Delusion World

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Feliz, skinning his knuckles and breaking a good many branches in the process, climbed a tree.

  From as high up the tree as he dared go—his weight was making it sway and creak alarmingly as it was—he did spot an end to the forest about a couple of hundred yards off. Beyond this ending was an open slope down what looked like a valley containing a good-sized town or even a small city. Feliz slid recklessly down the tree and headed in that direction.

  A few minutes later he saw the trees become sparser about him and he broke out at last into a gently sloping meadow. Ahead, about a mile or so away below him, he could see the city, a composite of buildings no more than four or five stories high at the best and with a fairly thick belt of smaller homes surrounding these taller constructions. The building material was evidently native wood, stone or cement—and the architectural style was a hundred years or so out of date. No matter. It was, in Feliz’s estimation, civilization.

  He started forward, and only then did he notice a low, unmortared, rustic-looking stone wall just a few feet from him. The wall also ran down the slope toward the city; and seated on the wall only a few feet off was a venerable old gentleman who beamed at Feliz.

  “A morning to remember, is it not?” said the old man.

  Feliz looked and blinked.

  The oldster had arranged his many-colored kilt warmly around his knees as he sat on the wall. It was perhaps a blessing that he had, for his thin, hairy, ancient legs from the knees down seemed to be things of knotted muscle and angular bone. The long arms protruding from his short-sleeved and also many-colored tunic were likewise thin and bony and rather unadmirable. His white beard was so long it had been tucked into a belt at his waist. His hair was similarly white and stood up like a fuzzy wig. Below it, the old man turned on Feliz eyes of a gentle and guileless blue; and, under a long and stick-thin nose, smiled at Feliz with a mouthful of brilliant white teeth marred only by the fact that one incisor was broken off near the root.

  Feliz stared distrustfully, searching the old man’s face likea suspicious customs agent who had never heard of technique traders before. The old man smiled more widely and more gently.

  “Something aboutine,” he asked, “suprises you, young man?”

  “I just ran into a woman who was mad as a hoot owl,” answered Feliz bluntly. “I thought perhaps you might be another of the same.”

  The old man chuckled happily, in fact so hard that he had to wipe his suddenly damp eyes with the end of his beard.

  “Dear me! Dear, dear me!” he gasped at last, recovering himself. "You must forgive me for going off in such a fit of humor. It was the irony of your question that set me off. That you should suspect me of insanity! Well, well.” He managed to sober up finally. “It’s not a subject to joke about, I’m sure. But just to reassure you, my young friend—among my other other modest virtues, I think I can truthfully say that I am without a doubt the sanest man in the world.”

  Chapter IV

  “Oh you are?” said Feliz. “The sanest man in the world,eh?”

  “Indeed. Without a doubt,” said the other. “Hoska’s the name. El Hoska. You’ve heard of me, no doubt.”

  “No,” said Feliz.

  "You haven’t!" El Hoska stood up in surprise. "Imagine that! It’s almost inconceivable—but then we must all keep open minds. Anything is possible, including the fact that you might, indeed, never have heard of me.” He indicated the city below. “I’m the mayor down there.”

  “You are?”

  “Indeed, yes.” El Hoska slipped a friendly arm through Feliz’s. “And one of the most pleasant, perfectly adjusted little communities you ever saw, it is indeed. Come along with me and meet my people. We see visitors only at such rare intervals.”

  “It comes from shooting at them from space stations,” said Feliz dryly.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “If the shoe fits,” said Feliz restraining the mayor’s attempt to lead him down the slope by the simple expedient of keeping his three hundred odd pounds, Earth-weight of bone and muscle solidly planted on motionless feet. “Sorry, I can’t meet your people now. I've got to get back to my ship."

  “That’s too bad,” said the mayor, reluctantly releasing him. “However, if you must, you must. I’ll be happy to tell people you passed by, in any case. Would you care to give me your name and profession?”

  “I’m a technique trader.”

