The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 2 Page 6

  Spoiled food, floating supplies, grimy water surged up the stairwell. The second and first levels were bigger and would take longer to fill, but they’d fill. Rugs, furnishings, clothing, all the things in the house would be waterlogged and ruined. Probably the weight of so much water would shift the house, rupture water pipes and other fluid intakes. It would take a repair crew more than a day just to clean up the mess. The house itself was done for, not repairable. The blonde and the thin man would never live in it again.

  Serve them right.

  The dulls could build another house; they built like beavers. There was only one of me in the world.

  The earliest memory I have is of some woman, probably the cresh-mother, staring at me with an expression of shock and horror. Just that. I’ve tried to remember what happened directly before or after, but I can’t. Before, there’s nothing but the dark formless shaft of no-memory that runs back to birth. Afterward, the big calm.

  From my fifth year, it must have been, to my fifteenth, everything I can remember floats in a pleasant dim sea. Nothing was terribly important. I was languid and soft; I drifted. Waking merged into sleep.

  In my fifteenth year it was the fashion in love-play for the young people to pair off for months or longer. “Loving steady,” we called it. I remember how the older people protested that it was unhealthy; but we were all normal juniors, and nearly as free as adults under the law.

  All but me.

  The first steady girl I had was named Elen. She had blonde hair, almost white, worn long; her lashes were dark and her eyes pale green. Startling eyes: they didn’t look as if they were looking at you. They looked blind.

  Several times she gave me strange startled glances, something between fright and anger. Once it was because I held her too tightly, and hurt her; other times, it seemed to be for nothing at all.

  In our group, a pairing that broke up sooner than four weeks was a little suspect—there must be something wrong with one partner or both, or the pairing would have lasted longer.

  Four weeks and a day after Elen and I made our pairing, she told me she was breaking it.

  I’d thought I was ready. But I felt the room spin half around me till the wall came against my palm and stopped.

  The room had been in use as a hobby chamber; there was a rack of plasticraft knives under my hand. I took one without thinking, and when I saw it I thought, I’ll frighten her.

  And I saw the startled, half-angry look in her pale eyes as I went toward her; but this is curious: she wasn’t looking at the knife. She was looking at my face.

  The elders found me later with the blood on me, and put me into a locked room. Then it was my turn to be frightened, because I realized for the first time that it was possible for a human being to do what I had done.

  And if I could do it to Elen, I thought, surely they could do it to me.

  But they couldn’t. They set me free: they had to.

  And it was then I understood that I was the king of the world....

  The sky was turning clear violet when I woke up, and shadow was spilling out from the hedges. I went down the hill until I saw the ghostly blue of photon tubes glowing in a big oblong, just outside the commerce area. I went that way, by habit.

  Other people were lining up at the entrance to show their books and be admitted. I brushed by them, seeing the shocked faces and feeling their bodies flinch away, and went on into the robing chamber.

  Straps, aqualungs, masks and flippers were all for the taking. I stripped, dropping the clothes where I stood, and put the underwater equipment on. I strode out to the poolside, monstrous, like a being from another world. I adjusted the lung and the flippers, and slipped into the water.

  Underneath, it was all crystal blue, with the forms of swimmers sliding through it like pale angels. Schools of small fish scattered as I went down. My heart was beating with a painful joy.

  Down, far down, I saw a girl slowly undulating through the motions of sinuous underwater dance, writhing around and around a ribbed column of imitation coral. She had a suction-tipped fish lance in her hand, but she was not using it; she was only dancing, all by herself, down at the bottom of the water.

  I swam after her. She was young and delicately made, and when she saw the deliberately clumsy motions I made in imitation of hers, her eyes glinted with amusement behind her mask. She bowed to me in mockery, and slowly glided off with simple, exaggerated movements, like a child’s ballet.

  I followed. Around her and around I swam, stiff-legged; first more childlike and awkward than she, then subtly parodying her motions; then improvising on them until I was dancing an intricate, mocking dance around her.

  I saw her eyes widen. She matched her rhythm to mine, then, and together, apart, together again we coiled the wake of our dancing. At last, exhausted, we clung together where a bridge of plastic coral arched over us. Her cool body was in the bend of my arm; behind two thicknesses of vitrin—a world away!—her eyes were friendly and kind.

  There was a moment when, two strangers yet one flesh, we felt our souls speak to one another across that abyss of matter. It was a truncated embrace— we could not kiss, we could not speak—but her hands lay confidingly on my shoulders, and her eyes looked into mine.

  That moment had to end. She gestured toward the surface, and left me. I followed her up. I was feeling drowsy and almost at peace, after my sickness. I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought.

  We rose together at the side of the pool. She turned to me, removing her mask: and her smile stopped, and melted away. She stared at me with a horrified disgust, wrinkling her nose.

  “Pyah!” she said, and turned, awkward in her flippers. Watching her, I saw her fall into the arms of a white-haired man, and heard her hysterical voice tumbling over itself.

  “But don’t you remember?” the man’s voice rumbled. “You should know it by heart.” He turned. “Hal, is there a copy of it in the clubhouse?”

