The Avram Davidson Treasury (38 page)

Under the table Sacheverell tugged on his chain ineffectually. “I don’t
like
it here, George,” he said. “It’s cold and it’s dirty and
I’m
dirty and cold, too, and I’m hungry. It’s all dark here and nobody ever comes here and I don’t like it, George, I don’t like it here one bit. I wish I was back with the Professor again. I was very
happy
then. The Professor was nice to me and so was the Princess and Madame Opal and the General. They were the only ones in on the secret, until
you
found out.”

George swung around and looked at him. One eye sparked in the candlelight.

“We used to have tea-parties and Madame Opal always brought chocolates when she came, even when she came alone, and she read love stories to me out of a magazine book with pictures and they were all true. Why can’t I be back with the Professor again?”

George swallowed, and opened his mouth with a little smacking sound. “Professor Whitman died of a heart-attack,” he said.

Sacheverell looked at him, head cocked. “An attack …”

“So he’s
dead!
So forget about him!” the words tore out of the man’s mouth. He padded across the room. Sacheverell retreated to the end of his chain.

“I don’t know what the hell Om gunna
do
… In a few weeks now, they’ll tear this rotten building down. Maybe,” he said, slyly, putting his foot down on the chain, “I’ll sell you to a zoo. Where you belong.” He bent, grunting, and picked up the chain.

Sacheverell’s teeth began to chatter. “I
don’t!
” he shrilled. “I
don’t
belong in a zoo! The little people they have there are
stupid—
they don’t know how to
behave
, and they can’t even
talk!
”

George closed one eye, nodded; slowly, very slowly, drew in the chain. “Come on,” he said. “Level with me. Professor Whitman had a nice little act, there. How come he quit and took off and came here?” Slowly he drew in the chain. Sacheverell trembled, but did not resist.

“We were going to go to a laboratory in a college,” he said. “He told me. It was a waste to keep me doing silly tricks with Coko and Moko, when I was so smart. He should have done it before, he said.”

George’s mouth turned up on one side, creasing the stubble. “Naa, Sacheverell,” he said. “That don’t make sense. You know what they do to monkeys in them labs? They cut ‘em up. That’s all. I
know
. I went to one and I asked. They pay about fifteen bucks and then they cut ’em up.” He made a scissors out of his fingers and went
k’khkhkhkh
… Sacheverell shuddered. George set his foot on the chain again and took hold of him by the neck. He poked him in the stomach with his finger, stiff. It had grown colder, the man’s breath shown misty in the tainted air. He poked again. Sacheverell made a sick noise, struggled. “Come on,” George said. “Level with me. There’s a million dollars inside of you, you dirty little ape. There’s
gotta
be. Only I don’t know how. So you tell me.”

Sacheverell whimpered. “I don’t
know
, George. I don’t
know.
”

The man scowled, then grinned slyly. “That’s what
you
say. I’m not so sure. You think I don’t know that if They found out, They’d take you away from me? Sure. A million bucks…how come I’m being followed, if They don’t know? First a guy with a beard, then a kid in a red snow-suit. I seen them together. Listen, you frigging little jocko, you better
think
, I’m telling you—you better think hard!” He poked again with his stiff and dirty finger. And again. “I always knew, see, I always
knew
that there was a million bucks waiting for me somewhere, if I only kept my eyes open. What the hell is a guy like me doing unloading crates in the fruit market, when I got plans for a million? And then—” His voice sank and his eyes narrowed. “—this Professor Whitman come along and put up at the Eagle Hotel. I caught his act in the sticks once, I been around.
First
I thought he was practicing ventriloquism,
then
I found out about
you—you
was the other voice in his room! And that’s when I—”

Abruptly he stopped. The outside door opened with a rusty squeal and footfalls sounded in the hall. Someone knocked. Someone tried the knob. Someone said, “Sacheverell? Sacheverell?” and George clamped his hairy, filthy hand over the captive’s mouth. Sacheverell jerked and twitched and rolled his eyes. The voice made a disappointed noise, the footfalls moved uncertainly, started to retreat. And then Sacheverell kicked out at George’s crotch. The man grunted, cursed, lost his grip—

“Help!”
Sacheverell cried. “
Help! Help! Save me!
”

Fists beat on the door, the glass in the back window crashed and fell to the floor, a wizened old-man’s face peered through the opening, withdrew. George ran to the door, then turned to chase Sacheverell, who fled, shrieking hysterically. A tiny figure in a red snow-suit squeezed through the bars of the back window and ran to pull the bolt on the door. Someone in boots and a plaid jacket and a woolen watch-cap burst in, melting snow glittering on a big black beard.

