The Nail and the Oracle (31 page)

“I see, I see. And the same thing would be true of lions or fish or tree toads, or—”

“Or any animal. A lot of things have been said about Nature, that she’s implacable, cruel, wasteful, and so on. I like to think she’s—reasonable. I concede that she reaches that state cruelly, at times, and wastefully and all the rest. But she has a way of coming up with the pragmatic solution, the one that works. To build in a pressure which tends to standardize and purify a successful stage, and to call in the exogene, the infusion of fresh blood, only once in several generations—that seems to me most reasonable.”

“More so,” Charli said, “than what we’ve always done, when you look at it that way. Every generation a new exogene, the blood kept churned up, each new organism full of pressures which haven’t had a chance with the environment.”

“I suppose,” said Vorhidin, “you could argue that the incest taboo is responsible for the restlessness that pulled mankind out of the caves, but that’s a little too simplistic for me. I’d have preferred a mankind that moved a little more slowly, a little more certainly, and never fell back. I think the ritual exogamy that made inbreeding a crime and ‘deceased wife’s sister’ a law against incest is responsible for another kind of restlessness.”

He grew very serious. “There’s a theory that certain normal habit patterns should be allowed to run their course. Take the sucking reflex, for example. It has been said that infants who have been weaned too early plague themselves all their lives with oral activity—chewing on straws, smoking intoxicants in pipes, drinking out of bottle by preference, nervously manipulating the lips, and so on. With that as an analogy, you may look again at the restlessness of mankind all through his history. Who but a gaggle of frustrates, never in their lives permitted all the ways of love within the family, could coin such a concept as ‘motherland’ and give their lives to it and for it? There’s a great urge to love Father, and another to topple him. Hasn’t humanity set up its beloved Fathers, its Big Brothers, loved and worshiped and given and died for them, rebelled and
killed and replaced them? A lot of them richly deserved it, I concede, but it would have been better to have done it on its own merits and not because they were nudged by a deep-down, absolutely sexual tide of which they could not speak because they had learned that it was unspeakable.

“The same sort of currents flow within the family unit. So-called ‘sibling rivalry’ is too well known to be described, and the frequency of bitter quarreling between siblings is, in most cultures and their literature, a sort of cliché. Only a very few psychologists have dared to put forward the obvious explanation that, more often than not, these frictions are inverted love feelings, well salted with horror and guilt. It’s a pattern that makes conflict between siblings all but a certainty, and it’s a problem which, once stated, describes its own solution … Have you ever read Vexworth? No? You should—I think you’d find him fascinating. Ecologist; in his way quite as much of a giant as Phelvelt.”

“Ecologist—that has something to do with life and environment, right?”

“Ecology has
everything to
do with life and environment; it studies them as reciprocals, as interacting and mutually controlling forces. It goes without saying that the main aim and purpose of any life form is optimum survival; but ‘optimum survival’ is a meaningless term without considering the environment in which it has to happen. As the environment changes, the organism has to change its ways and means, even its basic design. Human beings are notorious for changing their environment, and in most of our history in most places, we have made these changes without ecological considerations. This is disaster, every time. This is over-population, past the capabilities of producing food and shelter enough. This is the rape of irreplaceable natural resources. This is the contamination of water supplies. And it is also the twisting and thwarting of psychosexual needs in the emotional environment.

“Vexvelt was founded by those two, Charli—Phelvelt and Vexworth—and is named for them. As far as I know it is the only culture ever devised on ecological lines. Our sexual patterns derive from the ecological base and are really only a very small part of our structure.
Yet for that one aspect of our lives, we are avoided and shunned and pretty much unmentionable.”

It took a long time for Charli to be able to let these ideas in, and longer for him to winnow and absorb them. But all the while he lived surrounded by beauty and fulfillment, by people, young and old, who were capable of total concentration on art and learning and building and processing, people who gave to each other and to their land and air and water just a little more than they took. He finished his survey largely because he had started it; for a while he was uncertain of what he would do with it.

