Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley (34 page)

Sven stared at him closely, ideas beginning to form. “Forbes, have you ever had any ... feeling about Negroes?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Describe it.”

“Well, sir, we Mountain-Georgians hold that the Negro is the white man's natural friend. I mean to say, whites can get along fine with Chinese and Martians and such, but there's something special about black and white—”

“Go on,” Sven urged.

“Hard to explain it good, sir. It's just that—well, the qualities of the two seem to mesh, like good gears. There's a special understanding between black and white.”

“Did you know,” Sven said gently, “that once, long ago, your ancestors felt that the Negro was a lesser human being? That they created laws to keep him from interacting with whites? And that they kept on doing this long after the rest of the world had conquered its prejudices? That they kept on doing it, in fact, right up to the Hydrogen War?”

“That's a lie, sir!” Forbes shouted. “I'm sorry, I don't mean to call you a liar, sir, but it just isn't true. Us Georgians have always—”

“I can prove it to you in history books and anthropological studies. I have several in the ship's library, if you'd care to look!”

“Yankee books!”

“I'll show you Southern books, too. It's true, Forbes, and it's nothing to be ashamed of. Education is a long, slow process. You have a great deal to be proud of in your ancestry.”

“
If
this is true,” Forbes said, very hesitantly, “then what happened?”

“It's in the anthropology book. You know, don't you, that Georgia was hit during the war by a hydrogen bomb meant for Norfolk?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Perhaps you didn't know that the bomb fell in the middle of the so-called Black Belt. Many whites were killed. But almost the entire Negro population of that section of Georgia was wiped out.”

“I didn't know that.”

“Now, you must take my word that there had been race riots before the Hydrogen War, and lynchings, and a lot of bad feeling between white and black. Suddenly the Negroes were gone—dead. This created a considerable feeling of guilt among the whites, particularly in isolated communities. Some of the more superstitious whites believed that they had been spiritually responsible for this wholesale obliteration. And it hit them hard, for they were religious men.”

“What would that matter, if they hated the Negroes?”

“They didn't, that's the whole point! They feared intermarriage, economic competition, a change of hierarchy. But they didn't
hate
the Negroes. Quite the contrary. They always maintained, with considerable truth, that they liked the Negroes better than the ‘liberal' Northerners did. It set up quite a conflict.”

Forbes nodded, thinking hard.

“In an isolated community like yours, it gave rise to the custom of working away from home, with any race except their own. Guilt was at the bottom of it all.”

Perspiration rolled down Forbes's freckled cheeks. “I can't believe it,” he said.

“Forbes, have I ever lied to you?”

“No, sir.”

“Will you believe me, then, when I swear to you that this is true?”

“I—I'll try, Captain Sven.”

“Now you know the reason for the custom. Will you work with Blake?”

“I don't know if I can.”

“Will you try?”

Forbes bit his lip and squirmed uncomfortably. “Captain, I'll try. I don't know if I can, but I'll try. And I'm doing it for you and the men, not on account of what you said.”

“Just try,” Sven said. “That's all I ask of you.”

Forbes nodded and hurriedly left the bridge. Sven immediately signaled the tower that he was preparing for blastoff.

Down in the crew's quarters, Forbes was introduced to the new man, Blake. The replacement was tall, black-haired, and obviously ill at ease.

“Howdy,” said Blake.

“Howdy,” said Forbes. Each made a tentative gesture toward a handshake, but didn't follow it through.

“I'm from near Pompey,” said Forbes.

“I'm from Almira.”

“Practically next door,” Forbes said unhappily.

“Yeah, afraid so,” Blake said.

They eyed each other in silence. After a long moment, Forbes groaned, “I can't do it, I just can't.” He began to walk away.

“Suddenly he stopped, turned and blurted out, “You all white?”

“Can't say as how I am,” Blake replied. “I'm one-eighth Cherokee on my mother's side.”

“Cherokee, huh?”

“That's right.”

