begged, and pressed a kiss into her throat.

  Helen, her blood icing over, realized that unless she freed herself very quickly now, she would be fighting against a strong, aroused young man not clearly aware of what he was doing. She took refuge in the sharp maternal note of ten years ago, almost vanished in the closer, more equal companionship of the time between:

  “No, Robin. Stop it at once, do you hear?”

  Automatically he let her go, and she rolled quickly away, out of his reach, and got to her feet. Robin, too intelligent to be unaware of her anger and too naive to know its cause, suddenly dropped his head and wept, wholly unstrung. “Why are you angry?” he blurted out. “I was only loving you.”

  And at the phrase of the five-year-old child, Helen felt her throat would burst with its ache. She managed to choke out, “I’m not angry, Robin—we’ll talk about this later, I promise,” and then, her own control vanishing, turned and fled precipitately into the pouring rain.

  She plunged through the familiar woods for a long time, in a daze of unthinking misery. She did not even fully realize that she was sobbing and muttering aloud, “No, no, no, no!”

  She must have wandered for several hours. The rain had stopped and the darkness was lifting before she began to grow calmer and to think more clearly.

  She had been blind not to foresee this day when Robin was a child; only if her child had been a daughter could it have been avoided. Or—she was shocked at the hysterical sound of her own laughter—if Colin had stayed and they had raised a family like Adam and Eve!

  But what now? Robin was sixteen; she was not yet forty. Helen caught at vanishing memories of society; taboos so deeply rooted that for Helen they were instinctual and impregnable. Yet for Robin nothing existed except this little patch of forest and Helen herself—the only person in his world, more specifically at the moment the only woman in his world. So much, she thought bitterly, for instinct. But have I the right to begin this all over again? Worse; have I the right to deny its existence and, when I die, leave Robin alone?

  She had stumbled and paused for breath, realizing that she had wandered in circles and that she was at a familiar point on the riverbank which she had avoided for sixteen years. On the heels of this realization she became aware that for only the second time in memory, the winds were wholly stilled.

  Her eyes, swollen with crying, ached as she tried to pierce the gloom of the mist, lilac-tinted with the approaching sunrise, which hung around the water. Through the dispersing mist she made out, dimly, the form of a man.

  He was tall, and his pale skin shone with misty white colors. Helen sat frozen, her mouth open, and for the space of several seconds he looked down at her without moving. His eyes, dark splashes in the pale face, had an air of infinite sadness and compassion, and she thought his lips moved in speech, but she heard only a thin familiar rustle of wind.

  Behind him, mere flickers, she seemed to make out the ghosts of other faces, tips of fingers of invisible hands, eyes, the outline of a woman’s breast, the curve of a child’s foot. For a minute, in Helen’s weary numbed state, all her defenses went down and she thought: Then I'm not mad and it wasn’t a dream and Robin isn’t Reynolds’ son at all. His father was this—one of these—and they’ve been watching me and Robin, Robin has seen them, he doesn’t know he’s one of them, but they know. They know and I’ve kept Robin from them all these sixteen years. '

  The man took two steps toward her, the translucent body shifting to a dozen colors before her blurred eyes. His face had a curious familiarity—familiarity—and in a sudden spasm of t
error Helen thought, “I’m going mad, it’s Robin, it’s Robin!”

  His hand was actually outstretched to touch her when her scream cut icy lashes through the forest, stirring wild echoes in the wind-voices, and she whirled and ran blindly toward the treacherous, crumbling bank. Behind her came steps, a voice, a cry—Robin, the strange dryad-man, she could not guess. The horror of incest, the son the father the lover suddenly melting into one, overwhelmed her reeling brain and she fled insanely to the brink. She felt a masculine hand actually gripping her shoulder, she might have been pulled back even then, but she twisted free blindly, shrieking, “No, Robin, no, no—” and flung herself down the steep bank, to slip and hurl downward and whirl around in the raging current to spinning oblivion and death. . . .

