Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction 11th Part 19

We could spend the whole day sleeping, or playing with the girls, just as we chose. We could hunt the whole day or work the whole day on our art projects. There was no discipline, and there were no roll calls or inspections. But mostly we followed the routine. We referred to it as "the rut."

I found it necessary, after I had been there about fifteen months, to take long, solitary walks, which I usually did after Second Lunch. The canyon terraces and benches were laced with paths, little trailways under a constant canopy of green, moist little trailways full of bird sounds and fern odors and shadows. Even in all the three years I was there, I was never able to explore all the paths.

Once I followed one which led upward rather sharply, almost like stair steps, and then leveled off into a glade where there was an opening in the roof of greenery. In the glade was a mountain hillside pool fed by a waterfall which plunged over a cliff formed by the bench, above, the water frothing down through waving, spumid ferns. In the pool three of the girls, Twig, Nest and Vine, were playing, and they had three men with them.

None wore anything, for they were playing in the water; the young men had long beards, for they had not shaved for nearly two years. A radiant fruit grew on vines near the pool; they were eating of it and throwing the seeds at each other. Lotos Land. On the hills like G.o.ds reclined. I hurried back to my cave and gathered up my painting things, and I coaxed Twig and Nest and Vine and the three youths to arrange themselves in a frieze there by the waterfall. And thus it was that I painted them, and I think I am the only man ever to have painted nymphs and satyrs in the flesh.

Another time I took another path. As always, it was a green path, moist and full of bird sounds and the odor of ferns. It led to a place which, because of the enormity of the trees which grew there and the s.p.a.cing of their trunks, seemed like the interior of a cathedral. And there was a youth there from one of the other Tens. He had made a kind of table of green branches, and when I came upon him he was standing before it, and I heard him say, "I shall go up to the altar of G.o.d, to G.o.d the joy of myyouth." Then he saw me and he giggled. He giggled only a little, then began to weep. "I have taken the name of the Lord in vain. I have sinned,"

he said. He fled from there. I never saw him again.

We had no Sundays. Everyday was like another day. We never knew which day it was, but used to spend much time in aimless arguments over whether it was Monday or Thurs-day.

It was during one of those solitary walks toward the end of the second year that I came upon a man from one of the upper Tens. He had his girl with him. She was very beautiful. Neither wore anything, for by then all of us, men and girls alike, had given up clothing as a nuisance. He seemed to want to talk, so I stopped beside him. He was an older man, probably twenty-two or twenty-three.

"See these little roots," he said, indicating a cl.u.s.ter of them which thrust out from a crack in the cliff wall. "They look like tiny electric wires, don't they? I used to have a job with a telephone company, working with such wires. Each was a different color; the job was to match color to color and so complete the splicing accurately. It was a very tedious job and did not pay too much. But, you know, when it was done, and done properly, there was a satisfaction in it. A feeling that something had been accomplished."

"Well," I said, "I suppose you could do something of the sort here. You have only to let them know, and they'll pro-vide you with wires and things."

"Here?" he cried. "Let them know? I'd cut my throat first." And he took the cigarette from my fingers and burnt his girl savagely with it on her shoulder.

During the third year, another man and myself decided to escape. We had examined the fence at the garita where we were fed and had discovered that its meshes were no more formidable than chicken wire. So our plan was simple enough. We would merely climb to the rim of the canyon where we a.s.sumed the fence stood and, with clubs made from dead tree limbs, batter our way through it. The reason we had never attempted to escape before was because up to that point we had rather enjoyed our captivity.

We started out after Second Lunch and after an hour's climbing had gotten up about five thousand feet, for the path we took was terribly steep. As we ascended the higher benches other paths crossed ours again and again, and on these paths there was a deer hunt in full cry, a hunt which started at the usual time after Breakfast but which because of the superb stamina of the particular deer being hunted had gone on far longer than the ordinary chase.