  A murmur answered him, and in a few moments a young man came out holding a slender brown pamphlet.

  I knew that pamphlet. I could even have told you what page the white-haired man opened it to; what sentences the girl was reading as I watched.

  I waited. I don’t know why.

  I heard her voice rising: “To think that I let him touch me!” And the white-haired man reassured her, the words rumbling, too low to hear. I saw her back straighten. She looked across at me . . . only a few yards in that scented, blue-lit air; a world away . . . and folded up the pamphlet into a hard wad, threw it, and turned on her heel.

  The pamphlet landed almost at my feet. I touched it with my toe, and it opened to the page I had been thinking of:

  . . . sedation until his 15th year, when for sexual reasons it became no longer practicable. While the advisors and medical staff hesitated, he killed a girl of the group by violence.

  And farther down:

  The solution finally adopted was three-fold.

  A sanction—the only sanction possible to our humane, permissive society. Excommunication: not to speak to him, touch him willingly, or acknowledge his existence.

  A precaution. Taking advantage of a mild predisposition to epilepsy, a variant of the so-called Kusko analog technique was employed, to prevent by an epileptic seizure any future act of violence.

  A warning. A careful alteration of his body chemistry was effected to make his exhaled and exuded wastes emit a strongly pungent and offensive odor. In mercy, he himself was rendered unable to detect this smell.

  Fortunately, the genetic and environmental accidents which combined to produce this atavism have been fully explained and can never again . . .

  The words stopped meaning anything, as they always did at that point. I didn’t want to read any farther; it was all nonsense, anyway. I was the king of the world.

  I got up and went away, out into the night, blind to the dulls who thronged the rooms I passed.

  Two squares away was the commerce area. I found a clothing outlet and w
ent in. All the free clothes in the display cases were drab: those were for worthless floaters, not for me. I went past them to the specials, and found a combination I could stand—silver and blue, with a severe black piping down the tunic. A dull would have said it was “nice.” I punched for it. The automatic looked me over with its dull glassy eye, and croaked, “Your contribution book, please.”

  I could have had a contribution book, for the trouble of stepping out into the street and taking it away from the first passer-by; but I didn’t have the patience. I picked up the one-legged table from the refreshment nook, hefted it, and swung it at the cabinet door. The metal shrieked and dented, opposite the catch. I swung once more to the same place, and the door sprang open. I pulled out clothing in handfuls till I got a set that would fit me.

  I bathed and changed, and then went prowling in the big multi-outlet down the avenue. All those places are arranged pretty much alike, no matter what the local managers do to them. I went straight to the knives, and picked out three in graduated sizes, down to the size of my fingernail. Then I had to take my chances. I tried the furniture department, where I had had good luck once in a while, but this year all they were using was metal. I had to have seasoned wood.

  I knew where there was a big cache of cherry wood, in good-sized blocks, in a forgotten warehouse up north at a place called Kootenay. I could have carried some around, with me—enough for years—but what for, when the world belonged to me?

  It didn’t take me long. Down in the workshop section, of all places, I found some antiques—tables and benches, all with wooden tops. While the dulls collected down at the other end of the room, pretending not to notice, I sawed off a good oblong chunk of the smallest bench, and made a base for it out of another.

  As long as I was there, it was a good place to work, and I could eat and sleep upstairs, so I stayed.

  I knew what I wanted to do. It was going to be a man, sitting, with his legs crossed and his forearms resting down along his calves. His head was going to be tilted back, and his eyes closed, as if he were turning his face up to the sun.

  In three days it was finished. The trunk and limbs had a shape that was not man and not wood, but something in between: something that hadn’t existed before I made it.

  Beauty. That was the old word.

  I had carved one of the figure’s hands hanging loosely, and the other one curled shut. There had to be a time to stop and say it was finished. I took the smallest knife, the one I had been using to scrape the wood smooth, and cut away the handle and ground down what was left of the shaft to a thin spike. Then I drilled a hole into the wood of the figurine’s hand, in the hollow between thumb and curled finger. I fitted the knife blade in there; in the small hand it was a sword.

  I cemented it in place. Then I took the sharp blade and stabbed my thumb, and smeared the blade.

  I hunted most of that day, and finally found the right place—a niche in an outcropping of striated brown rock, in a little triangular half-wild patch that had been left where two roads forked. Nothing was permanent, of course, in a community like this one that might change its houses every five years or so, to follow the fashion; but this spot had been left to itself for a long time. It was the best I could do.

  I had the paper ready: it was one of a batch I had printed up a year ago. The paper was treated, and I knew it would stay legible a long time. I hid a little photo capsule in the back of the niche, and ran the control wire to a staple in the base of the figurine. I put the figurine down on top of the paper, and anchored it lightly to the rock with two spots of all-cement. I had done it so often that it came naturally; I knew just how much cement would hold the figurine steady against a casual hand, but yield to one that really wanted to pull it down.

  Then I stepped back to look: and the power and the pity of it made my breath come short, and tears start to my eyes.

  Reflected light gleamed fitfully on the dark-stained blade that hung from his hand. He was sitting alone in that niche that closed him in like a coffin. His eyes were shut, and his head tilted back, as if he were turning his face up to the sun.

