“But then your people used the machines to go away. Can’t you tell me why?”
A racking cough shook the old man and his breath came in gasping sobs.
Sheridan felt a sense of shame in what he had to do. I should let him die in peace, he thought. I should not badger him. I should let him go in whatever dignity he can—not pushed and questioned to the final breath he draws.
But there was that last answer—the one Sheridan had to have.
Sheridan said gently: “But tell me, friend, what did you bargain for? What was it that you bought?”
He wondered if the native heard. There was no indication that he had.
“What did you buy?” Sheridan insisted.
“A planet,” said the native.
“But you had a planet!”
“This one was different,” the native told him in a feeble whisper. “This was a planet of immortality. Anyone who went there would never, never die.”
Sheridan squatted stiffly in shocked and outraged silence.
And from the silence came a whisper—a whisper still of faith and belief and pity that would haunt the human all his life.
“That was what I lost,” the whisper said. “That was what I lost …”
Sheridan opened his hands and closed them, strangling the perfect throat and the winning smile, shutting off the cultured flow of words.
If I had him now, he thought, if I only had him now!
He remembered the spread-out picnic cloth and the ornate jug and the appetizing food, the smooth, slick gab and the assurance of the creature. And even the methodical business of getting very drunk so that their meeting could end without unpleasant questions or undue suspicion.
And the superior way in which he’d asked if the human might know Ballic, all the time, more than likely, being able to speak English himself.
So Central Trading finally had its competition. From this moment, Central Trading would be fighting with its back against the wall. For these jokers in Galactic Enterprises played dirty and for keeps.
The Garsonians had been naive fools, of course, but that was no true measure of Galactic Enterprises. They undoubtedly would select different kinds of bait for different kinds of fish, but the old never-never business of immortality might be deadly bait for even the most sophisticated if appropriately presented.
An utter lack of ethics and the transference machines were the trumps Galactic held.
What had really happened, he wondered, to all the people who had lived on this planet? Where had they really gone when they followed the podars into those machines?
Could the Galactic boys, by chance, have ferreted out a place where there would be a market for several million slaves?
Or had they simply planned to get the Garsonians out of the way as an effective means of cutting off the podar supply for Central Trading, thus insuring a ready and profitable sale for their supply of drugs?
Or had they lured the Garsonians away so they themselves could take over the planet?
And if that was the case—perhaps in any case—Galactic Enterprises definitely had lost this first encounter. Maybe, Sheridan told himself, they are really not so hot.
They gave us exactly what we need, he realized with a pleased jolt. They did us a favor!
Old blundering, pompous Central Trading had won the first round, after all.
He got to his feet and headed for the door. He hesitated and turned back to the native.
“Maybe, friend,” he said, “you were the lucky one.”
The native did not hear him.
Gideon was waiting at the door.
“How is he?” he asked.
“He’s dead,” Sheridan said. “I wonder if you’d arrange for burial.”
“Of course,” said Gideon. “You’ll let me see the data. I’ll have to bone up on the proper rites.”
“But first do something else for me.”
“Name it, Steve.”
“You know this Tobias, the messenger that Central Trading sent? Find him and see that he doesn’t leave.”
Gideon grinned. “You may rest assured.”
“Thank you,” said Sheridan.
On his way to the tent, he passed the courier’s ship. It was, he noted, a job that was built for speed—little more than an instrument board and seat tacked onto a powerful engine.
In a ship like that, he thought, a pilot could really make some time.
Almost to the tent, he met Hezekiah.
“Come along with me,” he said. “I have a job for you.”
Inside the tent, he sat down in his chair and reached for a sheet of paper.
“Hezekiah,” he said, “dig into that chest. Find the finest diplomatic transmog that we have.”
“I know just where it is, sir,” said Hezekiah, pawing through the chest.
He came out with the transmog and laid it on the desk.
“Hezekiah,” said Sheridan, “listen to me carefully. Remember every word I say.”
“Sir,” replied Hezekiah, a little huffily, “I always listen carefully.”
“I know you do. I have perfect faith and trust in you. That is why I’m sending you to Central.”
“To Central, sir! You must be joking, surely. You know I cannot go. Sir, who would look after you? Who would see that you—”
“I can get along all right. You’ll be coming back. And I’ll still have Napoleon.”
“But I don’t want to go, sir!”
“Hezekiah, I must have someone I can trust. We’ll put that transmog in you and—”
“But it will take me weeks, sir!”
“Not with the courier ship. You’re going back instead of the courier. I’ll write an authorization for you to represent me. It’ll be as if I were there myself.”
“But there is Abraham. Or Gideon. Or you could send any of the others …”
“It’s you, Hezekiah. You are my oldest friend.”
“Sir,” said Hezekiah, straightening to attention, “what do you wish me to do?”
