The Avram Davidson Treasury Page 8

  The C-G stroked his chin. “Yes, yes,” he said. “I see your point,” he said. He sighed gustily. “Can’t be done,” he said.

  “But why not, sir?” Harper cried.

  It was simple. “No money. Who’s to pay? The Exchequer-Commissioner is weeping blood trying to get the budget through Council. If he adds a penny more—No, young fellow. I’ll do what I can: I’ll feed these two, here. But that’s all I can do.”

  Trying to pull all the strings he could reach, Harper approached the Executive-Fiscal and the Procurator-General, the President-in-Council, the Territorial Advocate, the Chairman of the Board of Travel. But no one could do anything. Barnum’s Planet, it was carefully explained to him, remained No Man’s Land only because no man presumed to give any orders concerning it. If any government did, this would be a Presumption of Authority. And then every other government would feel obliged to deny that presumption and issue a claim of its own.

  There was a peace on now—a rather tense, uneasy one. And it wasn’t going to be disturbed for Harper’s Yahoos. Human, were they? Perhaps. But who cared? As for morality, Harper didn’t even bother to mention the word. It would have meant as little as chivalry.

  Meanwhile, he was learning something of the Yahoos’ language. Slowly and arduously, he gained their confidence. They would shyly take food from him. He persuaded the C-G to knock down a wall and enlarge their quarters. The official was a kindly old man, and he seemed to grow fond of the stooped, shaggy, splay-footed Primitives. And after a while he decided that they were smarter than animals.

  “Put some clothes on ‘em, Harper,” he directed. “If they’re people, let ’em start acting like people. They’re too big to go around naked.”

  So, eventually, washed and dressed, Junior and Senior were introduced to Civilization via 3-D, and the program was taped and shown everywhere.

  Would you like a cigarette, Junior? Here, let me light it for you. Give Junior a glass of water, Senior. Let’s see you take off your slippers, fellows, and put them on again. And now do what I say in your own language …

  But if Harper thought that might change public opinion, he thought wrong. Seals perform, too, don’t they? And so do monkeys. They talk? Parrots talk better. And anyway, who cared to be bothered about animals or Primitives? They were okay for fun, but that was all.

  And the reports from Barnumland showed fewer and fewer Yahoos each time.

  Then one night two drunken crewmen climbed over the fence and went carousing in the C-G’s zoo. Before they left, they broke the vapor-light tubes, and in the morning Junior and Senior were found dead from the poisonous fumes.

  That was Sunday morning. By Sunday afternoon Harper was drunk, and getting drunker. The men who knocked on his door got no answer. They went in anyway. He was slouched, red-eyed, over the table.

  “People,” he muttered. “Tell you they were human!” he shouted.

  “Yes, Mr. Harper, we know that,” said a young man, pale, with close-cropped dark hair.

  Harper peered at him, boozily. “Know you,” he said. “Thir’ gen’ration Coulterboy. Go ‘way. Spoi’ your c’reer. Whaffor? Smelly ol’ Yahoo?” The young medico nodded to his companion, who took a small flask from his pocket, opened it. They held it under Harper’s nose by main force. He gasped and struggled, but they held on, and in a few minutes he was sober.

  “That’s rough stuff,” he said, coughing and shaking his head. “But—thanks, Dr. Hill. Your ship in? Or are you stopping over?”

  The former intern shrugged. “I’ve left the ships,” he said. “I don’t have to worry about spoiling my new career. This is my superior, Dr. Anscomb.”

  Anscomb was also young, and, like most men from Coulter’s System, pale. He said, “I understand you can speak the Yahoos’ language.”

  Harper winced. “What good’s that now? They’re dead, poor little bastards.”

  Anscomb nodded. “I’m sorry about that, believe me. Those fumes are so quick… But there are still a few alive on Barnum’s Planet who can be saved. The Joint Board for Research is interested. Are you?”

  It had taken Harper fifteen years to work up to a room of this size and quality in bachelor executives’ quarters. He looked around it. He picked up the letter which had come yesterday. “…neglected your work and become a joke…unless you accept a transfer and reduction in grade …” He nodded slowly, putting down the letter. “I guess I’ve already made my choice. What are your plans?”