  But only rock was over his head. There was no sun for him.

  Hunched on the cool bare ground under a pepper tree, I was looking down across the road at the shadowed niche where my figurine sat.

  I was all finished here. There was nothing more to keep me, and yet I couldn’t leave.

  People walked past now and then—not often. The community seemed half deserted, as if most of the people had flocked off to a surf party somewhere, or a contribution meeting, or to watch a new house being dug to replace the one I had wrecked.... There was a little wind blowing toward me, cool and lonesome in the leaves.

  Up the other side of the hollow there was a terrace, and on that terrace, half an hour ago, I had seen a brief flash of color—a boy’s head, with a red cap on it, moving past and out of sight.

  That was why I had to stay. I was thinking how that boy might come down from his terrace and into my road, and passing the little wild triangle of land, see my figurine. I was thinking he might not pass by indifferently, but stop: and go closer to look: and pick up the wooden man: and read what was written on the paper underneath.

  I believed that sometime it had to happen. I wanted it so hard that I ached.

  My carvings were all over the world, wherever I had wandered. There was one in Congo City, carved of ebony, dusty-black; one on Cyprus, of bone; one in New Bombay, of shell; one in Chang-teh, of jade.

  They were like signs printed in red and green, in a color-blind world. Only the one I was looking for would ever pick one of them up, and read the message I knew by heart.

  TO YOU WHO CAN SEE, the first sentence said, I OFFER YOU A WORLD....

  There was a flash of color up on the terrace. I stiffened. A minute later, here it came again, from a different direction: it was the boy, clambering down the slope, brilliant against the green, with his red sharp-billed cap like a woodpecker’s head.

  I held my breath.

  He came toward me through the fluttering leaves, ticked off by pencils of sunlight as he passed. He was a brown boy, I could see at this distance, with a serious thin face. His ears stuck out, flickering pink with the sun behind them, and his elbow and knee pads made him look knobby.

  He reached the fork in the road, and chose the path on my side. I huddled into myself as he came nearer. Let him see it, let him not see me, I thought fiercely.

  My fingers closed around a stone.

  He was nearer, walking jerkily with his hands in his pockets, watching his feet mostly.

  When he was almost opposite me, I threw the stone.

  It rustled through the leaves below the niche in the rock. The boy’s head turned. He stopped, staring. I think he saw the figurine then. I’m sure he saw it.

  He took one step.

  “Risha!” came floating down from the terrace.

  And he looked up. “Here,” he piped.

  I saw the woman’s head, tiny at the top of the terrace. She called something I didn’t hear; I was standing up, tight with anger.

  Then the wind shifted. It blew from me to the boy. He whirled around, his eyes big, and clapped a hand to his nose.

  “Oh, what a stench!” he said.

  He turned to shout, “Coming!” and then he was gone, hurrying back up the road, into the unstable blur of green.

  My one chance, ruined. He would have seen the image, I knew, if it hadn’t been for that damned woman, and the wind shifting. . . . They were all against me, people, wind and all.

  And the figurine still sat, blind eyes turned up to the rocky sky.

  There was something inside me that told me to take my disappointment and go away from there, and not come back.

  I knew I would be sorry. I did it anyway: took the image out of the niche, and the paper with it, and climbed the slope. At the top I heard his clear voice laughing.

  There was a thing that might have been an ornamental mound, or the camouflag
ed top of a buried house. I went around it, tripping over my own feet, and came upon the boy kneeling on the turf. He was playing with a brown and white puppy.

  He looked up with the laughter going out of his face. There was no wind, and he could smell me. I knew it was bad. No wind, and the puppy to distract him—everything about it was wrong. But I went to him blindly anyhow, and fell on one knee, and shoved the figurine at his face.

  “Look—” I said.

  He went over backwards in his hurry: he couldn’t even have seen the image, except as a brown blur coming at him. He scrambled up, with the puppy whining and yapping around his heels, and ran for the mound.

  I was up after him, clawing up moist earth and grass as I rose. In the other hand I still had the image clutched, and the paper with it.

  A door popped open and swallowed him and popped shut again in my face. With the flat of my hand I beat the vines around it until I hit the doorplate by accident and the door opened. I dived in, shouting, “Wait,” and was in a spiral passage, lit pearl-gray, winding downward. Down I went headlong, and came out at the wrong door—an underground conservatory, humid and hot under the yellow lights, with dripping rank leaves in long rows. I went down the aisle raging, overturning the tanks, until I came to a vestibule and an elevator.

  Down I went again to the third level and a labyrinth of guest rooms, all echoing, all empty. At last I found a ramp leading upward, past the conservatory, and at the end of it voices.

  The door was clear vitrin, and I paused on the near side of it looking and listening. There was the boy, and a woman old enough to be his mother, just— sister or cousin, more likely—and an elderly woman in a hard chair holding the puppy. The room was comfortable and tasteless, like other rooms.

  I saw the shock grow on their faces as I burst in: it was always the same, they knew I would like to kill them, but they never expected that I would come uninvited into a house. It was not done.