Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (216 page)

We had quarreled more than once, and fiercely. She would not leave Shandakor and I couldn’t take her out by force as long as I was chained. And I was not to be released until everyone but Rhul had entered the Place of Sleep and the last page of that long history had been written.

I walked with her among the dancers and the slaves and the bright-cloaked princes. There were no temples in Shandakor. If they worshipped anything it was beauty and to that their whole city was a shrine. Duani’s eyes were rapt and there was a remoteness on her now.

I held her hand and looked at the towers of turquoise and cinnabar, the pavings of rose quartz and marble, the walls of pink and white and deep red coral, and to me they were hideous. The ghostly crowds, the mockery of life, the phantom splendors of the past were hideous, a drug, a snare.

“The faculty of reason!” I thought and saw no reason in any of it.

I looked up to where the great globe turned and turned against the sky, keeping these mockeries alive. “Have you ever seen the city as it is—without the Shadows?”

“No. I think only Rhul, who is the oldest, remembers it that way. I think it must have been very lonely. Even then there were less than three thousand of us left.”

It must indeed have been lonely. They must have wanted the Shadows as much to people the empty streets as to fend off the enemies who believed in magic.

I kept looking at the globe. We walked for a long time. And then I said, “I must go back to the tower.”

She smiled at me very tenderly. “Soon you will be free of the tower—and of these.” She touched the chains. “No, don’t be sad, JonRoss. You will remember me and Shandakor as one remembers a dream.” She held up her face, that was so lovely and so unlike the meaty faces of human women, and her eyes were full of somber lights. I kissed her and then I caught her up in my arms and carried her back to the tower.

In that room, where the great shaft turned, I told her, “I have to tend the things below. Go up onto the platform, Duani, where you can see all Shandakor. I’ll be with you soon.”

I don’t know whether she had some hint of what was in my mind or whether it was only the imminence of parting that made her look at me as she did. I thought she was going to speak but she did not, climbing the ladder obediently. I watched her slender golden body vanish upward. Then I went into the chamber below.

There was a heavy metal bar there that was part of a manual control for regulating the rate of turn. I took it off its pin. Then I closed the simple switches on the power plant. I tore out all the leads and smashed the connections with the bar. I did what damage I could to die cogs and the offset shaft. I worked very fast. Then I went up into the main chamber again. The great shaft was still turning but slowly, ever more slowly.

There was a cry from above me and I saw Duani. I sprang up the ladder, thrusting her back onto the platform. The globe moved heavily of its own momentum. Soon it would stop but the white fires still flickered in the crystal rods. I climbed up onto the railing, clinging to a strut. The chains on my wrists and ankles made it hard but I could reach. Duani tried to pull me down. I think she was screaming. I hung on and smashed the crystal rods with the bar, as many as I could.

There was no more motion, no more light. I got down on the platform again and dropped the bar. Duani had forgotten me. She was looking at the city.

The lights of many colors that had burned there were burning still but they were old and dim, cold embers without radiance. The towers of jade and turquoise rose up against the little moons and they were broken and cracked with time and there was no glory in them. They were desolate and very sad. The night lay clotted around their feet. The streets, the plazas and the market-squares were empty, their marble paving blank and bare. The soldiers had gone from the walls of Shandakor, with their banners and their bright mail, and there was no longer any movement anywhere within the gates.

Duani let out one small voiceless cry. And as though in answer to it, suddenly from the darkness of the valley and the slopes beyond there rose a thin fierce howling as of wolves.

“Why?” she whispered.
“Why?”
She turned to me. Her face was pitiful. I caught her to me.

“I couldn’t let you die! Not for dreams and visions, nothing. Look, Duani. Look at Shandakor.” I wanted to force her to understand. “Shandakor is broken and ugly and forlorn. It is a dead city—but you’re alive. There are many cities but only one life for you.”

Still she looked at me and it was hard to meet her eyes. She said, “We knew all that, JonRoss.”

