Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (304 page)

“Good night,” I said, and could have tried for another kiss, but instead I lay there like a boy wondering if she’d give me one, which she didn’t. She left the lantern by the top of the ladder, blew it out, and was gone.

* * * *

I slept, and I woke in a place full of the black dark of horror. The loft, yes—gradually I knew that, as a dream drained away from me. Some of me, though, was still running mush-footed through a house something like the Bull and Iron but with ten thousand rooms, and the black wolf followed me, slow as I was because he could wait, and snuffling in noises like words: “Look at me, look at me, look at me!” If I looked, he would have me, so I went on, opening doors, every new room strange but with no window, no sunrise-place. Not one of the doors would latch. Sometimes I leaned my back against one, hearing him slobber and whisper at the crack: “Look at me!” He could open it as soon as I took my weight away, and anyway I must go on to the next door, and the next…When I knew I was awake, when I heard my own rustling against the hay and recognized the feel of my pallet, my own voice broke loose in a whimper: “I’m not a brain-mue. I’ll prove it, I’ll prove it!”

I did get myself in hand. By the time I thought I had courage enough to fumble after the lantern and my flint-and-steel, I no longer needed the light. It was just the loft, with even a trace of moonlight in the one high window. I could wipe the sweat from my body (remembering too late that it was Emmia’s blanket) and think awhile.

Something difficult, and good, and honest. I knew soon enough what that had to be. Then it hardly even troubled me that I couldn’t tell Emmia of it afterward, for there was much about it that wouldn’t seem right to her and so couldn’t be explained. I understood there would always be many things I would not be telling to Emmia…

When the square of moonlight began to change to a different gray I was dressed and ready, the sack with the horn over my shoulder. Nothing remained of the spider-bite but a nasty itch, and that was fading out.

I went down the ladder, out and away, across the city in the still heavy dark, over the stockade and up the mountain with barely enough light to be sure of my course. I traveled slowly, but I was passing my cave (not pausing even to see if the ants had got after my bacon) when the first-light glory told me that sunrise would arrive within the hour. I didn’t see it—when it happened I was passing through that solemn big-tree region where yesterday I might have killed the mue. If I were the killing kind.

In the tangled ugly passage where the grapevines thickened overhead, I caught a wrong smell. Wolf smell.

My knife came out, and was steady in my fingers. My back chilled and tingled, but I think I was more angry than anything else. Angry that I must be halted or threatened by a danger that had nothing to do (I thought) with my errand. I didn’t stop, just worked on through the bad undergrowth watching everywhere, sniffing, as nearly ready as I could be, seeing that no one is ever quite ready to die. All the way to the cat-briers.

The black wolf was directly below the strand of grape-vine that hung down outside the mue’s tulip-tree, and she was dead. I stepped up to the huge carcass and prodded it with my knife. She stretched maybe six feet from nose to tail-tip, an old one, scarred, dingy black, foul. Her neck was broken. I proved to myself, lifting and prodding, that her neck was broken—if you don’t believe it, remember you never saw my North Mountain mue, and his arms. The patches and spatters of blood on the rocks, the ground, the dangling grape-stem, were not hers.

Her body was beginning to stiffen, and cold. It must have happened yesterday, maybe when he came back from the pool, careless perhaps, wondering why he hadn’t started changing to man-beautiful.

I set down my sack and climbed the tulip-tree. I called to him a few times. It troubled me that I hadn’t any name for him. I called: “Friend? I’m coming up, friend. I brought something back to you.” He didn’t answer. I knew why, before I reached the branch above his nest and looked down. The carrion ants were already at work, earning their living. I said: “I brought it back. I did steal it, friend, but I brought it back.”

I don’t remember how many other things I said that would never be answered.

* * * *

I went back through the forest to my cave, with my golden horn, and the day passed over me. Much of the time I wasn’t thinking at all, but in other hours I was. About the thirty-tonners that sail out of Levannon for the northern passage, and then eastward—for the safe Nuin harbors, yes, but eastward, toward the place where the sun is set afire for the day. And I would not go to Levannon on a roan horse, with the blessing and the money of the Kurin family and three attendants, and a serving-maid to warm the bed for me in the next inn. But I would go.

