The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 (3 page)

'Yes,
this is Earth,' said the one beside him, 'nor are you out of it. In Zambia men
are rolling down hills inside barrels as training for space flight. Israel and
Egypt have defoliated each other's deserts. The
Reader's
Digest
has
bought a controlling interest in the United States of America/General Mills combine.
The population of the Earth is increasing by thirty billion every Thursday. Mrs
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis will marry Mao Tse-Tung on Saturday, in search of
security; and Russia has contaminated Mars with bread mold.'

'Why
then,' said he, 'nothing has changed.'

'Nothing
much,' said the one beside him. 'As Jean-Paul Sartre has said in his lovable
way, "Hell is other people."'

'To
Hell with Jean-Paul Sartre. I want to know where I am.'

'Well
then,' said the other, 'tell me who you are.'

'I'm.'

'Well?'

'My
name is.'

'What?'

He
stood, his eyes filling with tears and his knees with palsy, and knew he did
not know his name. He was a blank, a cipher, an x. He had a body and all that,
but he had no who.

They
stood at the edge of a forest, he and the other one. It was a recognizable
forest, though rather dingy in the leaf, and damaged at the fringes by
weedkiller. A fawn was walking away from them into the forest and as it went
its name fell away from it. Something looked back at them with mild eyes from
the darkness of the trees before it vanished. 'This is England!' cried blank,
grasping the floating straw, but the other said, 'England sank years ago.'

'Sank?'

'Yes.
Foundered. Nothing is left now but the topmost fourteen feet of Mt Snowdon,
known as the New Welsh Reef.'

At
this blank also sank. He was crushed. 'Oh,' he cried on his knees, intending to
ask somebody's help, 'but he could not remember whose help it was one asked. It
began with a T, he was almost certain. He began to weep.

The
other sat down on the grass beside him and presently put a hand on his
shoulder, saying, 'Come one now, don't take it so hard.'

The
kindly voice gave blank some courage. He controlled himself, dried his face on
his sleeve, and looked at the other. It was like him, roughly. It was another.
However, it had no name either. What good was it?

Shadow
came into the eyes as Earth went round on its axis. Shadow slipped eastward and
upward into the other's eyes.

'I
think,' blank said carefully, 'that we should move out from the shadow of the,
this, here.' He gestured to the objects near them, large things, dark below and
multitudinously green above, the names of which he could no longer remember. He
wondered if each one had a name, or if they were all called by the same name.
What about himself and the other, did they share a name in common, or did each
have one of his own? 'I have a feeling I'll remember better farther away from
it, from them,' he said.

'Certainly,'
said the other. 'But it won't make as much difference as it used to.'

When
they came clear away from it into the sunlight, he at once remembered that it
was called a forest and that they were called trees. However, he could not
recall whether or not each tree had a name of its own. If they did, he did not
remember any of them. Perhaps he did not know these trees personally.

'What
shall I do,' he said, 'what shall I do?'

'Well,
look here, you can call yourself whatever you please, you know. Why not?'

'But
I want to know my
real
name.'

'That
isn't always easy. But meanwhile you could just take a label, as it were, for
ease of reference and conversational purposes. Pick a name, any name!' said the
other, and held out a blue box named
disposable.

'No,'
said Blank proudly, 'I'll choose my own.'

'Right.
But don't you want a kleenex?'

Blank
took a kleenex, blew his nose, and said, 'I shall call myself...' He halted in
terror.

The
other watched him, mild-eyed.

'How
can I say who I am when I can't say what I am?'

'How
would you find out what you are?'

'If
I had anything— If I did something—'

'That
would make you be?'

'Of
course it would.'

'I
never thought of that. Well, then, it doesn't matter what name you're called
by; any one will do; it's what you do that counts.'

Blank
stood up. 'I will exist,' he stated firmly. 'I will call myself Ralph.'

Whipcord
breeches fitted close on his powerful thighs, the stock rose high on his neck,
sweat clung in his thick, curly hair. He tapped his boots with his riding-crop,
his back to Amanda, who sat in her old grey dress in the deep shade of the
pecan tree. He stood in full sunlight, hot with anger. 'You're a fool,' he
said.

'Why
Mr Ralph,' came the soft lilting Southern voice, 'Ah'm just a little bit
stubborn.'

'You
realize, don't you, that Yankee as I am, I own all the land from here to
Weevilville? I own this county! Your farm wouldn't make a peanut-patch for one
of my darkies' kitchen gardens!'

'Indeed
not. Won't you come sit down in the shade, Mr Ralph? Youah gettin' so hot out
theah.'

'You
proud vixen,' he murmured, turning. He saw her, white as a lily in her worn old
dress, in the shade of the great old trees: the white lily of the garden. Suddenly
he was at her feet, clasping her hands. She fluttered in his powerful grasp.
'Oh Mr Ralph,' she cried faintly, 'what does this mean?'

I
am a man, Amanda, and you are a woman. I never wanted your land. I never wanted
anything but you, my white lily, my little rebel! I want you, I want you!
Amanda! Say you will be my wife!'

'Ah
will,' she breathed faintly, bending towards him as a white flower stoops; and
their lips met in a long, long kiss. But it did not seem to help at all.