When at length he came to Vorhidin and said he wanted to stay on Vexvelt, the big man smiled, but he shook his head. “I know you want to, Charli—but do you?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” He looked out at the dark bole of one of the Vexveltian poplars; Tyng was there, like a flower, an orchid. “It’s more than that,” said Charli, “more than my wanting to be a Vexveltian. You need me.”

“We love you,” Vorhidin said simply. “But—need?”

“If I went back,” said Charli Bux, “and Terratu got its hands on my survey, what do you think would become of Vexvelt?”

“You tell me.”

“First Terratu would come to trade, and then others, and then others; and then they would fight each other, and fight you … you need someone here who knows this, really knows it, and who can deal with it when it starts. It will start, you know, even without my survey; sooner or later someone will be able to do what I did—a shipment of feldspar, a sheet of pure metal. They will destroy you.”

“They will never come near us.”

“You think not. Listen: no matter how the other worlds disapprove, there is one force greater: greed.”

“Not in this case, Charli. And this is what I want you to be able to understand, all the way down to your cells. Unless you do, you can never live here. We are shunned, Charli. If you had been born here, that would not matter so much to you. If you throw in your lot with us, it would have to be a total commitment. But you should
not make such a decision without understanding how completely you will be excluded from everything else you have ever known.”

“What makes you think I don’t know it now?”

“You say we need defending. You say other-world traders will exploit us. That only means you don’t understand. Charli: listen to me. Go back to Terratu. Make the strongest presentation you can for trade with Vexvelt. See how they react. Then you’ll know—then you can decide.”

“And aren’t you afraid I might be right, and because of me, Vexvelt will be robbed and murdered?”

And Vorhidin shook his big head, smiling, and said, “Not one bit, Charli Bux. Not one little bit.”

So Charli went back, and saw (after a due delay) the Archive Master, and learned what he learned, and came out and looked about him at his home world and, through that, at all the worlds like it; and then he went to the secret place where the Vexveltian ship was moored, and it opened to him.

Tyng was there, Tamba, and Vorhidin. Charli said, “Take me home.”

In the last seconds before they took the Drive jump, and he could look through the port at the shining face of Terratu for the last time in his life, Charli said, “Why? Why? How did human beings come to hate this one thing so much that they would rather die insane and in agony than accept it? How did it happen, Vorhidin?”

“I don’t know,” said the Vexveltian.

Afterword:

And now you know what sort of a science fiction story this is, and perhaps something about science fiction stories that you didn’t know before.

I have always been fascinated by the human mind’s ability to think itself to a truth, and then to take that one step more (truly the basic secret of all human progress) and the inability of so many people to learn the trick. Case in point: “We mean to get that filth off the newsstands and out of the bookstores.” Ask why, and most such crusaders will simply point at the “filth” and wonder that you asked.
But a few will take one step more: “Because youngsters might get their hands on it.” That satisfies most, but ask: “And suppose they do?” a still smaller minority will think it through to: “Because it’s bad for them.” Ask again: “In what way is it bad for them?” and a handful can reach this: “It will arouse them.” By now you’ve probably run out of crusaders, but if there are a couple left, ask them, “How does being aroused harm a child?” and if you can get them to take that one more step, they will have to take it out of the area of emotional conviction and into the area of scientific research. Such studies are available, and invariably they show that such arousement is quite harmless—indeed, there is something abnormal about anyone who is not or cannot be so roused. The only possible harm that can result comes not from the sexual response itself but from the guilt-making and punitive attitude of the social environment—most of all that part of it which is doing the crusading.

Casting about for some more or less untouched area in which to exercise this one-step-more technique, I hit on this one. That was at least twenty years ago, and I have had to wait until now to find a welcome for anything so unsettling. I am, of course, very grateful. I hope the yarn starts some fruitful argument.

by Harlan Ellison
^®
and Theodore Sturgeon

Dedicated to the memory of Cordwainer Smith

Crouching there in the darkness on the 102nd floor, Smith fumbled for the skin-bag of knucklebones. Somewhere down below in the stairwell—probably the ninety-fifth or -sixth floor by now, judging from the firefly ricochets of their flashlight beams on the walls, coming up—the posse was sniffing him out. Soundlessly he put his good shoulder against the fire door, but it was solid. Probably bulged and wedged for months, since Smith had made the big mistake.