In the afternoon, in the strong light on my ledge, I took out my golden horn, and learned a little. Not a great deal—that day I touched only the fringes of it, but I did discover many notes that the mue had not shown me, and when I ceased to be afraid, the cliff rang, and the voice was clearer than any fancied voice of angels, and it was mine.

Late in the day, I did something like what my poor mue had done. I went up the mountainside well away from my ledge, and with a flat rock I scooped out a pocket in the ground, scattering the earth and wiping out my traces, leaving my golden horn with nothing to mark the place except what was written in my memory. My sack, as well as the mue’s gray moss, was wrapped around it, for I knew it was only a little while before I would be coming back for it. In the meantime there was a need.

I waited a long time outside the stockade that night. It must have been midnight, or past, when I climbed it, and crossed the city once more, and stood a foolish while in the darkness watching Emmia’s dark window, and the jinny-creeper vine, and hearing the city’s last noises dwindle away into nothing. I remember being astonished, so changed was the world (or if you like, myself), that I had never before even dreamed of climbing that vine to her window.

Now it seemed to me that I was afraid of nothing, I was only waiting for a little deeper quiet, a heavier sleep in the old grimy city that had nothing to do with me. Then my hands were on the vine, and I was climbing up through a harmless whisper of leaves, and opening her window all the way, and crossing the sweet-smelling room where I’d never entered before—but her soft breathing told me where she was, and that she slept.

I would have liked to stand there by her bed a long time, feeling her nearness without touching her, just able to make out a little of her face and her arm in the hint of moonlight. I leaned down and spoke her name a few times softly before I kissed her, and she came awake quickly, like a child. “Emmia, it’s just me, Davy. Don’t be afraid of anything. I’m going away, Emmia.”

“No. What—how—what are you doing here? What—”

I closed her mouth, awhile, the best way. Then I said: “I did something difficult, Emmia, and I think it was good and honest too, but I can’t ever tell you what it was, so please—please—don’t ever ask me.”

And so, of course, she asked me, fluttery and troubled and scared but not angry, not pulling away from me. I knew what to do, and words were no part of it, except that many times, after our first plunge into the rainbow, she called me Spice. Other words came later, maybe an hour later: “Davy, you’re not going away for true, are you? Don’t ever go away, Davy.”

“Why, Emmia,” I said, “love package, honey spice, what nonsense! Of course I’ll never go away.”

I think and hope she knew as well as I did that for love’s sake I was lying.

* * * *

Copyright © 1962 by Mercury Press, Inc.

(1904–1964)

My not-very-friendly-to-SF high school library for some reason had a vintage copy of Piper’s
Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen
which I found and devoured. Luckily, this was the mid-1980s and Piper’s work was being reissued by Ace, so I was able to read virtually everything he wrote, which was far too little. He never had much of an ear for character names, and his books were a touch on the violent side, but they had amazing scope, and strong characters who you couldn’t help liking (including one of the first really strong female protagonists in the novella “Omnilingual”), and romance mixed with hard science and history. I read them over and over, waiting for the magic to fade. I still do, and while Piper’s vision of the future is a bit on the paternalistic side, it still retains its magic.

H(enry) Beam Piper was one of the last of John W. Campbell’s discoveries. He’d grown up poor, been kicked out of high school, and couldn’t afford college. He went to work for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Pennsylvania coal country suffuses much of his work.

Although he’d been writing since the 1920s, he didn’t sell his first story until he was in his forties. For the next fifteen years he wrote prolifically, mixing influential alternate histories with a future history cycle loosely based on the rise and fall of the Roman Republic and Empire.