“Save me!” Sacheverell screamed, dashing from side to side. “He attacked Professor Whitman and knocked him down
and he didn’t get up again
—”

George stooped, picking up the chair, but the red snow-suit got between his legs and he stumbled. The chair was jerked from his hands, he came up with his fists clenched and the bearded person struck down with the chair. It caught him across the bridge of the nose with a crunching noise, he fell, turned over, stayed down. Silence.

Sacheverell hiccupped. Then he said, “Why are you wearing
men’s
clothing, Princess Zaga?”

“A bearded
man
attracts quite enough attention, thank you,” the Princess said, disengaging the chain. “No need to advertise… Let’s get out of here.” She picked him up and the three of them went out into the black, deserted street, boarded-shut windows staring blindly. The snow fell thickly, drifting into the ravaged hall and into the room where George’s blood, in a small pool, had already begun to freeze.

“There’s our car, Sacheverell,” said the man in the red snow-suit, thrusting a cigar into his child-size, jaded old face. “What a time—”

“I assume you are still with the carnival, General Pinkey?”

“No, kiddy. The new owners wouldn’t reckernize the union, so we quit and retired on Social Security in Sarasota. You’ll like it there. Not that the unions are much better, mind you: Bismarkian devices to dissuade the working classes from industrial government on a truly Marxian, Socialist-Labor basis. We got a television set, kiddy.”

“And look who’s waiting for you—” Princess Zaga opened the station wagon and handed Sacheverell inside. There, in the back seat, was the hugest, the vastest, the fattest woman in the world.

“Princess Opal!” Sacheverell cried, leaping into her arms—and was buried in the wide expanse of her bosom and bathed in her warm Gothick tears. She called him her Precious and her Little Boy and her very own Peter Pan.

“It was Madame Opal who planned this all,” Princess Zaga remarked, starting the car and driving off. General Pinkey lit his cigar and opened a copy of
The Weekly People
.

“Yes, I did, yes, I did,” Mme. Opal murmured, kissing and hugging Sacheverell. “Oh, how neglected you are! Oh, how thin! We’ll have a tea-party, just like we used to, the very best doll dishes; we’ll see you eat nice and we’ll wash you and comb you and put ribbons around your neck.”

Sacheverell began to weep. “Oh, it was
awful
with George,” he said.

“Never mind, never mind, he didn’t know any better,” Mme. Opal said, soothingly.

“The hell he didn’t!” snapped Princess Zaga.

“Predatory capitalism,” General Pinkey began.

“Never mind, never mind, forget about it, darling, it was only a bad dream …”

Sacheverell dried his tears on Mme. Opal’s enormous spangled-velvet bosom. “George was very
mean
to me,” he said. “He treated me
very
mean. But worst of all, you know, Madame Opal, he
lied
to me—he lied to me all the time, and I almost believed him—that was the most horrible part of all: I almost believed that I was a monkey.”

I
NTRODUCTION BY
U
RSULA
K. L
E
G
UIN

Science fiction often paints a hopeful history of colonists and castaways on far planets. They not only survive, they thrive in their isolation; they keep all their skills, they remember how to operate the sawmill, how to program the computer, how to maintain liberty and justice for all. And when the Federation finds them after five hundred years, they talk just the way the Feds talk.

Avram didn’t share the rationalist’s faith that reason, once established, will prevail. I doubt he believed that reason had ever been established anywhere for more than about five minutes. In the incredibly fertile darkness of his imagination, rational behavior is the gleam of a flashlight for a moment in a midnight thunderstorm in a tropical forest.

The Blakeneys could well be a Heinlein survivalist scenario five centuries later, the offspring of a couple of masterful polygamist studs, the children of Reason.

This profoundly disturbing story comes on as light as a meringue. Avram’s ear for weird ways of talking was wonderful, and his Blakeneys are very funny, mumbling on and going “Rower, rower.” It’s hard not to start talking like them, funnyfunny, a hey. But Avram’s ear was also for the precise meanings of words; he wrote with a very rare accuracy of usage. Late in the story we realize that the Blakeneys have no plural for the word house. “Houses?”—“No such word, hey.” And the whole story lies in that reply.

