Partners in Wonder

by Harlan Ellison

  Here.

  Where it is cold.

  Where it is dark.

  Where we receive no nourishment.

  You will do this.

  I am ready to serve. So am I. But what sort of weapon do you want us to get? I think I know what they mean. You always know what they mean; listen, masters, I don’t want to be a nuisance, but I can’t work with this incubus. He’s a complainer and a befuddler and he’s got delusions of authority. Masters, don’t listen to him. He’s jealous of the faith and trust you’ve put in me. He rails under the lash of envy. My success with the coven against the Norns infuriates him. Rails? What the Thoth are you gibbering about? Look, Masters, I serve gladly; there isn’t much else for me to do. But I can’t work under this lunatic. One of us has to be the charge-of-things on this. If it’s him, then put me on some other duty. If it’s me, then put him in his place.

  Silence!

  You will work together as needs be.

  The incubus.

  The nixie will be in charge of this matter.

  And you will assist.

  I serve gladly, Masters. Then why are you foaming? Shut up! Darling, you’re lovely when you’re angry.

  We will hear.

  No more.

  You will begin now.

  Find.

  The weapon and teach it.

  Open the portal.

  We long to return.

  How you do it is your concern but.

  Do not fail us.

  The nixie and the incubus had worked together as well as might be expected. The nixie said, We’ll give him magic and let him use it. We can’t go through, not yet at least, but we can send dreams and thoughts and desires: they’ll pass through the veil. And what good will that do?

  He’ll tear a rift in the veil for us. Oh, I can’t believe the stupidity of your ideas. Stupid or not, it’s the way I’m doing it; carefully and smoothly, and you keep your trachimoniae out of it. Just don’t order me about. I’m the highest-ranking incubus—

  Just shut up, will you.

  Shut up? How dare you speak to me like that? You’d better succeed quickly, nixie. My principals are anxious, and if you go wrong or slow down I’ll make certain they have their way with you.

  The nixie had found his weapon. Smith. He had given him first a series of dreams. Then a hunger to know the convolutions of black magic. The bulge in the floor. The hunger of curiosity. Leading him, step by step through his life: the Black Arts Book Store, the proper volumes, the revealed secrets, the dusty little room, and at last…the power. But given not quite whole. Given in a twisted manner. The runes had been cast, and the mistake made—and Smith had destroyed the world, tearing the veil in the process. But not quite enough for the return of the Faceless Ones.

  And the incubus grew impatient for his revenge.

  The girl.

  Smith was sorry. Standing in the room to which his bat had led him, he was sorry. He hadn’t meant to do it. Smith had not, in the deepest sense, known it was loaded (nor had he been meant to know); and when it went off (in this room with half a candle and dust and books bound in human flesh, and the great grimoire) it was aimed at the whole world.

  Peking, Paris, Rome, Moscow, Detroit, New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles: miles of cinders burying cold roast corpses. Checkerboard arrangements of bottomless pits and glass spires. Acres of boiling swamp. Whole cities that were now curling, rising green mist. Cities and countries that had been, were totally gone.

  And in the few cities that remained…Water no longer flowed through their veins nor electricity through their nerves, and there they sat, scraping the sky, useless, meaningless, awaiting erosion. And at their dead feet, scurrying loners and human rat packs, survivors hunting and sometimes eating one another, a species in its glorious infancy with the umbilical cord a thousand ways pinhole-perforated before it had had a chance really to be born; and Smith knew this and had to see it all around him, had to see it and say, “My fault. My fault.”

  Guilty Smith the runesmith.

  Back then, here, to the room where the runes had begun, to trap a girl he sensed would come. He set a noisetrap at the outer door (it opened outward so he propped a 4 × 4 against it and an old tin washtub under it; open the door and whamcrash!) and next to it a rune-trap (which cannot be described here) and he settled down to wait.