His writing often emphasized libertarian themes, with strong, independent characters solving intractable problems. Unsurprisingly, he couldn’t bring himself to accept help from others when he struggled with financial troubles and depression, especially after the death of his mother and the end of his marriage in the mid-1950s. An avid gun collector, Piper shot himself after first putting down dropcloths and writing a note apologizing for leaving such a mess. Unknown to him, his agent (who had also died recently) had recently made several sales, and a check was literally in the mail.
Lord Kalvan
, his best novel, was published posthumously.

The poignant “Graveyard of Dreams” also exists in significantly different form as
The Cosmic Computer
.

First published in
Galaxy Magazine
, February 1958

Standing at the armor-glass front of the observation deck and watching the mountains rise and grow on the horizon, Conn Maxwell gripped the metal hand-rail with painful intensity, as though trying to hold back the airship by force. Thirty minutes—twenty-six and a fraction of the Terran minutes he had become accustomed to—until he’d have to face it.

Then, realizing that he never, in his own thoughts, addressed himself as “sir,” he turned.

“I beg your pardon?”

It was the first officer, wearing a Terran Federation Space Navy uniform of forty years, or about ten regulation-changes, ago. That was the sort of thing he had taken for granted before he had gone away. Now he was noticing it everywhere.

“Thirty minutes out of Litchfield, sir,” the ship’s officer repeated. “You’ll go off by the midship gangway on the starboard side.”

“Yes, I know. Thank you.”

The first mate held out the clipboard he was carrying. “Would you mind checking over this, Mr. Maxwell? Your baggage list.”

“Certainly.” He glanced at the slip of paper. Valises, eighteen and twenty-five kilos, two; trunks, seventy-five and seventy kilos, two; microbook case, one-fifty kilos, one. The last item fanned up a little flicker of anger in him, not at any person, even himself, but at the situation in which he found himself and the futility of the whole thing.

“Yes, that’s everything. I have no hand-luggage, just this stuff.”

He noticed that this was the only baggage list under the clip; the other papers were all freight and express manifests. “Not many passengers left aboard, are there?”

“You’re the only one in first-class, sir,” the mate replied. “About forty farm-laborers on the lower deck. Everybody else got off at the other stops. Litchfield’s the end of the run. You know anything about the place?”

“I was born there. I’ve been away at school for the last five years.”

“On Baldur?”

“Terra. University of Montevideo.” Once Conn would have said it almost boastfully.

The mate gave him a quick look of surprised respect, then grinned and nodded. “Of course; I should have known. You’re Rodney Maxwell’s son, aren’t you? Your father’s one of our regular freight shippers. Been sending out a lot of stuff lately.” He looked as though he would have liked to continue the conversation, but said: “Sorry, I’ve got to go. Lot of things to attend to before landing.” He touched the visor of his cap and turned away.

The mountains were closer when Conn looked forward again, and he glanced down. Five years and two space voyages ago, seen from the afterdeck of this ship or one of her sisters, the woods had been green with new foliage, and the wine-melon fields had been in pink blossom. He tried to picture the scene sliding away below instead of drawing in toward him, as though to force himself back to a moment of the irretrievable past.

But the moment was gone, and with it the eager excitement and the half-formed anticipations of the things he would learn and accomplish on Terra. The things he would learn—microbook case, one-fifty kilos, one. One of the steel trunks was full of things he had learned and accomplished, too. Maybe they, at least, had some value.…

The woods were autumn-tinted now and the fields were bare and brown.

They had gotten the crop in early this year, for the fields had all been harvested. Those workers below must be going out for the wine-pressing. That extra hands were needed for that meant a big crop, and yet it seemed that less land was under cultivation than when he had gone away. He could see squares of low brush among the new forests that had grown up in the last forty years, and the few stands of original timber looked like hills above the second growth. Those trees had been standing when the planet had been colonized.

That had been two hundred years ago, at the middle of the Seventh Century, Atomic Era. The name of the planet—Poictesme—told that: the Surromanticist Movement, when the critics and professors were rediscovering James Branch Cabell.

* * * *

Funny how much was coming back to him now—things he had picked up from the minimal liberal-arts and general-humanities courses he had taken and then forgotten in his absorption with the science and tech studies.