  Many years later, Merrihew, grown old in the Space Service, falsified a log entry to send his ship for a little while into the orbit of the tiny green planet he had named Robin’s World. The old buildings had fallen into rotten timbers, and Merrihew quartered the little world for two months from pole to pole but found nothing. Nothing but shadows and whispers and the unending voices of the wind. Finally, he lifted his ship and went away.

  Katherine MacLean is a fey young woman whose career is curiosity. She is technically trained, and if she had specialized ten or fifteen years ago she would no doubt be the head of a research department today. Instead, she has preferred to follow her own interests wherever they lead her; she writes, drifts around, studies and occasionally takes a laboratory assistant's job to see what's going on. As a science fiction writer she has few peers; her work is not only technically brilliant but has a rare human warmth and richness. (Memo to an editor: No collection of her stories has ever been published.)

  "Unhuman Sacrifice,” first published in Astounding in 1958, is a subtle interweaving of anthropology, social comment, depth psychology, irony, deadpan humor. There are pointed comments here on good intentions, religious differences, the pursuit of happiness, and how not to interpret anthropological data; but these are only threads in the tapestry. What the whole story means is not expressible in a formula or a plot outline: it hits you below the level on which simple declarative sentences are put together.

  UNUMAN SACRIFICE

  BY KATHERINE MACLEAN

  “Damn! He’s actually doing it. Do you hear that?”

  A ray of sunlight and a distant voice filtered down from the open arch in the control room above. The distant voice talked and paused, talked and paused. The words were blurred, but the tone was recognizable.

  “He’s outside preaching to the natives.”

  The two engineers were overhauling the engines, but paused to look up toward the voice.

  “Maybe not,” said Charlie, the junior engineer. “After all, he doesn’t know their language.”

  “He’d preach anyway,” said Henderson, senior engineer and navigator. He heaved with a wrench on a tight bolt, the wrench slipped, and Henderson released some words that made Charlie shudder.

  On the trip, Charlie had often dreamed apprehensively that Henderson had strangled the passenger. And once he had dreamed that he himself had strangled the passenger and Henderson too. '

  When awake the engineers carefully avoided irritating words or gestures, remained cordial toward each other and the passenger no matter what the temptation to snarl, and tried to keep themselves in a tolerant good humor.

  It had not been easy.

  Charlie said, “How do you account for the missionary society giving him a ship of his own? A guy like that, who just gets in your hair when he’s trying to give you advice, a guy with a natural-born talent for antagonizing people?” ^

  “Easy,” Henderson grunted, spinning the bolt. He was a stocky, square-built man with a brusque manner and a practiced tolerance of other people’s oddities. “The missionary society was trying to get rid of him. You can’t get any farther away than where they sent us!”

  The distant voice filtered into the control room from the unseen sunlit landscape outside the ship. It sounded resonant and confident. “The poor jerk thinks it was an honor,” Henderson added. He pulled out the bolt and dropped it on the padded floor with a faint thump.

  “Anyhow,” Charlie said, loosening bolt heads in a circle as the manual instructed, “he can’t use the translator machine. It’s not ready yet, not until we get the rest of their language. He won’t talk to them if they can’t understand.”

  “Won’t he?” Henderson fitted his wrench to another bolt and spun it angrily. ‘Then what is he doing?” Without waiting for an answer he replied to his own question. “Preaching, that’s what he is doing!”

  It seemed hot and close in the engine room, and the sunlight from outside beckoned.

  Charlie paused and wiped the back of his arm against his forehead. “Preaching won’t do him any good. If they can’t understand him, they won’t listen.”

  “We didn’t listen, and that didn’t stop him from preaching to us!” Henderson snapped. “He’s lucky we found a landing planet so soon, he’s lucky he didn’t drive us insane first. A man like that is a danger to a ship.” Henderson, like Charlie, knew the stories of ships which had left with small crews and returned with a smaller crew of one or two red-eyed maniacs and a collection of corpses. Henderson was a conservative. He preferred the regular shipping runs, and ships with a regular-sized crew and a good number of passengers. Only an offer of triple pay and triple insurance indemnity had lured him from the big ships to be co-engineer on this odd three-man trip.