He was effectively trapped in a chimney. The dead stairwell of the carcass that was the Empire State Building, in the corpse that was New York City, in the mammoth graveyard he had made of the world. And finding the only escape hatch closed off, he reluctantly fumbled at his belt for the skin-bag of knucklebones.

Smith. First and last of the magic men. About to cast the runes again.

The posse had reached the ninety-ninth floor. If he were going to do it—terrible!—he had to do it now …

He hesitated a second. There were fifteen or sixteen men and women in that pack. He didn’t want to hurt them. Despite their slavering hatred, despite their obvious intention, he was reluctant to call into effect that power again.

He had done it before, and destroyed the world.

“He’s gotta be up there,” one of them called down to the rest of the pack. “Now we got ’im.”

The silence they had maintained since morning, climbing like insects up the inside of the Empire State, was suddenly broken. “Let’s
take ’im!” yelled another one. The slap-slap of their rag-and-hide-wrapped feet on the metal stairs rose to Smith. He swallowed and it tasted sour, and he upended the skin-bag.

The knucklebones spilled chatteringly on the landing. The pattern was random; he murmured. Hunkered down on his haunches, he called up the power, and there was the faintest hiss of a breeze in the stairwell. A breeze that was peculiarly bittersweet, the way Holland chocolates used to be. A chill breeze that broke sweat out on Smith’s spine, in the hollows between his shoulder blades. Then the screams began. Below him, on the one hundredth floor.

Terrible screams. Small creatures with things growing inside them, pushing their vital organs out of alignment, then out through the skin. Watery screams. As solids turned liquid and boiled and ran leaving their containers empty husks. Short, sharp screams. As dull cutting edges appeared where none had been before and severed the flesh that had contained them when they were merely bones. Then the screams stopped. The silence that had climbed with the posse since morning,
that
silence deepened, returned.

Smith crawled away from the knucklebones, far into the corner of the landing, drew his boney knees up to his bearded chin, and whimpered. The breeze—casting about like an animal that was still hungry—reluctantly died away, fled back to the place from which it had come.

Smith, alone. Caster of runes. Reader from a strange grimoire only he could interpret. The only survivor of the catastrophe he had caused. The only survivor because anyone else out there was merely one step away from animal. Smith, whimpering.

Smith, alone.

Alone
. The terrible word broke away out of him like projectile vomit: “Alone!” and fled to the walls, rebounded to sting him, turned echo-edged and rebounded again.

“But for me.” Then a girl laughed girl-laughter, and down amidst the silence was the sound of quick soft footsteps, and again girl-laughter, not spread about the floor below, but right in the stairwell. And it was laughter again, footstepping up and nearer.

Terror and joy, terror and joy, shock and disbelief. Terror and
joy and a terrible fear: oh, guard, oh fight, oh run,
look out!
Grunting
akh!
, grunting
hah!
Smith scrabbled to his knucklebones, so hurried that he would not take standing-time, but hurried hunkering, hams and knuckles to his knucklebones. He swept them into a clack-chattering heap, and “Mind now,” he cautioned her (whoever she was), “I’ll cast again. I will!” he plucked up a bone, fumbled in the blackness for the magic bag, put in the bone, plucked up another, his shiny-dry dirty hands doing his seeing, for his eyes were elbow-useless for seeing in such a black.

“But oh! I love you,” she said, so near now she could say it in a strumming whisper and be heard: oh! What a voice, oh, a clean, warm woman’s voice, full of care and meaning: but oh! She loved him.

Terror and joy. He plucked up the last of the bones, his eyes in the black-on-black, driving at the doorway to the stairs, where now a hand-torch flashlightninged an agony into him; and he cried out. The flash was gone a-borning, too brief, almost, to have a name at all, gone before its pointed tip had slashed its way from lens to optic nerve, gone long before its agony was done with him. And something alive,
life alive even after what he had done;
life alive was breathing in the dark.