The first extrasolar planets, as they had been discovered, had been named from Norse mythology—Odin and Baldur and Thor, Uller and Freya, Bifrost and Asgard and Niflheim. When the Norse names ran out, the discoverers had turned to other mythologies, Celtic and Egyptian and Hindu and Assyrian, and by the middle of the Seventh Century they were naming planets for almost anything.

Anything, that is, but actual persons; their names were reserved for stars. Like Alpha Gartner, the sun of Poictesme, and Beta Gartner, a buckshot-sized pink glow in the southeast, and Gamma Gartner, out of sight on the other side of the world, all named for old Genji Gartner, the scholarly and half-piratical adventurer whose ship had been the first to approach the three stars and discover that each of them had planets.

Forty-two planets in all, from a couple of methane-giants on Gamma to airless little things with one-sixth Terran gravity. Alpha II had been the only one in the Trisystem with an oxygen atmosphere and life. So Gartner had landed on it, and named it Poictesme, and the settlement that had grown up around the first landing site had been called Storisende. Thirty years later, Genji Gartner died there, after seeing the camp grow to a metropolis, and was buried under a massive monument.

Some of the other planets had been rich in metals, and mines had been opened, and atmosphere-domed factories and processing plants built. None of them could produce anything but hydroponic and tissue-culture foodstuffs, and natural foods from Poictesme had been less expensive, even on the planets of Gamma and Beta. So Poictesme had concentrated on agriculture and grown wealthy at it.

Then, within fifty years of Genji Gartner’s death, the economics of interstellar trade overtook the Trisystem and the mines and factories closed down. It was no longer possible to ship the output to a profitable market, in the face of the growing self-sufficiency of the colonial planets and the irreducibly high cost of space-freighting.

Below, the brown fields and the red and yellow woods were merging into a ten-mile-square desert of crumbling concrete—empty and roofless sheds and warehouses and barracks, brush-choked parade grounds and landing fields, airship docks, and even a spaceport. They were more recent, dating from Poictesme’s second brief and hectic prosperity, when the Terran Federation’s Third Fleet-Army Force had occupied the Gartner Trisystem during the System States War.

* * * *

Millions of troops had been stationed on or routed through Poictesme; tens of thousands of spacecraft had been based on the Trisystem; the mines and factories had reopened for war production. The Federation had spent trillions of sols on Poictesme, piled up mountains of stores and arms and equipment, left the face of the planet cluttered with installations.

Then, ten years before anybody had expected it, the rebellious System States Alliance had collapsed and the war had ended. The Federation armies had gone home, taking with them the clothes they stood in, their personal weapons and a few souvenirs. Everything else had been left behind; even the most expensive equipment was worth less than the cost of removal.

Ever since, Poictesme had been living on salvage. The uniform the first officer was wearing was forty years old—and it was barely a month out of the original packing. On Terra, Conn had told his friends that his father was a prospector and let them interpret that as meaning an explorer for, say, uranium deposits. Rodney Maxwell found plenty of uranium, but he got it by taking apart the warheads of missiles.

The old replacement depot or classification center or training area or whatever it had been had vanished under the ship now and it was all forest back to the mountains, with an occasional cluster of deserted buildings. From one or two, threads of blue smoke rose—bands of farm tramps, camping on their way from harvest to wine-pressing. Then the eastern foothills were out of sight and he was looking down on the granite spines of the Calder Range; the valley beyond was sloping away and widening out in the distance, and it was time he began thinking of what to say when he landed. He would have to tell them, of course.

He wondered who would be at the dock to meet him, besides his family. Lynne Fawzi, he hoped. Or did he? Her parents would be with her, and Kurt Fawzi would take the news hardest of any of them, and be the first to blame him because it was bad. The hopes he had built for Lynne and himself would have to be held in abeyance till he saw how her father would regard him now.

But however any of them took it, he would have to tell them the truth.