  Harper, Hill, and Anscomb sat on a hummock on the north coast of Barnumland, just out of rock-throwing range of the gaunt escarpment of the cliff which rose before them. Behind them a tall fence had been erected. The only Yahoos still alive were “nesting” in the caves of the cliff. Harper spoke into the amplifier again. His voice was hoarse as he forced it into the clicks and moans of the Primitives’ tongue.

  Hill stirred restlessly. “Are you sure that means. ‘Here is food. Here is water’—and not, ‘Come down and let us eat you’? I think I can almost say it myself by now.”

  Shifting and stretching, Anscomb said, “It’s been two days. Unless they’ve determined to commit race suicide a bit more abruptly than your ancient Tasmanians—” He stopped as Harper’s fingers closed tightly on his arm.

  There was a movement on the cliff. A shadow. A pebble clattered. Then a wrinkled face peered fearfully over a ledge. Slowly, and with many stops and hesitations, a figure came down the face of the cliff. It was an old she. Her withered and pendulous dugs flapped against her sagging belly as she made the final jump to the ground, and—her back to the wall of rock—faced them.

  “Here is food,” Harper repeated softly. “Here is water.” The old woman sighed. She plodded wearily across the ground, paused, shaking with fear, and then flung herself down at the food and the water.

  “The Joint Board for Research has just won the first round,” Hill said. Anscomb nodded. He jerked his thumb upward. Hill looked.

  Another head appeared at the cliff. Then another. And another. They watched. The crone got up, water dripping from her dewlaps. She turned to the cliff. “Come down,” she cried. “Here is food and water. Do not die. Come down and eat and drink.” Slowly, her tribes-people did so. There were thirty of them.

  Harper asked, “Where are the others?”

  The crone held out her dried and leathery breasts to him. “Where are those who have sucked? Where are those your brothers took away?” She uttered a single shrill wail; then was silent.

  But she wept—and Harper wept with her.

  “I’ll guess we’ll swing it all right,” Hill said. Anscomb nodded. “Pity there’s so few of them. I was afraid we’d have to use gas to get at them. Might have lost several that way.”

  Neither of them wept.

  For the first time since ships had come to their world, Yahoos walked aboard one. They came hesitantly and fearfully, but Harper had told them that they were going to a new home and they believed him. He told them that they were going to a place of much food and water, where no one would hunt them down. He continued to talk until the ship was on its way, and the last Primitive had fallen asleep under the dimmed-out vapor-tube lights. Then he staggered to his cabin and fell asleep himself. He slept for thirty hours.

  He had something to eat when he awoke, then strolled down to the hold where the Primitives were. He grimaced, remembering his trip to the hold of the other ship to collect Senior, and the frenzied howling of the convicts awaiting the females. At the entrance to the hold he met Dr. Hill, greeted him.

  “I’m afraid some of the Yahoos are sick,” Hill said. “But Dr. Anscomb is treating them. The others have been moved to this compartment here.”

  Harper stared. “Sick? How can they be sick? What from? And how many?”

  Dr. Hill said, “It appears to be Virulent Plague… Fifteen of them are down with it. You’ve had all six shots, haven’t you? Good. Nothing to worry—”

  Harper felt the cold steal over him. He stared at the pale young physician. “No
one can enter or leave any system or planet without having had all six shots for Virulent Plague,” he said slowly. “So if we are all immune, how could the Primitives have gotten it? And how is it that only fifteen have it? Exactly half of them. What about the other fifteen, Dr. Hill? Are they the control group for your experiment?”

  Dr. Hill looked at him calmly. “As a matter of fact, yes. I hope you’ll be reasonable. Those were the only terms the Joint Board for Research would agree to. After all, not even convicts will volunteer for experiments in Virulent Plague.”

  Harper nodded. He felt frozen. After a moment he asked, “Can Anscomb do anything to pull them through?”

  Dr. Hill raised his eyebrows. “Perhaps. We’ve got something we wanted to try. And at any rate, the reports should provide additional data on the subject. We must take the long-range view.”

  Harper nodded. “I suppose you’re right,” he said.

  By noon all fifteen were dead.

  “Well, that means an uneven control group,” Dr. Anscomb complained. “Seven against eight. Still, that’s not too bad. And it can’t be helped. We’ll start tomorrow.”

