Authors: James Blish
Anywhen (15 page)
He touched his gun. It did not reassure him much. It occurred to him that since this sea was visited, anything that lived here might hesitate to attack him, but he knew he could not count on that. The Chandalese might well have truces with such creatures which would not protect Naysmith for an instant. It was imperative to keep going, and if possible, to get out.
The totem poles were beginning to thin out. He could see high-water marks on the remaining ones, which meant that the underground ocean was large enough to show tides, but he had no idea what size that indicated; for one thing, he knew neither the mass nor the distance of Chandala's moon. He did remember, however, that he had seen no tide marks as he had entered the forest of idols, which meant that it was ebbing now; and it seemed to him that the current was distinctly faster than before.
He poled forward vigorously. Several times he heard the flapping noise and the fluttering sounds again, and not these alone. There were other noises. Some of them were impossible to interpret, and some of them so suggestive that he could only pray that he was wrong about them. For a while he tried shutting the radio off, but he found the silence inside the helmet even less possible to endure, as well as cutting him off from possible cues to pursuit.
But the current continued to pick up, and shortly he noticed that he was casting a shadow into the shell before him. If the source of the light, whatever it was, was over the center of the sea, it was either relatively near the water or he had come a long distance
;
perhaps both.
Then there was a wall looming to his left side. Five more long thrusts with the spear, and there was another on his right. The light dimmed; the water ran faster.
He was back on a river again. By the time the blackness closed down the current was rushing, and once more he was forced to sit down and use the spear as a steering oar. Again ahead of him he heard the scream of gas jets.
Mixed with that sound was another noise, a prolonged roaring which at first completely baffled him. Then, suddenly, he recognized it; it was the sound of a great cataract.
Frantically, he flashed his light about. There was a ledge of sorts beside the torrent, but he was going so fast now that to make a leap for it would risk smashing his helmet. All the same, he had no choice. He thrust the skidding coracle toward the wall and jumped.
He struck fair, on his feet. He secured his balance in time to see the shell swept away, with his pack and spare oxygen bottles.
For a reason he cannot now explain, this amused him.
This, as Naysmith chooses to tell it, is the end of the meaningful part of the story, though by no means the end of his travails; these he dismisses as "scenery." As his historian, I can't be quite so offhand about them, but he has supplied me with few details to go by.
He found the cataract, not very far ahead; evidently, he had jumped none too soon. As its sound had suggested, it was a monster, leaping over an underground cliff
which he guesses must have been four or five miles high, into a cavern which might have been the Great Gulf itself. He says, and I think he is right, that we now have an explanation for the low density of Chandala: If the rest of it has as much underground area as the part he saw, its crust must be extremely porous. By this reckoning, the Chandalese underworld must have almost the surface area of Mars.
It must have seemed a world to itself indeed to Nay-smith, standing on the rim of that gulf and looking down at its fire-filled floor. Where the cataract struck, steam rose in huge billows and plumes, and with a scream which forced him to shut off the radio at once. Occasionally the ground shook faintly under his feet.
Face to face with Hell, Naysmith found reason to hope. This inferno, it seemed to him, might well underlie the region of hot springs, geysers, and fumaroles toward which he had been heading from the beginning; and if so, there should be dead volcanic funnels through which he might escape to the surface. This proved to be the case; but first he had to pick his way around the edge of the abyss to search for one, starting occasional rockslides, the heat blasting through his helmet, and all in the most profound and unnatural silence. If this is scenery, I prefer not to be offered any more scenic vacations.
"But on the way, I figured it out," Naysmith told me. "Rituals don't grow without a reason—especially not rituals involving a whole culture. This one has a reason that I should have been the first to see—or any physician should. You, too."
"Thanks. But
I don't
see it. If the Heart stars do, they aren't telling."
"They must think it's obvious," Naysmith said. "It's eugenics. Most planets select for better genes by controlling breeding. The Chandalese do it by genocide. They force their lower castes to kill themselves off."