* * * *

The ship swept on, tearing through the thin puffs of cloud at ten miles a minute. Six minutes to landing. Five. Four. Then he saw the river bend, glinting redly through the haze in the sunlight; Litchfield was inside it, and he stared waiting for the first glimpse of the city. Three minutes, and the ship began to cut speed and lose altitude. The hot-jets had stopped firing and he could hear the whine of the cold-jet rotors.

Then he could see Litchfield, dominated by the Airport Building, so thick that it looked squat for all its height, like a candle-stump in a puddle of its own grease, the other buildings under their carapace of terraces and landing stages seeming to have flowed away from it. And there was the yellow block of the distilleries, and High Garden Terrace, and the Mall.…

At first, in the distance, it looked like a living city. Then, second by second, the stigmata of decay became more and more evident. Terraces empty or littered with rubbish; gardens untended and choked with wild growth; windows staring blindly; walls splotched with lichens and grimy where the rains could not wash them.

For a moment, he was afraid that some disaster, unmentioned in his father’s letters, had befallen. Then he realized that the change had not been in Litchfield but in himself. After five years, he was seeing it as it really was. He wondered how his family and his friends would look to him now. Or Lynne.

The ship was coming in over the Mall; he could see the cracked paving sprouting grass, the statues askew on their pedestals, the waterless fountains. He thought for an instant that one of them was playing, and then he saw that what he had taken for spray was dust blowing from the empty basin. There was something about dusty fountains, something he had learned at the University. Oh, yes. One of the Second Century Martian Colonial poets, Eirrarsson, or somebody like that:

The fountains are dusty in the Graveyard of Dreams;

The hinges are rusty and swing with tiny screams.

There was more to it, but he couldn’t remember; something about empty gardens under an empty sky. There must have been colonies inside the Sol System, before the Interstellar Era, that hadn’t turned out any better than Poictesme. Then he stopped trying to remember as the ship turned toward the Airport Building and a couple of tugs—Terran Federation contragravity tanks, with derrick-booms behind and push-poles where the guns had been—came up to bring her down.

He walked along the starboard promenade to the gangway, which the first mate and a couple of airmen were getting open.

* * * *

Most of the population of top-level Litchfield was in the crowd on the dock. He recognized old Colonel Zareff, with his white hair and plum-brown skin, and Tom Brangwyn, the town marshal, red-faced and bulking above the others. It took a few seconds for him to pick out his father and mother, and his sister Flora, and then to realize that the handsome young man beside Flora was his brother Charley. Charley had been thirteen when Conn had gone away. And there was Kurt Fawzi, the mayor of Litchfield, and there was Lynne, beside him, her red-lipped face tilted upward with a cloud of bright hair behind it.

He waved to her, and she waved back, jumping in excitement, and then everybody was waving, and they were pushing his family to the front and making way for them.

The ship touched down lightly and gave a lurch as she went off contragravity, and they got the gangway open and the steps swung out, and he started down toward the people who had gathered to greet him.

His father was wearing the same black best-suit he had worn when they had parted five years ago. It had been new then; now it was shabby and had acquired a permanent wrinkle across the right hip, over the pistol-butt. Charley was carrying a gun, too; the belt and holster looked as though he had made them himself. His mother’s dress was new and so was Flora’s—probably made for the occasion. He couldn’t be sure just which of the Terran Federation services had provided the material, but Charley’s shirt was Medical Service sterilon.

Ashamed that he was noticing and thinking of such things at a time like this, he clasped his father’s hand and kissed his mother and Flora. Everybody was talking at once, saying things that he heard only as happy sounds. His brother’s words were the first that penetrated as words.

“You didn’t know me,” Charley was accusing. “Don’t deny it; I saw you standing there wondering if I was Flora’s new boy friend or what.”

“Well, how in Niflheim’d you expect me to? You’ve grown up since the last time I saw you. You’re looking great, kid!” He caught the gleam of Lynne’s golden hair beyond Charley’s shoulder and pushed him gently aside. “Lynne!”

“Conn, you look just wonderful!” Her arms were around his neck and she was kissing him. “Am I still your girl, Conn?”