The funnyfunniest thing about them, to me, is that they don’t have cows. They have freemartins. I suspect Avram of throwing this in to see if anybody knew what a freemartin is, and if so, if they’d wonder how the Blakeney cattle reproduce. A hey.

THE HOUSE THE BLAKENEYS BUILT

F
OUR PEOPLE COMING DOWN
the Forest Road, a hey,” Old Big Mary said.

Young Red Tom understood her at once. “Not ours.”

Things grew very quiet in the long kitchenroom. Old Whitey Bill shifted in his chairseat. “Those have’s to be Runaway Little Bob’s and that Thin Jinnie’s,” he said. “Help me up, some.”

“No,” Old Big Mary said. “They’re not.”

“Has to be.” Old Whitey Bill shuffled up, leaning on his canestick. “Has to be. Whose elses could they be. Always said, me, she ran after him.”

Young Whitey Bill put another chunk of burnwood on the burning. “Rowwer, rowwer,” he muttered. Then everyone was talking at once, crowding up to the windowlooks. Then everybody stopped the talking. The big food-pots bubbled. Young Big Mary mumbletalked excitedly. Then her words came out clearsound.

“Look to here—look to here—I say, me, they aren’t Blakeneys.”

Old Little Mary, coming down from the spindleroom, called out, “People! People! Three and four of them down the Forest Road and I don’t know them and, oh, they funnywalk!”

“Four strange people!”

“Not Blakeneys!”

“Stop sillytalking! Has to be! Who elses?”

“But not Blakeneys!”

“Not from The House, look to, look to! People—not from The House!”

“Runaway Bob and that Thin Jinnie?”

“No, can’t be. No old ones.”

“Children? Childrenchildren?”

All who hadn’t been lookseeing before came now, all who were at The House, that is—running from the cowroom and the horseroom and dairyroom, ironroom, schoolroom, even from the sickroom.

“Four people! Not Blakeneys, some say!”

“Blakeneys or not Blakeneys, not from The House!”

Robert Hayakawa and his wife Shulamith came out of the forest, Ezra and Mikicho with them. “Well, as I said,” Robert observed, in his slow careful way, “a road may end nowhere, going in one direction, but it’s not likely it will end nowhere, going in the other.”

Shulamith sighed. She was heavy with child. “Tilled fields. I’m glad of that. There was no sign of them anywhere else on the planet. This must be a new settlement. But we’ve been all over that—” She stopped abruptly, so did they all.

Ezra pointed. “A house—”

“It’s more like a, well, what would you say?” Mikicho moved her mouth, groping for a word. “A…
a castle?
Robert?”

Very softly, Robert said, “It’s not new, whatever it is. It is very much not new, don’t you see, Shulamith.
What—?
”

She had given a little cry of alarm, or perhaps just surprise. All four turned to see what had surprised her. A man was running over the field towards them. He stopped, stumbling, as they all turned to him. Then he started again, a curious shambling walk. They could see his mouth moving after a while. He pointed to the four, waved his hand, waggled his head.

“Hey,” they could hear him saying. “A hey, a hey. Hey. Look to. Mum. Mum mum mum. Oh, hey …”

He had a florid face, a round face that bulged over the eyes, and they were prominent and blue eyes. His nose was an eagle’s nose, sharp and hooked, and his mouth was loose and trembling. “Oh, hey, you must be, mum, his name, what? And she run off to follow him? Longlong. Jinnie! Thin Jinnie! Childrenchildren, a hey?” Behind him in the field two animals paused before a plow, switching their tails.

“Mikicho, look,” said Ezra. “Those must be cows.”

The man had stopped about ten feet away. He was dressed in loose, coarse cloth. Again he waggled his head. “Cows, no. Oh, no, mum mum, freemartins, elses. Not cows.” Something occurred to him, almost staggering in its astonishment. “A hey, you won’t know me! Won’t know me!” He laughed. “Oh. What a thing. Strange Blakeneys. Old Red Tom, I say, me.”

Gravely, they introduced themselves. He frowned, his slack mouth moving. “Don’t know them name,” he said, after a moment. “No, a mum. Make them up, like children, in the woods. Longlong. Oh, I, now! Runaway Little Bob. Yes, that name! Your fatherfather. Dead, a hey?”

Very politely, very wearily, feeling—now that he had stopped—the fatigue of the long, long walk, Robert Hayakawa said, “I’m afraid I don’t know him. We are not, I think, who you seem to think we are…might we go on to the house, do you know?” His wife murmured her agreement, and leaned against him.