"Ugh. Are you sure? Is it scientific? I don't see how it could be, under the circumstances."
"Well, I don't have all the data. But I think a really thorough study of Chandalese history, with a statistician to help, would show that it is. It's also an enormously dangerous method, and it may wind up with the whole planet dead; that's the chance they're taking, and I assume they're aware of it."
"Well," I said, "assuming that it does work, I wouldn't admit a planet that 'survived' by that method into any federation 1 ran."
"No," Naysmith said soberly. "Neither would I. And there's the rub, you see, because the Heart stars
will.
That's what shook me. I may have been a lousy doctor—and don't waste your breath denying it, you know what I mean—but I've been giving at least lip service to all our standard humanitarian assumptions all my life, without ever examining them. What the Chandalese face up to, and we don't, is that death is now and has always been
the
drive wheel of evolution. They not only face up to it, they
use
it.
"When I was down there in the middle of that sewer, I was in the middle of my own
Goetzendaemmerung
—the twilight of the idols that Nietzsche speaks of. I could see all the totems of my own world, of my own life, falling into the muck . . . shooting like logs over the brink into Hell. And it was then that I knew I couldn't be a surgeon any more."
"Come now," I said. "You'll get over it. After all, it's just another planet with strange customs. There are millions of them."
"You weren't there," Naysmith said, looking over my
shoulder at nothing. "For you, that's all it is. For me . . . `No other taste shall change this.' Don't you see? All planets are Chandalas. It's not just that Hell is real. The laws that run it are the laws of life everywhere."
His gaze returned to me. It made me horribly uneasy.
"What was it Mephistopheles said? 'Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it.' The totems are falling all around us as we sit here. One by one, Rosenbaum; one by one."
And that is how we lost Naysmith. It would have been easy enough to say simply that he had a desperate experience on a savage planet and that it damaged his sanity, and let it go at that. But it would not be true. I would dismiss it that way myself if I could.
But I cannot bring myself to forget that the Heart stars classify Chandala as a civilized world.
A number of readers, including Fritz Leiber, complained on its first appearance that this story wasn't a fantasy at all. But there are, on the contrary, two fantastic assumptions buried in it, one large and one small. The present title—which was the original, though not the one under which it first appeared—probably won't help, since the whole quotation from which it comes appeared in the magazine editor's blurb for the piece.
The early Mott Street morning was misty, but that would burn off later; it was going to be a hot day in New York. The double doors of the boarded-up shop swung inward with a grating noise, and a black-and-white tomcat bolted out of an overflowing garbage can next door and slid beneath a parked car. It was safe there: The car had been left in distress two days ago, and since then the neighborhood kids had removed three tires and the engine.
After that, nothing moved for a while. At last, a preternaturally clean old man, neatly dressed in very clean rags, came out of the dark, chill interior of the shop with a kettle heaped with freshly fired charcoal, which he set on the sidewalk. Straightening, he took a good long look at the day, exposing his cleanliness, the sign of his reclamation from the Bowery two blocks away, to the unkind air. Then he scuffled back into the cave with a bubbly sigh; he would next see the day tomorrow morning at the same time, if it didn't rain. Behind him, the bucket of charcoal sent up petals of yellow flame, in the midst of which the briquettes nestled like dragon's eggs, still unhatched.
Now emerged the hot-dog wagons, three of them, one by one, their blue-and-orange-striped parasols bobbing stiffly, pushed by men in stiff caps. The men helped themselves to charcoal from the bucket, to heat the franks ( all meat) and the sauerkraut (all cabbage) and the rolls (all sawdust ). Behind them came the fruit pushcarts, and then two carts heaped with the vegetables of the district: minute artichokes for three cents each, Italian tomatoes, eggplants in all sizes, zucchini, peppers, purple onions.