“You’re to tell Central that Garson IV is now uninhabited. You’re to say that such being the case, I’m possessing it formally in the name of Central Trading. Tell them I’ll need reinforcements immediately because there is a possibility that Galactic Enterprises may try to take it from us. They’re to send out one sled loaded with robots as an initial occupying and colonizing force, and another sledload of agricultural implements so we can start our farming. And every last podar that they have, for seed. And, Hezekiah …”
“Yes, sir?”
“That sledload of robots. They’d better be deactivated and knocked down. That way they can pile on more of them. We can assemble them here.”
Hezekiah repressed a shudder. “I will tell them, sir.”
“I am sorry, Hezekiah.”
“It is quite all right, sir.”
Sheridan finished writing out the authorization. “Tell Central Trading,” he said, “that in time we’ll turn this entire planet into one vast podar field. But they must not waste a minute. No committee sessions, no meetings of the board, no dawdling around. Keep right on their tail every blessed second.”
“I will not let them rest, sir,” Hezekiah assured him.
VI
The courier ship had disappeared from sight. Try as he might, Sheridan could catch no further glimpse of it.
Good old Hezekiah, he thought, he’ll do the job. Central Trading will be wondering for weeks exactly what it was that hit them.
He tilted his head forward and rubbed his aching neck.
He said to Gideon and Ebenezer: “You can get up off him now.”
The two arose, grinning, from the prostrate form of Tobias. Tobias got up, outraged. “You’ll hear of this,” he said to Sheridan.
“Yes, I know,” said S
heridan. “You hate my guts.”
Abraham stepped forward, “What is next?” he asked.
“Well,” Sheridan said, “I think we should all turn gleaners.”
“Gleaners?”
“There are bound to be some podars that the natives missed. We’ll need every one we can find for seed.”
“But we’re all physicists and mechanical engineers and chemists and other things like that. Surely you would not expect such distinguished specialists—”
“I think I can remedy that,” said Sheridan. “I imagine we still can find those spacehand transmogs. They should serve until Central sends us some farmer units.”
Tobias stepped forward and ranged himself alongside of Abraham. “As long as I must remain here, I demand to be of use. It’s not in a robot’s nature just to loaf around.”
Sheridan slapped his hand against his jacket pocket, felt the bulge of the transmog he’d taken out of Hezekiah.
“I think,” he told Tobias, “I have just the thing for you.”
I Had No Head and My Eyes Were Floating Way Up in the Air
Created for inclusion in The Last Dangerous Visions™, which was to have been the final entry in Harlan Ellison’s acclaimed series of original anthologies, this story has never actually seen print until now because the anthology has never been published.
This story, as is often the case with Simak stories, provides new takes on themes Cliff touched on elsewhere, but I keep thinking that it’s a story about life after life.
And it’s sad, for the line “You were so badly made” has more than a single meaning.
—dww
He had been Charlie Tierney, but was no longer. He had been a man, but was no longer. Now he was something else, something cobbled together. Now he had no head, had no arms, and his eyes were floating on stalks above his awakening body.
When he had been Charlie Tierney there had been only two really important things to know about him: he was venal, and he was alone. Venal to the point of it being a sickness, a poison that infected his every act. Alone, through years as a child, years as a man, years in space. So alone he could never learn that his ability to be bought was an illness.
Now he was more alone than he had ever been … and he was no longer venal. Venality was a human quality, and he was no longer human. Alone, because he was the only one like himself in the universe.
Tierney sat drinking sunlight, and he remembered.
I had it made.
After years of fumbling around, after years of chewing stardust, of hope that never quite came off, of finally giving up the hope—here finally I was, walking down a hill, walking on a planet that I owned, with the pre-emption signals planted and all that needed to be done the filing of the claim. A planet that was worth the claiming—not one of those methane worlds, not carbon dioxide, not soup, but air that a man could breathe, and something to walk on besides rock, a world with vegetation and running water and not too great a sea surface and, what was best of all, a working force of natives who had just enough intelligence, if handled right, to exploit such a planet for you. They didn’t know it yet, but I had plans for them. It might take a bit of doing to get them into harness, but I was just the man who knew how to do it.
I was a little drunk, I guess. Christ, I had a right to be. After squatting on that hilltop with those crummy natives, lapping up the stuff, I should have been out cold. But I had soaked up too much alcoholic poison—and some that weren’t alcoholic—at too many grimy way stations all through space, to cave in from drinking stuff that wasn’t fit to drink. In my day, I’d drunk a lot of booze that wasn’t fit to drink. Come in from a long, hard run with nothing found and headaches all the way and you’ll drink anything at all just so it gives forgetfulness.
There always had been a lot of forgetting to be done. But that was over now. In just a while from now I’d be wading up to my knees through cash.
The luckiest part of it was those stupid natives. And that was just the way it should be. Hell, I told myself, they wouldn’t even know the difference. They might even like it. They would love working out their guts for me. I had them all psyched out. I knew what made them tick.