  “ . . . I didn’t mind being preached at.” Charlie’s tone was mild, but he stared upward in the direction of the echoing voice with a certain intensity in his stance.

  “Come off it, you twerp. We only have to be sweet to each other on a trip when we’re cabinbound. Don’t kid old Harry, you didn’t like it.”

  “No,” said Charlie dreamily, staring upward with a steady intensity. “Can’t say that I did. He’s not such a good preacher. I’ve met better in bars.” The echoing voice from outside seemed to be developing a deeper echo. “He’s got the translator going, Harry. I think we ought to stop him.”

  Charlie was a lanky redhead with a mild manner, about the same age as the preacher, but Henderson, who had experience, laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.

  “I’ll do it,” said Henderson, and scrambled up the ladder to the control room.

  The control room was a pleasant shading of grays, brightly lit by the sunlight that streamed in through the open archway. The opening to the outside was screened only by a billowing curtain of transparent Saran-type plastic film, ion-coated to allow air to pass freely, but making a perfect and aseptic filter against germs and small insects. The stocky engineer hung a clear respirator box over a shoulder, brought the tube up to his mouth, and walked through the plastic film. It folded over him and wrapped him in an intimate tacky embrace, and gripped to its own surface behind him, sealing itself around him like a loose skin. Just past the arch he walked through a frame of metal like a man-sized croquet wicket and stopped while it tightened a noose around the trailing films of plastic behind him, cutting him free of the doorway curtain and sealing the break with heat.

  Without waiting for the plastic to finish wrapping and tightening itself around him, the engineer went down the ramp, trailing plastic film in gossamer veils, like ghostly battle flags.

  They could use this simple wrapping of thin plastic as an airsuit air lock, for the air of the new world was rich and good, and the wrapping was needed only to repel strange germs or infections. They were not even sure that there were any such germs; but the plastic was a routine precaution for ports in quarantine, and the two engineers were accustomed to wearing it. It allowed air to filter by freely, so that Henderson could feel the wind on his skin, only slightly diminished. He was wearing uniform shorts, and the wind felt cool and pleasant.

  Around the spaceship stretched grassy meadow and thin forest, and beyond that in one direction lay the blue line of the sea, and in another the
hazy blue-green of distant low mountains. It was so like the southern United States of Charlie’s boyhood that the young engineer had wept with excitement when he first looked out of the ship. Harry Henderson did not weep, but he paused in his determined stride and looked around, and understood again how incredibly lucky they had been to find an Earth-type planet of such perfection. He was a firm believer in the hand of fate, and he wondered what fate planned for the living things of this green planet, and why it had chosen him as its agent.

  Down in the green meadow, near the foot of the ramp, sat the translator machine, still in its crate and on a wheeled dolly but with one side opened to expose the controls. It looked like a huge box, and it was one of the most expensive of the new inductive language analyzers, brought along by their passenger in the hope and expectation of finding a planet with natives.

  Triumphant in his success, the passenger, the Revent Winton, sat cross-legged on top of the crate, like a small king on a large throne. He was making a speech, using the mellow round tones of a trained elocutionist, with the transparent plastic around his face hardly muffling his voice at all.

  And the natives were listening. They sat around the translator box in a wide irregular circle, and stared. They were bald, with fur in tufts about their knees and elbows. Occasionally one got up, muttering to the others, and hurried away; and occasionally one came into the area and sat down to listen.

  “Do not despair,” called Revent Winton in bell-like tones. “Now that I have shown you the light, you know that you have lived in darkness and sin all your lives, but do not despair . .

  The translator machine was built to assimilate a vast number of words and sentences in any tongue, along with fifty or so words in direct translation, and from that construct or find a grammatical pattern and print a handbook of the native language. Meanwhile, it would translate any word it was sure of. Henderson had figured out the meaning of a few native words the day before and recorded them in, and the machine was industriously translating those few words whenever they appeared, like a deep bell, tolling the antiphony to the preacher’s voice. The machine spoke in an enormous bass that was Henderson’s low tones recorded through a filter and turned up to twenty times normal volume.