“Well, man, why didn't you say so in the first place. Knew a Cherokee from Altahatchie once, name of Tom Little Sitting Bear. Don't suppose you're kin to him?”

“Don't believe so,” Blake said. “Never knew no Cherokees, myself.”

“Well, it don't make no never-mind. They shoulda told me in the first place you was a Cherokee. Come on, I'll show you your bunk.”

When the incident was reported to Captain Sven, several hours after blastoff, he was completely perplexed. How, he asked himself, could one-eighth Cherokee blood make a man a Cherokee? Wasn't the other seven-eighths more indicative?

He decided he didn't understand American Southerners at all.

J
EFFERSON
Toms went into an auto-café one afternoon after classes, to drink coffee and study. He sat down, philosophy texts piled neatly before him, and saw a girl directing the robot waiters. She had smoky-gray eyes and hair the color of a rocket exhaust. Her figure was slight but sweetly curved and, gazing at it, Toms felt a lump in his throat and a sudden recollection of autumn, evening, rain, and candlelight.

This was how love came to Jefferson Toms. Although he was ordinarily a very reserved young man, he complained about the robot service in order to meet her. When they did meet, he was inarticulate, overwhelmed by feeling. Somehow, though, he managed to ask her for a date.

The girl, whose name was Doris, was strangely moved by the stocky, black-haired young student, for she accepted at once. And then Jefferson Toms's troubles began.

He found love delightful, yet extremely disturbing, in spite of his advanced studies in philosophy. But love was a confusing thing even in Toms's age, when spaceliners bridged the gaps between the worlds, disease lay dead, war was inconceivable, and just about anything of any importance had been solved in an exemplary manner.

Old Earth was in better shape than ever before. Her cities were bright with plastic and stainless steel. Her remaining forests were carefully tended bits of greenery where one might picnic in perfect safety, since all beasts and insects had been removed to sanitary zoos which reproduced their living conditions with admirable skill.

Even the climate of Earth had been mastered. Farmers received their quota of rain between three and three-thirty in the morning, people gathered at stadiums to watch a program of sunsets, and a tornado was produced once a year in a special arena as part of the World Peace Day Celebration.

But love was as confusing as ever, and Toms found this distressing.

He simply could not put his feelings into words. Such expressions as “I love you,” “I adore you,” “I'm crazy about you” were overworked and inadequate. They conveyed nothing of the depth and fervor of his emotions. Indeed they cheapened them, since every stereo, every second-rate play was filled with similar words. People used them in casual conversation and spoke of how much they
loved
pork chops,
adored
sunsets, were
crazy about
tennis.

Every fiber of Toms's being revolted against this. Never, he swore, would he speak of his love in terms used for pork chops. But he found, to his dismay, that he had nothing better to say.

He brought the problem to his philosophy professor. “Mr. Toms,” the professor said, gesturing wearily with his glasses, “ah—
love
, as it is commonly called, is not an operational area with us as yet. No significant work has been done in this field, aside from the so-called Language of Love of the Tyanian race.”

This was no help. Toms continued to muse on love and think lengthily of Doris. In the long haunted evenings on her porch when the shadows from the trellis vines crossed her face, revealing and concealing it, Toms struggled to tell her what he felt. And since he could not bring himself to use the weary commonplaces of love, he tried to express himself in extravagances.

“I feel about you,” he would say, “the way a star feels about its planet.”

“How immense!” she would answer, immensely flattered at being compared to anything so cosmic.

“That's not what I meant,” Toms amended. “The feeling I was trying to express was more—well, for example, when you walk, I am reminded of—”

“Of a what?”

“A doe in a forest glade,” Toms said, frowning.

“How charming!”

“It wasn't intended to be charming. I was trying to express the awkwardness inherent in youth and yet—”

“But, honey,” she said. “I'm not awkward. My dancing teacher—”

“I didn't mean
awkward
. But the essence of awkwardness is—is—”

“I understand,” she said.