  The nixie to the incubus:

  What have you been doing? I’ve lured him back to the focus location. You fool! He may suspect now. He suspects nothing. I’ve implanted a delusion, a girl. When he sleeps we take him and rip the veil completely. What girl? What have you done? You can ruin it all, you egomaniac! There is no girl. A succubus. I tried earlier, but it went wrong. This time he’s weaker, he’ll sleep, we’ll take him.

  What makes you think he’ll succumb this time, any more than he did the last time? Because he’s a human and he’s weak and stupid and lonely and filled with guilt and he has never known love. I will give him love. Love that will drain him, empty him. Then he’s mine.

  Not yours…ours!

  Not yours at all, nixie. The Masters will see to you.

  He stood in a dark corner, waiting. And sleep suddenly seemed the most important thing in the world to him. He wanted to sleep.

  Sleep! Should a man live threescore years, one of them must go to this inert stupidity, a biochemical habit deriving from the accident of diurnal rotation. The caveman must huddle away behind rocks and flame during the hours of darkness because of the nocturnal predators who can see better in the dark than he can. They, in turn, must hide from him. Hence the habit, long outmoded but still inescapable. A third of a life spent sprawled out paralyzed, mostly unconscious, and oh vulnerable. Twenty years wasted out of each life, when life itself is so brief a sparkle in a surrounding immensity of nothingness. Brief as it is, still we must give away a third of it to sleep, for no real reason. Twenty years. Smith had hated and despised sleep, the cruel commanding necessity for sleep, the intrusion, the interruption, the sheer waste of sleep; but never had he hated it so much as now, when everyone in the world was his enemy and all alone he must stand them off. Who would stand sentry over Smith? Only Smith, lying mostly unconscious with his own lids blinding him and his ears turned off and his soft belly upward to whatever soft-footed enemy might penetrate his simple defenses.

  But he could not help himself; he wanted to sleep.

  He lay down fully dressed and pulled a blanket over him. He murmured his goodnight words, which for a long time had been (as he slid toward the edge of slumber’s precipice and scanned the day past and the weeks and months since that first terrible rune-work), “I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry. I’m sorry…” and as he tumbled off the edge of waking, he would catch one awful glimpse of tomorrow—more of the same, but worse.

  But not tonight. Perhaps it was his exhaustion, the long thirty-six-hour flight up the Empire State Building, trying, out of guilt and compassion, not to use his terrible weapon (how many times had he made that firm resolution…how many times, falling sickly asleep, had he determined to walk out unarmed, to build an attention aura around himself, to get from the new barbarians that which his guilt deserved?), or perhaps he had reached a new peak of terror and shame, and feared especially the vulnerability of sleep.

  As he approached the dark tumble into oblivion, something made him claw at the edge, hold fast, neither asleep nor awake, just at that point through which he usually hurtled, unable to stay awake, on guard no more.

  And he heard voices.

  Now I send her to him. Now when he’s weakest. Wait! Are you sure? This man…he’s…different. There’s been a change in him. Since we last manipulated him? Don’t be ridiculous. No, wait! There is…something. Sleep. Yes, that’s it. It has to do with sleep. I’m not waiting; my Principals want through now, in this tick of time, now! I want success more than you, that is why the triumph and the rewards will be mine. The twelve generations it took to breed this Smith as a gateway and the lifetime it took
to train him. It’s all come down to me, to me to fail or succeed, and I’ll succeed! I’m sending the succubus, now! He’s never been loved…now he’ll be loved.

  No! You fool! Your ego! Sleep is his strength. You have it all wrong. Nothing can harm him when he sleeps!

  Success!

  Smith had a brief retinal impression of something…it was being a gateway, and what it was like. Mouth open till the flesh tore at the corners. Darkness pouring from within him, then flames that expanded and rolled over the land, filling the sky, and himself burning burning burning.

  Then it was gone. Smith clung for one more amazed moment to this place, this delicately limned turnover point between waking and sleeping. This line was a crack in—in something incomprehensible, but it was a crack through which his mind could peep as between boards in a fence.