“Duani, you’re a child, you’ve only a child’s way of thought. Forget the past and think of tomorrow. We can get through the barbarians. Corin did. And after that…”

“And after that you would still be human—and I would not.” From below us in the dim and empty streets there came a sound of lamentation. I tried to hold her but she slipped out from between my hands. “And I am glad that you are human,” she whispered. “You will never understand what you have done.”

And she was gone before I could stop her, down into the tower. I went after her. Down the endless winding stairs with my chains clattering between my feet, out into the streets, the dark and broken and deserted streets of Shandakor. I called her name and her golden body went before me, fleet and slender, distant and more distant. The chains dragged upon my feet and the night took her away from me.

I stopped. The whelming silence rushed smoothly over me and I was bitterly afraid of this dark dead Shandakor that I did not know. I called again to Duani and then I began to search for her in the shattered shadowed streets. I know now how long it must have been before I found her.

For when I found her, she was with the others. The last people of Shandakor, the men and the women, the women first, were walking silently in a long line toward a low flat-roofed building that I knew without telling was the Place of Sleep.

They were going to die and there was no pride in their faces now. There was a sickness in them, a sickness and a hurt in their eyes as they moved heavily forward, not looking, not wanting to look at the sordid ancient streets that I had stripped of glory.

“Duani.’“
I called, and ran forward but she did not turn in her place in the line. And I saw that she was weeping.

Rhul turned toward me, and his look had a weary contempt that was bitterer than a curse. “Of what use, after all, to kill you now?”

“But I did this thing!
I
did it!”

“You are only human.”

The long line shuffled on and Duani’s little feet were closer to that final doorway. Rhul looked upward at the sky. “There is still time before the
sunrise. The women at least will be spared the indignity of spears.”

“Let me go with her!”

I tried to follow her, to take my place in line. And the weapon in Rhul’s hand moved and there was the pain and I lay as Corin had lain while they went silently on into the Place of Sleep.

The barbarians found me when they came, still half doubtful, into the city after dawn. I think they were afraid of me. I think they feared me as a wizard who had somehow destroyed all the folk of Shandakor.

For they broke my chains and healed my wounds and later they even gave me out of the loot of Shandakor the only thing I wanted—a bit of porcelain, shaped like the head of a young girl.

I sit in the Chair that I craved at the University and my name is written on the roll of the discoverers. I am eminent, I am respectable—I, who murdered the glory of a race.

Why didn’t I go after Duani into the Place of Sleep? I could have crawled! I could have dragged myself across those stones. And I wish to God I had. I wish that I had died with Shandakor!

* * * *

Copyright © 1952 by Better Publications, Inc.

(1931–2008)

Better known as an editor and reviewer than for his writing, Budrys nevertheless put together and impressive writing career, particularly for someone who spent most of his life exiled from his homeland. (His father was a Lithuanian diplomat sent to the U.S. with his family when Budrys was five, before the country was overrun in World War II and then occupied by the Soviet Union. For most of his life, Budrys held a captain’s commission in the Free Lithuanian Army.)

Educated at the University of Miami and Columbia University, Budrys sold his first story, “The High Purpose,” to
Astounding
when he was twenty-one. That same year he started working for such science fiction publishers as Gnome Press and Galaxy Science Fiction, while continuing to write both fiction and nonfiction under a wide range of pseudonyms. Longtime book reviewer for
Galaxy
, Budrys also served as a book editor for
Playboy
, a frequent instructor at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, an organizer and judge for the (somewhat controversial) Writers of the Future awards, and a publicist. (In one publicity stunt, he erected a giant pickle on the proposed site of the Chicago Picasso.)

Budrys became a naturalized American citizen in 1996, but he also lived to see Lithuania freed. Married (since 1954) to Edna F. Duna, he had four sons. He died of metastatic malignant melanoma in 2008.

First Published in
Astounding Science Fiction
, February 1959, by “John A. Sentry”

Know him? Yes, I know him—
knew
him. That was twenty years ago.