  "But this is magnificent!" cried El Hoska. "That changes matters. You absolutely must stay. You must come down and get acquainted. This is just what we’ve been waiting for. We have a warehouse full of techniques to be traded and at least one other full of old ones needing mending. I’m sure we can give you a lot of business.”

  “Just a minute,” said Feliz. He explained what a technique trader actually was.

  “Dear me!” said El Hoska, when he was finished.

  “Yes,” said Feliz.

  “What an embarrassing blunder! I’m afraid I just assumed you were something like a tinker or a dealer in hides. Can you possibly forgive me? Of course, you.are a thousand times more valuable. Pardon me—but the best teachings advise us not to bottle up our happy emotions, any more than our unhappy ones; but give immediate expression to them.”

  He stood on his head, to Feliz’s astonishment. His skinny old legs waved happily in the air. It was an unlovely sight.

  “Well, so long,” said Feliz. He turned and started back into the woods.

  His legs, operating independently, immediately turned him around and headed him once more down the slope, toward the city.

  “Hey!” yelled Feliz. “What is this?” But even as the words emerged from his lips, he was answering that question himself. The memory of Psi-Man Verde forcing him to sit still in a chair was still painfully green.

  “The will of one,” replied the mayor solicitously, stepping up to walk beside Feliz, "is the will of all. As the mayor of my people I express their united desires. That is all. We are a simple people,” he continued, as Feliz’s captive legs carried him on down the slope. "Though we live in the city, you could say we are not of it.”

  "Could you?" gritted Feliz through closed teeth, straining without success to regain control of his own lower limbs.

  “I think you could, yes,” replied the mayor thoughtfully. “A somewhat romantic phrase, of course, but true in essence. Yes, we are really children of nature and the spirit. A sound body and a clean mind are almost our only necessities—which is why you had the luck to bump into me on the hillside this dawning, as I was doing my deep-breathing exercises. Yes,” sighed the old man happily, "with a spiritual return to nature has come a harmony between the flesh and spirit. . . .”

  And he rambled on as they continued down the hill, his bright old eyes gleaming, his creaky voice expounding. Feliz reached out one of his uncaptive arms, and fingers that could crumple half-inch steel plate grasped at the back of El Hoska’s neck.

  But the mayor, innocently galumphing along with his kilt flapping about his bony knees, was about six inches out of reach.

  They went down into the city together. It was, Feliz discovered, in an advanced state of decay. Best kept up were the small family houses toward its outer edge in which people obviously lived; but even these showed startling differences. There seemed to be a group of homeowners who believed in keeping their buildings up; but at least an equal number had let theirs go to not-so-picturesque ruin, though these latter had kept up their lawns and flower beds. The larger business and office buildings of the area near the center of the town were slovenly and broken-windowed almost without exception. No wheeled traffic was about the streets and there seemed to be a startling lack of industry.

  “Here,” said El Hoska, as they at last reached the center of town, “you see our public square.”

  He waved at a plastic-floored area of about two acres. Scowling helplessly, Feliz looked it over. Its black-and-white checked surface was nearly deserted except for a few individuals as brightly and colorfully dres
sed as El Hoska. Occasionally, a man in the black tunic and breeches of the men Feliz had seen in his screen at the time he was dodging the space station, marched from one building to another. The more gaily clad people ignored these uniformed men. And, as far as the uniformed men were concerned, from what Feliz could see, the feeling was mutual.

  “Wait here,” said the mayor, beaming at Feliz. “Wander about and steep yourself, if you will, in the storied grandeur of these buildings surrounding us. Meanwhile, I will gather a few of my people who will wish to meet you, and whom I am sure you will in turn enjoy meeting.”

  And he skipped away. Feliz stared. For the mayor was actually skipping, the way a four year old child might. He skipped across the square, waving gaily to the other brightly dressed strollers and loungers as he passed them, and disappeared from sight down one of the streets.

  Still skipping.