There in our canyon we hunted deer as the Tarahumara Indians of the barrancas of the Sierra Madre Occidental hunted them: We ran them down and cut their throats. On a hunting party we stationed ourselves at intervals along the terraces where the deer were found and whoever first started a deer would give a cry and take up the chase, and he would bound after the deer until he became winded. Then another of us, or two or three of us, would take up the chase in his stead, ever bounding, ever on thedeer's trail. The animal was never allowed to stop and rest, never allowed to stop and graze, never allowed to pause and drink, for once the chase was taken up it never halted until the deer was dead. And the deer itself would never halt until its lungs were full of blood and its hooves were torn and splintered from endless clawing and pounding over the rocks of the trails. The deer only halted and fell when it could run no longer, and when the deer fell the deadly relay was done.

So, as my companion and I climbed up the side of the canyon, we could hear the noise of the chase, the pounding of the deer's hooves, the cries of its pursuers. And from far down in the canyon from the ball courts along the river we could hear the shouts of the players as one Ten vied against another Ten in another of their interminable games. Then at times the noise of the chase would fade away as quarry and hunters swept far up the canyon on some curving path, and the shouts from the playing courts would die out after a score was made, and then all we could hear would be the bird sounds in the canyon's greenery and the sounds of the great ferns as the wind stirred them.

By afternoon we thought we should have reached the canyon's finite rim where we a.s.sumed the fence would be, but the benches and terraces still reared above us. The chase continued on the paths and trails around us; we wondered how one deer could hold out so long against that pack of human wolves.

And then we did reach the rim of the canyon, and we looked down, and the canyon was a long winding slash of green with a thin white streak through its center-the river and its sanded sides. We also found the fence. It was not formidable at all; it was neither very high nor very strong. There was no point in making clubs and battering a hole in it, for the fence had a gate in it and the gate was unlocked..

As we examined the gate the sound of the chase arose again; it was coming toward us along a path that bordered the inner side of the fence.

We were so high now that we could no longer hear the sounds of the players down on the sands. My companion and I looked at each other, and we nodded in agreement. We opened the gate of the fence and when the deer came bounding along the trail we leaped in front of him and startled him, and with a bound he went through the gate to freedom. He was a great, gray stag, the biggest we had ever seen; his sides were heaving, and his horns were streaming with fronds of fern.

We closed the gate and went down the trail and halted the three young men who, with flint knives in their hands, had been pursuing him. We told them what we had done. "So there's a gate up there?" one of them said.

"Could we all go through it-like the big buck did?"

"Certainly," we said.

"But what's on the other side?" he asked.

"Nothing," we said. "Just more greenery, more mountains. It's better on this side."So they threw away their knives and joined my companion and me as we began our descent into the canyon.

During the third year animosities arose; fighting between the Tens and the individuals of the Tens was monotonously frequent. But, although there was no ordinance against it, none of us killed another. "Thou shalt not murder" was the only law we obeyed, but none of us could explain why we did so. Certainly they had never so ordered us; they never gave us any orders in any form at all. But as a troop of monkeys in trees operates without formal rules or laws to guide it, yet, nevertheless, observes certain taboos, so did we. There were many flare-ups over many things: scoring on the playing field, minor pilferings, suspected insults; and there were many, many fights over the girls, some of whom were prettier than the others. But none of the fights ever ended in murder. There seemed to be some agreement among us that One Hundred had marched into imprisonment and One Hundred would some day march out. So we beat and clawed and cursed each other, and sometimes we cut each other with flint knives, but never did we kill each other. I think that was our only pride.

For we could take no pride in anything else. When we had marched in we were civilized; at least we had the veneer of civilization. There were certain things we would do and certain things we would not do. We obediently wore the loin cloths they had given us. We obediently said our prayers at night. But with no discipline over us, with no restrictions upon us, with no necessity for doing anything, with no ani-mal desire left unfulfilled, we became as animals. We threw away our loin cloths and stopped saying our prayers.

You might say there was a price attached to all this. And there was. Our captivity ended exactly on the hour when the three years were up. One hundred men had marched into it; one hundred men marched out. We had marched in as one group, but we marched out as two. The first fifty of us to march out were those who had somehow survived. The second fifty were those who had gone mad.