Perhaps
it ought to be moved up twenty or thirty years.

'You
sick bitch,' he muttered, turning. He saw her, stark naked there in the shade,
her back against the pecan tree, her knees up. He strode towards her
unbuttoning his fly. They coupled in the centipede-infested crabgrass. He
bucked like a bronco, she cried ululatingly,
Oooh! Aaah!
Coming
coming coming
come
wow wow wow
CLIMAX! Now what?

Blank
stood at a little distance from the forest and stared disconsolately at the
other.

'Am
I a man?' he inquired. 'Are you a woman?'

'Don't
ask me,' the other said, morose.

'I
thought surely that was the most important thing to establish!'

'Not
so damned important.'

'You
mean it doesn't
matter
if I am a man or a woman?'

'Of
course it matters. It matters to me too. It also matters which man and which
woman we are or, as the case may be, are not. For instance, what if Amanda was
black?'

'But
sex.'

'Oh,
Hell,' said the other with a flare of temper, 'bristleworms have sex, tree-sloths
have sex, Jean-Paul Sartre has sex - what does it prove?'

'Why,
sex is real, I mean really real - it's having and acting in its intensest form.
When a man takes a woman he proves his being!'

'I
see. But what if he's a woman?'

'I
was Ralph.'

'Try
being Amanda,' the other said sourly.

There
was a pause. Shadows were coming on eastward and upward from the forest over
the grass. Small birds cried
jug jug, tereu.
Blank sat
hunched over his knees. The other lay stretched out, making patterns with
fallen pine needles, shadowed, sorrowful.

'I'm
sorry,' blank said.

'No
harm done,' the other said. 'After all, it wasn't real.'

'Listen,'
blank said, leaping up, 'I know what's happened! I'm on some kind of trip. I
took something, and I'm on a trip, that's it!'

It
was. He was on a trip. A canoe trip. He was paddling a small canoe along a
long, narrow, dark, shining stretch of water. The roof and walls were of
concrete. It was pretty dark. The long lake, or stream, or sewer, slanted
upward visibly. He was paddling against the current, uphill. It was hard work,
but the canoe kept sliding forward upriver as silently as the black shining
water moved back down. He kept his strokes quiet, the paddle entering the water
silent as a knife in butter. His large black-and-pearl electric guitar lay on
the forward seat. He knew there was somebody behind him, but he didn't say anything.
He wasn't allowed to say anything or even look around, so if they didn't keep
up that was their lookout, he couldn't be called responsible. He certainly
couldn't slow down, the current might get hold of his canoe and pull it right
out from under him and then where'd he be? He shut his eyes and kept paddling,
silent entry, strong stroke. There was no sound behind him. The water made no
sound. The cement made no sound. He wondered if he was actually going forward
or only hanging still while the black water ran hellbent beneath. He would
never get out to daylight. Out, out—

The
other didn't even seem to have noticed that blank had been away on a trip, but
just lay there making patterns with pine needles, and presently said, 'How is
your memory?'

Blank
searched it to see if it had improved while he was away. There was less in it
than before. The cupboard was bare. There was a lot of junk in the cellars and
attics, old toys, nursery rhymes, myths, old wives' tales, but no nourishment
for adults, no least scrap of possession, not a crumb of success. He searched
and searched like a starving methodical rat. At last he said uncertainly, 'I do
remember England.'

'Why
surely. I expect you can even remember Omaha.'

'But
I mean, I remember being in England.'

'Do
you?' The other sat up, scattering pinestraw. 'You do remember being, then!
What a pity England sank.'

They
were silent again.

'I
have lost everything.'

There
was a darkness in the other's eyes and on the eastern edge of the earth
plunging down the steepening slopes of night. 'I'm nobody.'

'At
least,' said the other, 'you know you're human.'

'Oh,
what good's that? with no name, no sex, no nothing? I might as well be a
bristleworm or a tree-sloth!'

'You
might as well,' the other agreed, 'be Jean-Paul Sartre.'

'I?'
said blank, offended. Driven to denial by so nauseous a notion, he stood up and
said, 'I certainly am not Jean-Paul Sartre. I am myself.' And so saying he
found himself to be, in fact, himself; his name was Lewis D. Charles and he
knew it as well as he knew his own name. There he was.

The
forest was there, root and branch.

The
other was, however, gone.

Lewis
D. Charles looked in the red eye of the west and the dark eye of the east. He
shouted aloud, 'Come back! Please come back!'

He
had gone at it all wrong, backwards. He had found the wrong name. He turned,
and without the least impulse of self-preservation plunged into the pathless
forest, casting himself away so that he might find what he had cast away.

Under
the trees he forgot his name again at once. He also forgot what he was looking
for. What was it he had lost? He went deeper and deeper into shadows, under
leaves, eastward, in the forest where nameless tigers burned.

VASTER
THAN EMPIRES AND MORE SLOW

Trees
again.

As
I recall, Robert Silverberg, who first published this story in
New
Dimensions I,
asked very gently if I would change the title. I could
see where a reader about halfway through might find the title all too
descriptive of the story itself; but it was too beautiful, and too beautifully
apt, to part with, and Mr Silverberg let me keep it. It's from Marvell, 'To his
Coy Mistress'—