  Feliz took an experimental step and found that the compulsion the mayor had been holding upon him was no longer operating. He was free to move about as he liked. He took one long stride back the way he had come, and then caution stopped him.

  It would be best to find some other way out of this town. The road back was in the same general direction in which the mayor had disappeared. Feliz had no wish to be recaptured.

  Feliz scowled about the square. He still had no idea what it was that kept the Malvar at a distance from this planet; but if most of the world’s inhabitants had the mental punch and grip of the mayor, then there was at least enough here to give the aliens pause.

  Incongruously, as Feliz looked about for other exits from the square, there came back to his mind the matter of the barking rabbit. Being a technique trader had taught him that all mysteries on a strange world are usually connected to the general fabric of that world at many points. All things are eventually related; and when in search of a solution to one puzzle, you bump into another, the chances are better than even that both are different aspects of the same problem. Why should a rabbit—a very Earth-like rabbit—bark? The incongruity of it stuck firmly in his mind and would not be shoved aside.

  Meanwhile, he had spotted what looked like a little alley leading off from the square. An alley between blank and dusty commercial buildings whose appearance suggested that nobody had gone that way for weeks. Feliz took off.

  “Halt!” shouted a voice behind him. Feliz stopped, and the back of his neck crawled. Had someone been keeping a watch on him all this time? He turned.

  Two of the black-clad men, brandishing night sticks, were approaching him across the square at a run. As he finished turning, they slid to a stop on the slippery plastic about him.

  “How did you sneak in here?” shouted one.

  “Answer immediately!” shouted the other, who was .somewhat skinnier and shorter than his companion. The second-speaking one also had a bad case of halitosis. Feliz caught a full blast of his breath and backed off slightly.

  “Halt!” shouted the taller one. “We order you to halt.”

  "I am halted!” growled Feliz, taking another backstep to get away from the smaller man’s exhalations.

  “Then stop trying to sneak away!" The taller one waved his night stick ominously. “Answer immediately!"

  “Answer what?” snarled Feliz. His own temper, never one to win any records for length and sweetness, was beginning to warm to the occasion.

  “Who are you?” shouted the taller of the two. Then, before Feliz could answer, he shouted, “That is a lie!”

  “What’s a lie?” roared Feliz.

  “Silence! You are here to answer questions, not ask them. Speak when you’re spoken to.”

  Feliz, getting a grip on his temper, closed his mouth and said nothing.

  “Well?” shouted the taller. “Why are you stubbornly silent?”

  “Stubbornly silent!” exploded Feliz. He gasped air, closed his mouth, felt his face heat up like a furnace,clenched his fists and said between his teeth, in an artificially calm voice, “Because I am here to answer questions, and to speak when I’m spoken to."

  “Slippery answers,” shouted the smaller one with the halitosis, “will not help!”

  “You would do well to co-operate,” said the tall one threateningly. “We’re trying to treat you with kindness.”

  “And patience,” said the smaller one.

  “But you continue to avoid answering.”

  “Answer at once. Who are you?”

  “I,” said Feliz. “am a technique trader.”

  “That is a lie!” both shouted at once.

  "Shut up!” thundered Feliz, finally and completely losing his grip on his temper. "I’m trying to tell you what I am, and you—”

  Too late, he saw the night sticks descending toward his skull.

  “Resisting arrest!” he heard the small one shouting, dimly and from a great distance, as the black and white of the pavement rushed up to meet him. “Hit him a good one, Harry! Hit him again!"

  Chapter V

  Splash!

  Feliz snorted water out of his nose and tried to come up swimming. It was an ocean. No, it was merely a bad flood. No again. It was a local cloudburst of some sort. . . Feliz came fully to his senses and recognized the fact that someone had just emptied a pail of water over him.

  The someone in question wore a black outfit like a uniform. There were two more black outfits behind a desk. The one who had just dumped the water went back and sat down alongside the others. Feliz blinked water out of his eyes and straightened up slightly in the stiff-backed chair in which he seemed to be sitting. He stared at the three. Like a trio of suspicious rather than wise monkeys, they stared back.