_____________________________.

Those who in good weather have searched the horizon for distant specks which might be ships or planes are familiar with the curious fact that such specks are more easily seen from the corner of the eye than looked at straight on. A phenomenon Cordwainer Smith here exploits, in the lit-erary sense, in seeking a glimpse of a future world, and cer-tain enduring human values...

ALPHA RALPHA BOULEVARD.

by Cordwainer Smith We were drunk with happiness in those early years. Every-body was, especially the young people. These were the first years of the Rediscoveryof Man, when the Instrumentality dug deep in the treasury, reconstructing the old cultures, the old languages, and even the old troubles. The nightmare of perfection had taken our forefathers to the edge of suicide.

Now under the leadership of the Lord Jestocost and the Lady Alice More, the ancient civilizations were rising like great land ma.s.ses out of the sea of the past.

I myself was the first man to put a postage stamp on a letter, after sixteen thousand years. I took Virginia to hear the first piano recital. We watched at the eye-machine when cholera was released in Tasmania, and we saw the Tasmanians dancing in the streets, now that they did not have to be protected any more. Everywhere, things became exciting. Everywhere, men and women worked with a wild will to build a more imperfect world.

I myself went into a hospital and came out French. Of course I remembered my early life; I remembered it, but it did not matter. Virginia was French, too, and we had the years of our future lying ahead of us like ripe fruit hanging in an orchard of perpetual summers. We had no idea when we would die. Formerly, I would be able to go to bed and think, "The government has given me four hundred years. Three hundred and seventy-four years from now, they will stop the stroon injections and I will then die." Now I knew anything could happen. The safety devices had been turned off. The diseases ran free. With luck, and hope, and love, I might live a thousand years. Or I might die tomorrow. I was free.

We revelled in every moment of the day.

Virginia and I bought the first French newspaper to appear since the Most Ancient World fell. We found delight in the news, even in the advertis.e.m.e.nts. Some parts of the culture were hard to reconstruct. It was difficult to talk about foods of which only the names survived, but the homunculi and the machines, working tirelessly in Downdeepdowndeep, kept the surface of the world filled with enough novelties to fill anyone's heart with hope. We knew that all of this was make-believe, and yet it was not. We knew that when the diseases had killed the statistically correct number of people, they would be turned off; when the accident rate rose too high, it would stop without our knowing why. We knew that over us all, the Instrumentality watched. We had confidence that the Lord Jestocost and the Lady Alice More would play with us as friends and not use us as victims of a game.

Take, for example, Virginia. She had been called Menerima, which represented the coded sounds of her birth num-ber. She was small, verging on chubby; she was compact; her head was covered with tight brown curls; her eyes were a brown so deep and so rich that it took sunlight, with her squinting against it, to bring forth the treasures of her irises. I had known her well, but never known her. I had seen her often, but never seen her with my heart, until we met just outside the hospital, after becoming French.

I was pleased to see an old friend and started to speak in the Old Common Tongue, but the words jammed, and as I tried to speak it was not Menerima any longer, but someone of ancientbeauty, rare and strange-someone who had wan-dered into these latter days from the treasure worlds of time past. All I could do was to stammer: "What do you call yourself now?" And I said it in ancient French.

She answered in the same language, "Je m'appelle Virginie."

Looking at her and falling in love was a single process. There was something strong, something wild in her, wrapped and hidden by the tenderness and youth of her girlish body. It was as though destiny spoke to me out of the certain brown eyes, eyes which questioned me surely and wonderingly, just as we both questioned the fresh new world which lay about us.

"May I?" said I, offering her my arm, as I had learned in the hours of hypnopedia. She took my arm and we walked away from the hospital.

I hummed a tune which had come into my mind, along with the ancient French language.

She tugged gently on my arm, and smiled up at me.

"What is it," she asked, "or don't you know?"