But Toms knew she didn't.

So he was forced to give up extravagances. Soon he found himself unable to say anything of any importance to Doris, for it was not what he meant, nor even close to it.

The girl became concerned at the long, moody silences which developed between them.

“Jeff,” she would urge, “surely you can say
something
!”

Toms shrugged his shoulders.

“Even if it isn't absolutely what you mean.”

Toms sighed.

“Please,” she cried, “say anything at all! I can't stand this!”

“Oh, hell—”

“Yes?” she breathed, her face transfigured.

“That wasn't what I meant,” Toms said, relapsing into his gloomy silence.

At last he asked her to marry him. He was willing to admit that he “loved” her—but he refused to expand on it. He explained that a marriage must be founded upon truth or it is doomed from the start. If he cheapened and falsified his emotions at the beginning, what could the future hold for them?

Doris found his sentiments admirable, but refused to marry him.

“You must
tell
a girl that you love her,” she declared. “You have to tell her a hundred times a day, Jefferson, and even then it's not enough.”

“But I do love you!” Toms protested. “I mean to say I have an emotion corresponding to—”

“Oh, stop it!”

In this predicament, Toms thought about the Language of Love and went to his professor's office to ask about it.

“We are told,” his professor said, “that the race indigenous to Tyana II had a specific and unique language for the expression of sensations of love. To say ‘I love you' was unthinkable for Tyanians. They would use a phrase denoting the exact kind and class of love they felt at that specific moment, and used for no other purpose.”

Toms nodded, and the professor continued. “Of course, developed with this language was, necessarily, a technique of love-making quite incredible in its perfection. We are told that it made all ordinary techniques seem like the clumsy pawing of a grizzly in heat.” The professor coughed in embarrassment.

“It is precisely what I need!” Toms exclaimed.

“Ridiculous,” said the professor. “The technique might be interesting, but your own is doubtless sufficient for most needs. And the language, by its very nature, can be used with only one person. To learn it impresses me as wasted energy.”

“Labor for love,” Toms said, “is the most worthwhile work in the world, since it produces a rich harvest of feeling.”

“I refuse to stand here and listen to bad epigrams. Mr. Toms, why all this fuss about love?”

“It is the only perfect thing in this world,” Toms answered fervently. “If one must learn a special language to appreciate it, one can do no less. Tell me, is it far to Tyana II?”

“A considerable distance,” his professor said, with a thin smile. “And an unrewarding one, since the race is extinct.”

“Extinct! But why? A sudden pestilence? An invasion?”

“It is one of the mysteries of the galaxy,” his professor said somberly.

“Then the language is lost!”

“Not quite. Twenty years ago, an Earthman named George Varris went to Tyana and learned the Language of Love from the last remnants of the race.” The professor shrugged his shoulders. “I never considered it sufficiently important to read his scientific papers.”

Toms looked up Varris in the
Interspatial Explorers Who's Who
and found that he was credited with the discovery of Tyana, had wandered around the frontier planets for a time, but at last had returned to deserted Tyana, to devote his life to investigating every aspect of its culture.

After learning this, Toms thought long and hard. The journey to Tyana was a difficult one, time-consuming, and expensive. Perhaps Varris would be dead before he got there, or unwilling to teach him the language. Was it worth the gamble?

“Is
love
worth it?” Toms asked himself, and knew the answer.

So he sold his ultra-fi, his memory recorder, his philosophy texts, and several stocks his grandfather had left him, and booked passage to Cranthis IV, which was the closest he could come to Tyana on a scheduled spaceway. And after all his preparations had been made, he went to Doris.

“When I return,” he said, “I will be able to tell you exactly how much—I mean the particular quality and class of—I mean, Doris, when I have mastered the Tyanian Technique, you will be loved as no woman has ever been loved!”

“Do you mean that?” she asked, her eyes glowing.

“Well,” Toms said, “the term ‘loved,' doesn't quite express it. But I mean something very much like it.”