  “Virulent Plague again?” Harper asked.

  Anscomb and Hill shook their heads. “Dehydration,” the latter said. “And after that, there’s a new treatment for burns we’re anxious to try… It’s a shame, when you think of the Yahoos being killed off by the thousands, year after year, uselessly. Like the dodo. We came along just in time—thanks to you, Harper.”

  He gazed at them. “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” he asked. They looked at him, politely blank. “I’d forgotten. Doctors don’t study Latin any more, do they? An old proverb. It means: ‘Who shall guard the guards themselves?’… Will you excuse me, Doctors?”

  Harper let himself into the compartment. “I come,” he greeted the fifteen.

  “We see,” they responded. The old woman asked how their brothers and sisters were “in the other cave.”

  “They are well… Have you eaten, have you drunk? Yes? Then let us sleep,” Harper said.

  The old woman seemed doubtful. “Is it time? The light still shines.” She pointed to it. Harper looked at her. She had been so afraid. But she had trusted him. Suddenly he bent over and kissed her. She gaped.

  “Now the light goes out,” Harper said. He slipped off a shoe and shattered the vapor tube. He groped in the dark for the air-switch, turned it off. Then he sat down. He had brought them here, and if they had to die, it was only fitting that he should share their fate. There no longer seemed any place for the helpless, or for those who cared about them.

  “Now let us sleep,” he said.

  Or the Grasses Grow

  INTRODUCTION BY ALAN DEAN FOSTER

  Ever cut a diamond? Talk to a diamond-cutter sometime. They’ll tell you that, sure, size matters—but by itself it doesn’t make a good gem. Color’s important, too. The whiter a stone, the purer and more transparent, the more valuable it is. And after color, clarity. Look at a diamond under a jeweler’s loupe or, better still, beneath a ’scope. Imperfections stand out, and some of them shout, disrupting the play of light inside the crystal. Dispersion, it’s called.

  Anybody can take an idea, throw it at the reader, wrap a few quotes and exclamation points and adjectives around it, and call it a story. Might even be a big idea, flashy and impressive at first read. But dig into most stories and it won’t take long to find the imperfections and discolorations.

  Take a small idea, now, and hone it perfectly, so that there are no wasted words, no endless and unnecessary expository phrases, no participles dangling off the edges of otherwise well-cut sentences. That’s much more difficult to do. Most writers achieve modest results with grandiose effects. In this regard, fantasy fiction is particularly guilty. Flying horses, gigantic djinn, sorcerers throwing lightning bolts at one another—effective at first, but after a while reduced to a kind of literary mendacity.

  But a bunch of guys sitting around talking about their lives—ordinary people, with everyday problems. How do you reach out and grab the reader with that? How do you travel from a discussion of personal problems to a conclusion that stops a reader dead in his or her tracks, maybe just a little out of breath?

  The same way an old diamond-cutter takes a tiny lump of dull, misshapen, milky crystal and turns it into an ornament that dazzles and overpowers the eye, that’s how. Avram Davidson was a master shaper of small stories. “Or the Grasses Grow” is a prime example of his ability to, well, facet, what at first appears to be a small idea, and turn it into something brilliant.

  OR THE GRASSES GROW

  ABOUT HALFWAY ALONG THE narrow and ill-paved county road between Crosby and Spanish Flats (all dips and hollows shimmering falsely like water in the heat till you get right up close to them), the road to Tickisall Agency branches off. No pretense of concrete or macadam—or even grading—deceives the chance or rare purposeful traveller. Federal, State, and County governments have better things to do with their money: Tickisall pays no taxes, and its handful of residents have only recently (and most grudgingly) been accorded the vote.

  The sunbaked earth is cracked and riven. A few dirty sheep and a handful of scrub cows share its scanty herbage with an occasional swaybacked horse or stunted burro. Here and there a gaunt automobile rests in the thin shadow of a board shack, and a child, startled doubtless by the smooth sound of a strange motor, runs like a lizard through the dusty wastes to hide, and then to peer. Melon vines dried past all hope of fruit lie in patches next to whispery, tindery cornstalks.