When the pushcarts were all gone the street was quiet again, but the cat stayed underneath the late-model wreck at the curb. It was waiting for the dogs, who after a while emerged with their men: scrubby, yellowing animals with long foxy noses and plumy tails carried low, hitched to the men with imaginative networks of old imitation-alligator belts and baby-carriage straps. There was also one authentic German shepherd who wore an authentic rigid Seeing-Eye harness; the man he was pulling was a powerfully built Negro who was already wearing his sign:
PRAY IN YOUR OWN WAY
EVERY DAY
TAKE A PRAYER CARD
THEY'RE FREE
I AM BLIND
THANK YOU
The others still carried their signs under their arms, though all were wearing their dark glasses. They paused to sniff at the day.
"Pretty good," said the man with the German shepherd. "Let's go. And don't any of you bastards be late back." The others mumbled, and then they too filed off toward
Houston Street, where the bums were already in motion toward the Volunteers of America shop, hoping to pick up a little heavy lifting to buy cigarettes with. The bums avoided the dogs very scrupulously. The dogs pulled the men west and down the sixty steps of the Broadway-Lafayette IND station to the F train, which begins there, and they all sat together in the rear car. There was almost no talking, but one of the men already had his transistor radio going, filling the car with a hysterical mixture of traffic reports and rock-and-roll.
The cat stayed under the late-model wreck; it was now time for the children to burst out of the church and charge toward the parochial school across the street, screaming and pummeling each other with their prayer books.
Another clean old man took in the empty charcoal bucket, and the doors closed.
The dogs pulled the men out of the F train at the Forty-seventh—Fiftieth Street station on Sixth Avenue, which is the Rockefeller Center stop; they emerged, however, at the Forty-seventh Street end, which is almost squarely in the middle of Manhattan's diamond mart. Here they got out their cups, each of which contained a quarter to shake, and hung on their signs; then they moved singly, at five-minute intervals, one block north, and then slowly east.
The signs were all metal, hung at belt level, front and back, and all were black with greenish-yellow lettering. The calligraphy was also all the same: curlicue capitals, like the upper case of that type font known as Hobo.
The messages, however, were varied, though they had obvious similarities in style. The one following the man with the German shepherd and the prayer cards, for instance, said:
GOD BLESS YOU
YOU CAN SEE
AND I CAN'T
THANK YOU
Slowly they deployed along Forty-eighth Street toward Fifth Avenue, which was already teeming with people, though it was only 10:00 A.M. At the Fifth Avenue end, which is marked by Black, Starr and Gorham, a phenomenally expensive purveyor of such luxuries as one-fork-of-a-kind sterling, an old blind woman in the uniform of the Lighthouse sat behind a table on which was a tambourine, playing a guitar and whining out a hymn. A dog lay at her feet. Only a few feet away, still in front of one of Black, Starr and Gorham's show windows, was a young man with a dog, standing with a guitar, singing rock-and-roll at the top of his voice. Two blocks up Fifth Avenue, at the terrace of Rockefeller Center, two women and a man in Salvation Army uniforms played hymns on three trumpets in close harmony ( a change from yesterday, when that stand had been occupied only by an Army officer with a baritone saxhorn which he could barely play), but they didn't matter—the men weren't working Rockefeller Center any more, having already done for that area.
The dogs ignored the old woman and the rock-and-roller as well, and so did the men. They never sang. The man with the transistor radio turned it up a little when he worked that end of the block.
The street filled still further. As it got on toward a blistering noon, the travellers that counted came out: advertising agency account men ( "and when the client's sales forecast was under ours by fifteen percent, they went and cut the budget on us, and now poor old Jim's got his yacht posted for sale in the men's room"), the middle
echelons of editors from important weekly news magazines ( with the latest dirty verses about their publishers ), literary agents playing musical chairs ("went to S&S and took Zuck Stamler with him with twenty-five percent of the contract and an option clause bound in purest brass"), and an occasional bewildered opinion-maker from the trade press ("a buck eighty-five for
spaghetti?") .
None of these ever dropped a coin in the cups, but the dogs were not disturbed; they walked their men in the heat.