The words came soft and unbidden to my lips and I sang it very quietly, muting my voice in her curly hair, half-sing-ing half-whispering the popular song which had poured into my mind with all the other things which the Rediscovery of Man had given me: She wasn't the woman I went to seek.

I met her by the merest chance.

She did not speak the French of France, But the surded French of Martinique.

She wasn't rich. She wasn't chic.

She had a most entrancing glance, And that was all...

Suddenly I ran out of words, "I seem to have forgotten the rest of it. It's called 'Macouba' and it has something to do with a wonderful island which the ancient French called Martinique."

"I know where that is," she cried. She had been given the same memories that I had. "You can see it from Earthport!"

This was a sudden return to the world we had known. Earthport stood on its single pedestal, twelve miles high, at the eastern edge of the small continent. At the top of it, the Lords worked amid machines which had no meaning any more. There the ships whispered their way in from the stars. I had seen pictures of it, but I had never been there. As a matter of fact, I had never known anyone who had actually been up Earthport. Why should we have gone? We might not have been welcome, and we could always see it just as well through the pictures on the eye-machine. For Menerima-familiar, dully pleasant, dear little Menerima-to have gonethere was uncanny. It made me think that in the Old Perfect World things had not been as plain or forthright as they seemed.

Virginia, the new Menerima, tried to speak in the Old Common Tongue, but she gave up and used French instead: "My aunt," she said, meaning a kindred lady, since no one had had aunts for thousands of years, "was a Believer. She took me to the Abba-dingo. To get holiness and luck."

The old me was a little shocked; the French me was dis-quieted by the fact that this girl had done something unusual even before mankind itself turned to the unusual. The Abba-dingo was a long-obsolete computer set part way up the column of Earthport. The homunculi treated it as a G.o.d, and occasionally people went to it. To do so was tedious and vul-gar.

Or had been. Till all things became new again.

Keeping the annoyance out of my voice, I asked her: "What was it like?"

She laughed lightly, yet there was a trill to her laughter which gave me a shiver. If the old Menerima had had secrets, what might the new Virginia do? I almost hated the fate which made me love her, which made me feel that the touch of her hand on my arm was a link between me and time-forever.

She smiled at me instead of answering my question. The surfaceway was under repair; we followed a ramp down to the level of the top underground, where it was legal for true persons and hominids and homunculi to walk.

I did not like the feeling; I had never gone more than twenty minutes' trip from my birthplace. This ramp looked safe enough. There were few hominids around these days, men from the stars who (though of true human stock) had been changed to fit the conditions of a thousand worlds.

The homunculi were morally repulsive, though many of them looked like very handsome people; bred from animals into the shape of men, they took over the tedious ch.o.r.es of work-ing with machines where no real man would wish to go. It was whispered that some of them had even bred with actual people, and I would not want my Virginia to be exposed to the presence of such a creature.

She had been holding my arm. When we walked down the ramp to the busy pa.s.sage, I slipped my arm free and put it over her shoulders, drawing her closer to me. It was light enough, bright enough to be clearer than the daylight which we had left behind, but it was strange and full of danger. In the old days, I would have turned around and gone home rather than to expose myself to the presence of such dreadful beings. At this time, in this moment, I could not bear to part from my new-found love, and I was afraid that if I went back to my own apartment in the tower, she might go to hers. Anyhow, being French gave a spice to danger.

Actually, the people in the traffic looked commonplace enough. There were many busy machines, some in human forms and some not. I did not see a single hominid. Other people, whom I knew to be homunculi because they yielded the right of way to us, looked no different from the real humanbeings on the surface. A brilliantly beautiful girl gave me a look which I did not like-saucy, intelligent, pro-vocative beyond all limits of flirtation. I suspected her of being a dog by origin. Among the hominids, d'persons are the ones most apt to take liberties. They even have a dog-man philosopher who once produced a tape arguing that since dogs are the most ancient of men's allies, they have the right to be closer to man than any other form of life. When I saw the tape, I thought it amusing that a dog should be bred into the form of a Socrates; here, in the top underground, I was not so sure at all. What would I do if one of them be-came insolent? Kill him? That meant a brush with the law and a talk with the Subcommissioners of the Instrumen-tality.