  Something began to beat in him, daring to move, hope. He quelled it quickly lest it wake him altogether and those—those others—know of it. Slipping, slipping, losing his clutch on this half-wakefulness, about to drop end over end into total sleep, he snatched at phrases and concepts, forcing himself to keep and remember them: twelve generations it took to breed this Smith as a gateway…lifetime it took to train.

  And: nothing can reach him, nothing can harm him while he’s asleep.

  Sleep.

  Sleep the robber, sleep the intruder, sleep the enemy—all his life he had tried to avoid it, had succumbed as little as possible, had fought to live without it. Who had taught him that? Why did he want to unlearn it so desperately now? And what did the doctors and poets say about sleep: surcease, strengthener, healer, knitter-up of the raveled sleeve of care. And he had sneered at them. Had he been taught to sneer?

  He had. For their purposes, he had been taught. More: he had been bred for this—twelve generations, was it? And why? To be given the power to decimate humanity so that something unspeakable, something long-exiled could return to possess this world? Would it be the Earth alone, or all the planets, the galaxies, the universe? Could it be time itself? Or other sets of dimensions?

  The one thing he must do is sleep. Nothing can harm him when he sleeps.

  Then she came to him. The girl from the stairwell, alive again, a second time, or how many times back to the inky beginnings he could not even imagine? She came to him through the door, and there was no sound of crashing washtub; she came through the room and there was no stench and death from the rune-trap.

  She came toward him, lying there, without clothes, without sound, without pain or anger, and she extended her flawless arms to him in love. The pleasure of her love swept across the room. She wanted to give herself, to give him everything, all she was and all she could be, for no other return than his love. She wanted his love, all of his love, all of him, everything, all the substance and strength of him.

  He half-rose to meet her, and then he knew what she was, and he trembled with the force of losing her, of destroying her, and he murmured words without vowels and a slimy darkness began to eat at her feet, her legs, her naked thighs, her torso, and she let one ghastly shriek as something took her, and her face dissolved in slime and darkness, and she was gone…and he fell back, weak.

  Smith the runesmith let go his shred of wakefulness and plunged joyfully into the healing depths. It was not until he awakened, rested and strong and healthily starving, that he realized fully what else he had let go.

  Guilt.

  The sin was not his. He had been shaped to do what he had done. A terrible enemy had made him its instrument, its weapon. You do not accuse, condemn, imprison the murder weapon.

  The runesmith, smiling (how long since?) fumbled for the skin-bag of knucklebones. He closed his eyes, his strong, clear rested eyes, and turned his rested mind to the talent (inborn) and skills (instilled) in him alone of all men ever. No jaded blind buckshot in the faces of his kind, done in anguish to stay alive, but the careful, knowing, precise drawing of a bead. The location, direction, range known to Smith the weapon in ways impossible to Smith the man.

  The knucklebones spilled chatteringly on the floor.

  The pattern was random; his talent and his skills understood it.

  He murmured a new murmur.

  Hunkered down on his haunches, he called up the power.

  There was the faintest hiss of a breeze in the tumbled warren of this focus-room, a breeze that was peculiarly bittersweet, the way Holland chocolates used to be. A chill breeze that broke sweat out on Smith’s spine, in the hollows between his shoulder blades.

  Then the screams began.

  They were screams beyond sound, and surely only an immeasurable fraction of them reached Smith, so different were they in quality and kind from anything remotely human. Yet their echoes and their backlash seemed to blur the world for a moment of horror beyond imagining. A soundless, motionless quake, the terror of countless billions of frightful beings facing death and (unlike the millions who had perished here) knowing it, knowing why.

  Smith’s skills knew as Smith himself could not, that the universe itself was relieved of a plague.

  Was it a long time later? Probably it was—Smith was never able to remember that—when he stood up and filled his lungs with the dusty, sweet air and looked out on tomorrow and forever with clear and guiltless eyes.