  And in the midst of all this, next to the only spring which never goes dry, are the only painted buildings, the only decent buildings in the area. In the middle of the green lawn is a pole with the flag, and right behind the pole, over the front door, the sign:

  U.S. BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS.

  TICKISALL AGENCY

  OFFICE OF THE SUPERINTENDENT

  There were already a few Indians gathering around that afternoon, the women in cotton-print dresses, the men in overalls. There would soon be more. This was scheduled as the last day for the Tickisall Agency and Reservation. Congress had passed the bill, the President had signed it, the Director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs had issued the order. It was supposed to be a great day for the Tickisall Nation—only the Tickisalls, what was left of them, didn’t seem to think so. Not a man or woman of them spoke. Not a child whimpered. Not a dog barked.

  Before Uncle Fox-head sat a basket with four different kinds of clay, and next to the basket was a medicine gourd full of water. The old man rolled the clay between his moistened palms, singing in a low voice. Then he washed his hands and sprinkled them with pollen. Then he took up the prayer-sticks, made of juniper—(once there had been juniper trees on the reservation, once there had been many trees)—and painted with the signs of Thunder, Sun, Moon, Rain, Lightning. There were feathers tied to the sticks—once there had been birds, too …

  Oh, People-of-The-Hidden Places,

  Oh, take our message to The Hidden Places,

  Swiftly, swiftly, now …

  the old man chanted, shaking the medicine-sticks.

  Oh, you, Swift Ones, People-with-no-legs,

  Take our message to The-People-with-no-bodies,

  Swiftly, swiftly, now …

  The old man’s skin was like a cracked, worn moccasin. With his turkeyclaw hand he took up the gourd rattle, shook it: West, South, Up, Down, East, North.

  Oh, People-of-the-hollow Earth,

  Take our message to the hollow Earth,

  Take our song to our Fathers and Mothers,

  Take our cry to the Spirit People,

  Take and go, take and go,

  Swiftly, swiftly, now …

  The snakes rippled across the ground and were gone, one by one. The old man’s sister’s son helped him back to his sheepskin, spread in the shade, where he half-sat, half-lay, panting.

  His great-nephews, Billy Cottonwood and Sam Quarterhorse, were talking together in E
nglish. “There was a fellow in my outfit,” Cottonwood said, “a fellow from West Virginia, name of Corrothers. Said his grandmother claimed she could charm away warts. So I said my great-uncle claimed he could make snakes. And they all laughed fit to kill, and said, ‘Chief, when you try a snowjob, it turns into a blizzard!’… Old Corrothers,” he reflected. “We were pretty good buddies. Maybe I’ll go to West Virginia and look him up. I could hitch, maybe.”

  Quarterhorse said, “Yeah, you can go to West Virginia, and I can go to L.A.—but what about the others? Where they going to go if Washington refuses to act?”

  The fond smile of recollection left his cousin’s lean, brown face. “I don’t know,” he said. “I be damned and go to Hell, if I know.” And then the old pick-up came rattling and coughing up to the house, and Sam said, “Here’s Newton.”

  Newton Quarterhorse, his brother Sam, and Billy Cottonwood, were the only three Tickisalls who had passed the physical and gone into the Army. There weren’t a lot of others who were of conscripting age (or any other age, for that matter), and those whom TB didn’t keep out, other ailments active or passive did. Once there had been trees on the Reservation, and birds, and deer, and healthy men.

  The wash-faded Army suntans had been clean and fresh as always when Newt set out for Crosby, but they were dusty and sweaty now. He took a piece of wet burlap out and removed a few bottles from it. “Open these, Sam, will you, while I wash,” he said. “Cokes for us, strawberry pop for the old people… How’s Uncle Fox-head?”

  Billy grunted. “Playing at making medicine snakes again. Do you suppose if we believed he could, he could?”

  Newt shrugged. “So. Well, maybe if the telegrams don’t do any good, the snakes will. And I’m damned sure they won’t do no worse. That son of a bitch at the Western Union office,” he said, looking out over the drought-bitten land. “‘Sending a smoke-signal to the Great White Father again, Sitting Bull?’ he says, smirking and sneering. I told him, ‘You just take the money and send the wire.’ They looked at me like coyotes looking at a sick calf.” Abruptly, he turned away and went to dip his handkerchief in the bucket. Water was hard come by.