Virginia noticed none of this.

She had not answered my question, but was asking me questions about the top underground instead. I had been there only once before, when I was small, but it was flatter-ing to have her wondering, husky voice murmuring in my ear.

Then it happened.

At first I thought he was a man, foreshortened by some trick of the underground light. When he isame closer, I saw that it was not. He must have been five feet across the shoulders. Ugly red scars on his forehead showed where the horns had been dug out of his skull. He was a homunculus, obviously derived from cattle stock. Frankly, I had never known that they left them that ill-formed.

And he was drunk.

As he came closer I could pick up the buzz of his mind. "...they're not people, they're not hominids, and they're not Us-what are they doing here? The words they think confuse me." He had never telepathed French before.

This was bad. For him to talk was common enough, but only a few of the homunculi were telepathic-those with special jobs, such as in the Downdeep-downdeep, where only telepathy could relay instructions.

Virginia clung to me.

Thought I, in clear Common Tongue: "True men are we. You must let us pa.s.s."

There was no answer, but a roar. I do not know where he got drunk, or on what, but he did not get my message. I could see his thoughts forming up into panic, helpless-ness, hate. Then he charged, almost dancing toward us, as though he could crush our bodies.

My mind focussed and I threw the stop order at him.

It did not work.Horror-stricken, I realized that I had thought French at him.

Virginia screamed.

The bull-man was upon us.

At the last moment he swerved, pa.s.sed us blindly, and let out a roar which filled the enormous pa.s.sage. He had raced beyond us.

Still holding Virginia, I turned around to see what had made him pa.s.s us.

What I beheld was odd in the extreme.

Our figures ran down the corridor away from us-my black-purple cloak flying in the still air as my image ran, Virginia's golden dress swimming out behind her as she ran with me. The images were perfect and the bull-man pursued them.

I stared around in bewilderment. We had been told that the safeguards no longer protected us.

A girl stood quietly next to the wall. I had almost mistaken her for a statue. Then she spoke. "Come no closer. I am a cat. It was easy enough to fool him. You had better get back to the surface."

"Thank you," I said, "thank you. What is your name?"

"Does it matter?" said the girl. "I'm not a person."

A little offended, I insisted, "I just wanted to thank you." As I spoke to her I saw that she was as beautiful and as bright as a flame. Her skin was clear, the color of cream, and her hair-finer than any human hair could possibly be-was the wild golden orange of a Persian cat.

"I'm C'mell," said the girl, "and I work at Earthport."

That stopped both Virginia and me. Cat-people were be-low us, and should be shunned, but Earthport was above us, and had to be respected. Which was C'mell?

She smiled, and her smile was better suited for my eyes than for Virginia's.

It spoke a whole world of voluptuous knowledge. I knew she wasn't trying to do anything to me; the rest of her manner showed that. Perhaps it was the only smile she knew.

"Don't worry," she said, "about the formalities. You'd bet-ter take these steps here. I hear him coming back."

I spun around, looking for the drunken bull-man. He was not to be seen.

"Go up here," urged C'mell. "They are emergency steps and you will be back on the surface. I can keep him from following. Was that French you were speaking?""Yes," said I. "How did you-?"

"Get along," she said. "Sorry I asked. Hurry!"

I entered the small door. A spiral staircase went to the surface. It was below our dignity as true people to use steps, but with C'mell urging me, there was nothing else I could do. I nodded goodbye to C'mell and drew Virginia after me up the stairs.

At the surface we stopped.

Virginia gasped, "Wasn't it horrible?"

"We're safe now," said I.

"It's not safety," she said. "It's the dirtiness of it. Imagine having to talk to her!"

Virginia meant that C'mell was worse than the drunken bull-man. She sensed my reserve because she said, "The sad thing is, you'll see her again..."

"What! How do you know that?"