  He tested his power. It was intact.

  He walked to the inner and outer barriers, kicking them down. He looked out at the sunlit ruins of the city.

  If I live, he thought (and barring accident I can live forever), I can build it up again. I have magic; they gave it to me and no one can take it away. Magic and science, humanity and the Powers. It’s supposed to have worked that way long ago. It will again. Build it up again…

  And if I don’t, if I fail, then at least I’ve fixed it so they have no enemies but themselves. Terrible as that might be, there are worse things.

  He saw a flicker of movement in the distance, something feeble, hungry, misshapen, ragged.

  The runesmith stepped out of the shadows, and walked toward the movement in the distance. There was sun now. For the first time. Because he wanted sun. And he wanted cool breezes. And the scent of good things in the air.

  He could have it all now. They might never forgive him, but they could not harm him, and he would help them, as they had never been able to help themselves.

  They were still alone, but perhaps it would be better now.

  INTRODUCTION

  Joe L. Hensley and Harlan Ellison

  RODNEY PARISH FOR HIRE

  Readers of Dangerous Visions will find on pages 244–47 approximately 2000 words of trivia concerning my friendship with Joe L. Hensley. I won’t go back through that again. Suffice it to say I met Joe in 1955 (or thereabouts) and we became instant and fast friends. In all honesty I must confess he has done more for me than I for him, but I suspect that is strictly a matter of necessity and opportunity, for there is truly nothing I would not do for Joe. Yet it seems to me inconceivable that there could be enough favors I could perform for Joe that would equal by even one-half the fairy godfather deeds he has done for me…not the least of which was saving my ass from being court-martialed during my horrendous tenure as a member of the United States Army. So it’s logical, as close friends, we’d collaborate on stories.

  The story before you was one of three on which Joe and I collaborated between the years 1956–60.

  Writing with Joe has always been one of the easiest and most productive liaisons of my writing career. Our temperaments and way of plotting a story mesh very well. It is this, at core, that makes for the most successful collaborations, I think. While it is possible for one writer to be strong in this area, and the other to be heavy in that area, there is always (to my mind, however subtly) a fracture line where their strengths meet. It is only when two people can theme together that the unity of a story, in all its unpredictable nuances, emerges satisfactorily.

  Joe and I wrote each of our three collaborations at a different location, at least a year apart. On
e was written under the eyes of fans and casual observers at poolside, at a motel in Ohio during the Midwest Science Fiction Convention in 1959, a second story was written at a bucolic lake in Indiana where Joe had a summer cabin, and the third was written in Joe’s office in his home in Madison, Indiana. The latter dates are fuzzy to me, but it would have to be around 1957–58.

  The method of writing was almost the same employed by a single writer. We devised a basic idea, extrapolated it, and followed it to its conclusion, by no means logically. It happened that way with all three stories. Two of them, on rereading, are just as fresh and exciting as I thought they were when first out of the typewriter. The third suffers a bit with age, perhaps because it was the longest of the three and it was a more standard story idea than Joe and I had attempted the previous two times. One of the successful collaborations was “Do-It-Yourself,” which has been reprinted in a number of places and has appeared in two of my collections. The other successful one is “Rodney Parish For Hire.” It appeared in a small-circulation men’s magazine in 1960, and has never been reprinted. It appears here in book form for the first time.

  It was written in alternate sections, and (as I noted above) so similar were Joe’s and my thought-processes in the creation of this little chiller, that today, on desperately attempting to locate the places where I stopped and he took up, I’ll be damned if I can find them. I do remember that I started the story and left off writing at the first changeover point with the sentence, he wasn’t much taller, then. Beyond that, it all blends, and I wouldn’t remember even that much were it not for the fact that early in my writing career I used to use the device of someone shoving his fist in his mouth to demonstrate being overwhelmed by pain or horror, or something that occurs in the paragraph just before the line just noted.