Everybody knows him now. Everybody who passed him on the street knows him. Everybody who went to the same schools, or even to different schools in different towns, knows him now. Ask them. But I knew him. I lived three feet away from him for a month and a half. I shipped with him and called him by his first name.

What was he like? What was he thinking, sitting on the edge of his bunk with his jaw in his palm and his eyes on the stars? What did he think he was after?

Well…Well, I think he— You know, I think I never did know him, after all. Not well. Not as well as some of those people who’re writing the books about him seem to.

I couldn’t really describe him to you. He had a duffelbag in his hand and a packed airsuit on his back. The skin of his face had been dried out by ship’s air, burned by ultraviolet and broiled by infra red. The pupils of his eyes had little cloudy specks in them where the cosmic rays had shot through them. But his eyes were steady and his body was hard. What did he look like? He looked like a man.

* * * *

It was after the war, and we were beaten. There used to be a school of thought among us that deplored our combativeness; before we had ever met any people from off Earth, even, you could hear people saying we were toughest, cruelest life-form in the Universe, unfit to mingle with the gentler wiser races in the stars, and a sure bet to steal their galaxy and corrupt it forever. Where these people got their information, I don’t know.

We were beaten. We moved out beyond Centaurus, and Sirius, and then we met the Jeks, the Nosurwey, the Lud. We tried Terrestrial know-how, we tried Production Miracles, we tried patriotism, we tried damning the torpedoes and full speed ahead…and we were smashed back like mayflies in the wind. We died in droves, and we retreated from the guttering fires of a dozen planets, we dug in, we fought through the last ditch, and we were dying on Earth itself before Baker mutinied, shot Cope, and surrendered the remainder of the human race to the wiser, gentler races in the stars. That way, we lived. That way, we were permitted to carry on our little concerns, and mind our manners. The Jeks and the Lud and the Nosurwey returned to their own affairs, and we knew they would leave us alone so long as we didn’t bother them.

We liked it that way. Understand me—we didn’t accept it, we didn’t knuckle under with waiting murder in our hearts—we
liked
it. We were grateful just to be left alone again. We were happy we hadn’t been wiped out like the upstarts the rest of the Universe thought us to be. When they let us keep our own solar system and carry on a trickle of trade with the outside, we accepted it for the fantastically generous gift it was. Too many of our best men were dead for us to have any remaining claim on these things in our own right. I know how it was. I was there, twenty years ago. I was a little, pudgy man with short breath and a high-pitched voice. I was a typical Earthman.

* * * *

We were out on a God-forsaken landing field on Mars, MacReidie and I, loading cargo aboard the
Serenus
. MacReidie was First Officer. I was Second. The stranger came walking up to us.

“Got a job?” he asked, looking at MacReidie.

Mac looked him over. He saw the same things I’d seen. He shook his head. “Not for you. The only thing we’re short on is stokers.”

You wouldn’t know. There’s no such thing as a stoker any more, with automatic ships. But the stranger knew what Mac meant.

Serenus
had what they called an electronic drive. She had to run with an evacuated engine room. The leaking electricity would have broken any stray air down to ozone, which eats metal and rots lungs. So the engine room had the air pumped out of her, and the stokers who tended the dials and set the cathode attitudes had to wear suits, smelling themselves for twelve hours at a time and standing a good chance of cooking where they sat when the drive arced.
Serenus
was an ugly old tub. At that, we were the better of the two interstellar freighters the human race had left.

“You’re bound over the border, aren’t you?”

MacReidie nodded. “That’s right. But—”

“I’ll stoke.”

MacReidie looked over toward me and frowned. I shrugged my shoulders helplessly. I was a little afraid of the stranger, too.

The trouble was the look of him. It was the look you saw in the bars back on Earth, where the veterans of the war sat and stared down into their glasses, waiting for night to fall so they could go out into the alleys and have drunken fights among themselves. But he had brought that look to Mars, to the landing field, and out here there was something disquieting about it.