  “I want a lawyer,” Feliz said.

  “Silence!” snapped the one in the middle. “Alcoholic beverages are forbidden, except by express permission of the controller.”

  Feliz’s vision cleared completely. He looked about him and saw that he was seated in a Spartan sort of office with walls of dirty white. A spider was setting up house in one high comer of the room within Feliz’s range of vision. Directly before him, in that order, were the desk, the three behind it, and a large window through which sunlight came to smite Feliz in the eyes. The men behind the desk were haloed against it. Feliz squinted and became aware suddenly of a piercing headache which exploded upward for a second as he noticed it, then subsided to a dull, persistent ache. “All right, spy!” grated the one in the middle. “Talk!” Feliz pulled himself all the way up in the chair. With a movement so swift that Feliz had trouble convincing himself that he had seen it, the man behind the desk whipped out what appeared to be a needle-snouted handgun and pointed it across the desk at Feliz.

  “Be very careful!” he said.

  “Oh, yes. Yes,” said Feliz. “I will!”

  Slowly, the middle man put the handgun away. Feliz stared at the three. All bore ingrained frowns of suspicion upon their tight faces. They looked like wrinkled crabapples, knotted and gnarled before their time. The middle one seemed to have the authority. He was a tall, thin man with a long, oval face. His nose was fleshy; his lips were thick and they parted a little with each breath. Dark eyes glared at Feliz from under untidy brows.

  “Well, spy?” this man said now.

  “I’m not a spy.”

  “Don’t lie to me! I’ll have you shot!” shouted the middle man.

  "You tin-whistle idiot!" roared Feliz, losing his temper in spite of the recent caution imposed by the sight of the hand-gun. “I’m a perfectly legitimate technique trader!”

  Oddly enough, his violence and abusiveness seemed to relax |he others at once. It was as if he had just proved himself to be a member of the club, so to speak, and the first natural stiffness between them could now be abandoned. One of the black-clad sidemen put his elbows on the desk, and the middle one leaned forward.

  “Don’t try to lie to me!” he said—but he said it almost genially. “What’s that?”

  Feliz explained, for the second time that day. Memory of his first explanation reminded
him of something that might be useful. “Listen,” he wound up, “you people probably came too late to see it when you picked me up; but I’d just finished talking to your mayor—”

  The clubbish attitude suddenly vanished.

  “Mayor!” cried the central one. “What is this nonsense! There is no mayor in this city. There is only the controller—me, Taki Manoai! Talk to me of mayors and I’ll have you shot!”

  “Well, he called himself the mayor," growled Feliz. "He had this kilt and tunic on, colored red and purple and blue and yellow and—”

  "Enough of such deviationist talk!” shouted the controller. “Kilts are decadent. Tunics are forbidden. The aberrant strain of impure breeds among us that pretended to see different shades in the one color black has been eradicated from this world many years ago.”

  “Look around you, man—” began Feliz; but the controller began to foam at the mouth and the ceiling fell in. There had, it seemed, been night sticks hiding not too far behind Feliz’s chair.

  Feliz explored his tender head with careful fingers. While his brain was as susceptible to being jarred into unconsciousness as any other human brain, his skull—thank Micturia—was somewhat thicker than a normal human’s. No permanent damage seemed to have resulted-from the night-sticking; though he would scarcely like to have made a practice of being on the receiving end of that department.

  He stopped feeling his head and contemplated the bowl of lukewarm protein gruel set before him. It was the first prison he had been in where the jailer was not bribable in direct proportion to the badness of prison conditions. The place he was in at the moment might have been a good place once—about a hundred years before. But it had suffered from a sad lack of care for at least the last fifty years or so.

  “Steak?” Feliz had suggested hopefully when the jailer brought him his gruel.

  “Steak?” said the other, interested. “What kind of a machine does that come out of?”