It had taken a lot of patience and a lot of observation and more work than I liked to think about, but I finally had them pegged. They had a culture, if you could call it that. They had a feeble kind of intelligence, enough intelligence so that you could tell them to put their backs into it and they’d put their backs into it. Before I was through with them they’d think I was the best friend they had and they’d bust their silly guts for me. They had been the ones who had asked me to the hilltop for a little get-together. They had supplied the food, which I had barely been able to gag down, and the likker, which had been a little easier to gag down, and we’d talked after a fashion—good, solid, friendly talk.
I had the little creeps in the hollow of my hand.
They were crazy-looking things, but for that matter all aliens are crazy-looking things.
They stood four feet or so in height and looked something like a lobster, or at least like something that far back in its evolutionary line had been something like a lobster. As if the crustacea, instead of striking out, had developed as the primates had developed on the Earth. They had been modified considerably from the ancestral lobster, but the resemblance was still there. They lived in burrows and there were big villages of these burrows everywhere I went. There were a lot of them and that suited me just fine. It takes a big labor force to milk a planet. If you had to import that kind of labor or bring in machines the overhead would kill you.
So I was walking down the hillside, perhaps not too steadily, but I was feeling fine. I could see the spaceship in the bright moonlight, just across the valley, and in the morning I’d take off and file the claim and see some people that I knew and then I’d be in business. No more tearing around in uncharted space to find that one particular planet, no more begging grubstakes to go out on another hunt, no more stinking fleabags in little planetary outposts, no more rotgut liquor, no more frowsy whores. From here on out I’d have the best there was. I’d made the kind of strike every planet hunter dreams about. I had struck it rich. Oh, it was sweet all right—an absolutely virgin planet with all sorts of riches and a gang of stupid natives to work for me.
I came to the rockslide and I could have walked around it and in a more sober moment I suppose I would have done just that. But I wasn’t sober. I was drunk on alien booze and on happiness, if happiness is finding what you’ve hunted all your life.
I saw that I could save some time by crossing the rockslide and it didn’t look too bad. Just a sheet of rubble where, in ages past, a cliff near the top of the hill had shed part of its face, sending down a fan of rock and boulders. A number of boulders were embedded in the slide and others, I saw, had simply slid off the cliff face and not rolled down the hill, remaining poised where they had fallen. I remember thinking, as I started across the slide, that it would not take too much to send them plunging down the slope. But they had been there, safely anchored, for many unknown years, and, anyhow, I was somewhat fuddled.
So I started across the slide and the walking was rougher than I’d expected it to be, but I was being careful so as not to fall and break my neck and I was getting along all right. I had to watch where I put my feet and was going slow and wasn’t paying too much attention to anything that might be happening.
A sudden grinding sound from somewhere above me jerked me around and a stone rolled underneath one foot and threw me to my knees. I saw the boulders coming down the slope straight at me. They came slow at first, slow and deliberate, seeming to topple rather than to roll. I yelled. I don’t remember what I yelled. I just yelled. I knew I didn’t have the time to get away, but I tried. I tried to get to my feet and had almost made it when another stone shifted underneath a foot and threw me down again. The boulders were much closer now, gath
ering speed, bounding high into the air when they struck other boulders in their paths, and the rest of the slide above me, jarred by the rolling boulders, was moving down on top of me, as if the rock and rubble had somehow come alive.
Before the first of the boulders reached me I seemed to see little shadowy figures running frantically along the base of the cliff and I thought, “Those God damned lobsters!”
Then the boulders reached me and I put out my hands to stop them, just as if there might have been a chance of stopping them; and I was still yelling.
The boulders hit and killed me. They smashed my flesh and bone. They busted in my rib cage and they cracked my skull. They smashed and rolled me flat. The blood went spraying out and stained the stones. The bladder broke, the intestines ruptured.
But there was, after a time, it seemed, a part of me that wasn’t killed. In the darkness of no-seeing I knew I had been killed. But there was this part of me that still hung onto knowing with bleeding fingernails.
I don’t believe I thought at first. I existed, that was all. In darkness, in emptiness, in nothingness; I was there, not dead. Or at least not entirely dead. I’d forgotten everything I had ever known. I began from scratch. No better than a worm. I tried to take it easy, but there was no such thing as easy. For no reason, I was frantic. Frantic without purpose. Just frantic to exist, to continue hanging on with bloody fingernails. A frantic worm, without knowing, with no reason.
After a time the tension eased a little and I thought. Not simple thoughts, but convoluted and intricate, going on and on, reaching for a simple answer, but going through a maze of mental contortions that were worse than hanging on to existence with no more than fingernails. The terrible thing about it was that I, or the existence that was I, for there was as yet no I, did not even know the problem to which it sought an answer.
Wonder came to replace the thinking, a quiet, hard, chilling wonder that stretched out flat and thin. And the wonder asked: Is this afterlife? Is there really afterlife? Is this what happens when one dies? Hoping it was not, frantic it was not, despairing at the prospect of an eternal, groping afterlife, so flat and thin and dark. Wonder went on forever and forever—not thinking, not reasoning, not speculating, just a wonder that filled the little being that existed, a hopeless, helpless wonder that grew no less or greater, but stretched, unmarked, toward eternity.