He’d caught Mac’s look and turned his head to me. “I’ll stoke,” he repeated.

I didn’t know what to say. MacReidie and I—almost all of the men in the Merchant Marine—hadn’t served in the combat arms. We had freighted supplies, and we had seen ships dying on the runs—we’d had our own brushes with commerce raiders, and we’d known enough men who joined the combat forces. But very few of the men came back, and the war this man had fought hadn’t been the same as ours. He’d commanded a fighting ship, somewhere, and come to grips with things we simply didn’t know about. The mark was on him, but not on us. I couldn’t meet his eyes. “O.K. by me,” I mumbled at last.

I saw MacReidie’s mouth turn down at the corners. But he couldn’t gainsay the man any more than I could. MacReidie wasn’t a mumbling man, so he said angrily: “O.K., bucko, you’ll stoke. Go and sign on.”

“Thanks.” The stranger walked quietly away. He wrapped a hand around the cable on a cargo hook and rode into the hold on top of some freight. Mac spat on the ground and went back to supervising his end of the loading. I was busy with mine, and it wasn’t until we’d gotten the
Serenus
loaded and buttoned up that Mac and I even spoke to each other again. Then we talked about the trip. We didn’t talk about the stranger.

* * * *

Daniels, the Third, had signed him on and had moved him into the empty bunk above mine. We slept all in a bunch on the
Serenus
—officers and crew. Even so, we had to sleep in shifts, with the ship’s designers giving ninety per cent of her space to cargo, and eight per cent to power and control. That left very little for the people, who were crammed in any way they could be. I said empty bunk. What I meant was, empty during my sleep shift. That meant he and I’d be sharing work shifts—me up in the control blister, parked in a soft chair, and him down in the engine room, broiling in a suit for twelve hours.

But I ate with him, used the head with him; you can call that rubbing elbows with greatness, if you want to.

He was a very quiet man. Quiet in the way he moved and talked. When we were both climbing into our bunks, that first night, I introduced myself and he introduced himself. Then he heaved himself into his bunk, rolled over on his side, fixed his straps, and fell asleep. He was always friendly toward me, but he must have been very tired that first night. I often wondered what kind of a life he’d lived after the war—what he’d done that made him different from the men who simply grew older in the bars. I wonder, now, if he really did do anything different. In an odd way, I like to think that one day, in a bar, on a day that seemed like all the rest to him when it began, he suddenly looked up with some new thought, put down his glass, and walked straight to the Earth-Mars shuttle field.

He might have come from any town on Earth. Don’t believe the historians too much. Don’t pay too much attention to the Chamber of Commerce plaques. When a man’s name becomes public property, strange things happen to the facts.

* * * *

It was MacReidie who first found out what he’d done during the war.

I’ve got to explain about MacReidie. He takes his opinions fast and strong. He’s a good man—is, or was; I haven’t seen him for a long while—but he liked things simple.

MacReidie said the duffelbag broke loose and floated into the middle of the bunkroom during acceleration. He opened it to see whose it was. When he found out, he closed it up and strapped it back in its place at the foot of the stoker’s bunk.

MacReidie was my relief on the bridge. When he came up, he didn’t relieve me right away. He stood next to my chair and looked out through the ports.

“Captain leave any special instructions in the Order Book?” he asked.

“Just the usual. Keep a tight watch and proceed cautiously.”

“That new stoker,” Mac said.

“Yeah?”

“I knew there was something wrong with him. He’s got an old Marine uniform in his duffel.”

I didn’t say anything. Mac glanced over at me. “Well?”

“I don’t know.” I didn’t.

I couldn’t say I was surprised. It had to be something like that, about the stoker. The mark was on him, as I’ve said.

It was the Marines that did Earth’s best dying. It had to be. They were trained to be the best we had, and they believed in their training. They were the ones who slashed back the deepest when the other side hit us. They were the ones who sallied out into the doomed spaces between the stars and took the war to the other side as well as any human force could ever hope to. They were always the last to leave an abandoned position. If Earth had been giving medals to members of her forces in the war, every man in the Corps would have had the Medal of Honor two and three times over. Posthumously. I don’t believe there were ten of them left alive when Cope was shot. Cope was one of them. They were a kind of human being neither MacReidie nor I could hope to understand.

“You don’t know,” Mac said. “It’s there. In his duffel. Damn it, we’re going out to trade with his sworn enemies! Why do you suppose he wanted to sign on? Why do you suppose he’s so eager to go!”

“You think he’s going to try to start something?”

“Think! That’s exactly what he’s going for. One last big alley fight. One last brawl. When they cut him down—do you suppose they’ll stop with him? They’ll kill us, and then they’ll go in and stamp Earth flat! You know it as well as I do.”

“I don’t know, Mac,” I said. “Go easy.” I could feel the knots in my stomach. I didn’t want any trouble. Not from the stoker, not from Mac. None of us wanted trouble—not even Mac, but he’d cause it to get rid of it, if you follow what I mean about his kind of man.

Mac hit the viewport with his fist. “Easy! Easy—nothing’s easy. I hate this life,” he said in a murderous voice. “I don’t know why I keep signing on. Mars to Centaurus and back, back and forth, in an old rust tub that’s going to blow herself up one of these—”

* * * *

Daniels called me on the phone from Communications. “Turn up your Intercom volume,” he said. “The stoker’s jamming the circuit.”

I kicked the selector switch over, and this is what I got:

“—so there we were at a million per, and the air was gettin’ thick. The Skipper says ‘Cheer up, brave boys, we’ll—’“

He was singing. He had a terrible voice, but he could carry a tune, and he was hammering it out at the top of his lungs.

“Twas the last cruise of the Venus, by God you should of seen us! The pipes were full of whisky, and just to make things risky, the jets were…”

The crew were chuckling into their own chest phones. I could hear Daniels trying to cut him off. But he kept going. I started laughing myself. No one’s supposed to jam an intercom, but it made the crew feel good. When the crew feels good, the ship runs right, and it had been a long time since they’d been happy.

He went on for another twenty minutes. Then his voice thinned out, and I heard him cough a little. “Daniels,” he said, “get a relief down here for me.
Jump to it!
” He said the last part in a Master’s voice. Daniels didn’t ask questions. He sent a man on his way down.

He’d been singing, the stoker had. He’d been singing while he worked with one arm dead, one sleeve ripped open and badly patched because the fabric was slippery with blood. There’d been a flashover in the drivers. By the time his relief got down there, he had the insulation back on, and the drive was purring along the way it should have been. It hadn’t even missed a beat.

He went down to sick bay, got the arm wrapped, and would have gone back on shift if Daniels’d let him.

Those of us who were going off shift found him toying with the theremin in the mess compartment. He didn’t know how to play it, and it sounded like a dog howling.

“Sing, will you!” somebody yelled. He grinned and went back to the “Good Ship
Venus
.” It wasn’t good, but it was loud. From that, we went to “Starways, Farways, and Barways,” and “The Freefall Song.” Somebody started “I Left Her Behind For You,” and that got us off into sentimental things, the way these sessions would sometimes wind up when spacemen were far from home. But not since the war, we all seemed to realize together. We stopped, and looked at each other, and we all began drifting out of the mess compartment.

And maybe it got to him, too. It may explain something. He and I were the last to leave. We went to the bunkroom, and he stopped in the middle of taking off his shirt. He stood there, looking out the porthole, and forgot I was there. I heard him reciting something, softly, under his breath, and I stepped a little closer. This is what it was:

“The rockets rise against the skies,

Slowly; in sunlight gleaming

With silver hue upon the blue.

And the universe waits, dreaming.

“For men must go where the flame-winds blow,

The gas clouds softly plaiting;

Where stars are spun and worlds begun,

And men will find them waiting.

“The song that roars where the rocket soars

Is the song of the stellar flame;