The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales - [SSC] Read online

  “He has agreed to journey to uru, to obtain judgment on your guilt or innocence.”

  “Where?”

  “Uru. It’s...I suppose you’d call it a mythical place, beyond dreams. His spirit can journey there through the medium of a drug-induced trance. There the culumesqua can attain direct communication with the ancestral spirits, in symbolic dreams which only he and his kind can interpret.”

  Connolly could hardly believe what he was hearing. “Jesus Christ.” he croaked. “You’ve asked this goddam witch-doctor to dive into some kind of hallucination to find out whether or not I’m guilty. What the hell happens if he says I am? What’s to stop him making up his mind any old how?”

  Maria Asprey shifted her position slightly, to rest fatigued muscles.

  “Look, Connolly,” she said, “there’s no other way to approach this problem except through their frame of reference. They’re the ones who have to make a decision; they’re the ones who have to come to terms with the loss of seventeen people, including nearly a third of the season’s brood. There’s nothing I can do except explore the avenues that their culture makes available.”

  “You could make them see the bloody truth!”

  “They have their own ways of defining truth and falsehood.”

  “But they’re crazy!”

  She shook her head. “It’s a way of being in the world,” she told him. “It works, for them. It’s coherent, in its own terms. Whenever evil manifests itself, they feel compelled to debit the moral responsibility. They have to be reassured that someone is responsible, because the idea that they might be the helpless victims of an uncontrollable fate would be intolerable to them—they live too close to the margins of survival for that. Belief in chance is a luxury. Mr. Connolly; we can afford it only because we’re so well-equipped to preserve ourselves against its vicissitudes. Even we have trouble coming to terms with misfortune, don’t we?”

  “You’ve got to help me,” he said, dully.

  “I am helping you,” she told him. “I’m doing everything that can be done. I can’t do the impossible.”

  “You’re letting my life hang on the whim of some hophead’s dream.”

  “No, Mr. Connolly...I’m appealing to the Supreme Court. I’m doing everything that can be done to preserve your life. If I fail...there was nothing else I could do. Nothing.”

  “You half-believe that I’m guilty yourself,” he accused. “You’re that far ahead on the road to insanity yourself.”

  “I’m trying to understand the aquamen,” she said, allowing herself to use the human word without inflection. “I’m trying to cultivate the ability to enter into their way of life, to be able to see situations as they see them. I’m not becoming one of them. I can still see things from your point of view, as well. The crash was an accident, caused by the rot. But Martinstown lies due west of the archipelago, and you approached the raft from the north. You did change the airplane’s course, Mr. Connolly, didn’t you? You did head for the raft.”

  “That doesn’t make me a murderer,” he said, spitting the words out sourly.

  “I know that,” she said, softly. “But we’re on a floating island on an alien world. That changes...everything.”

  “Miss Asprey,” he said, as though he was fated to repeat it over and over in an eternally hopeless attempt to win her comprehension, “it wasn’t my fault. If anything happens to me...how are you going to square your conscience?”

  Her voice was thin and distant, and she turned her face away to look out through the opening of the shelter even while she made her response. “Conscience,” she said, “doesn’t come into it. It doesn’t come into it at all.”

  * * * *

  Evening fell, and the twilight slowly ebbed away. There had been plenty of light inside the shelter, whose walls were crudely-woven, but now it rapidly grew dark. The moon was nearly full, but it was a small moon, and its light was meager by comparison with the white glare of Earth’s companion. The stars were bright, but they seemed impotent to interfere with the gathering gloom inside the alien nest.

  Maria Asprey returned again, this time carrying a strange night-light: a bowl made out of translucent shells cemented together, filled with a suspension of bioluminescent algae. The light it gave out was cold and very weak, but it was enough to fill the shelter with radiance and shadows.

  “Get me to the boat,” said Connolly, trying once again to sit up straight, hoping against hope that he could stand.

  “Where could you go?” she asked. Her voice was still unnaturally calm. “The ocean is their world. You couldn’t get away.”

  “There’s a flare-gun in the emergency-kit. I could defend myself. It’s a chance, but I might get clear, under cover of the darkness.”

  “You wouldn’t,” she said, squatting down as before. “They’d slit the fabric of the dinghy from below. Your flare-gun would be useless. Darkness is no cover; they see well by moonlight, and they remain active by night. It’s not possible.”

  “Then bring the gun to me here.”

  “Why?” she asked, tiredly.

  “Because I’m damned if I’ll give in without a fight. If they’re going to kill me, they’re going to have to work to do it.” His voice was high and urgent, but far from hysterical. His anger was under control.

  “You’ve already been the cause of seventeen deaths,” she told him, flatly.

  He felt helpless even to protest against the injustices.

  “How the hell are you going to explain this,” he asked, “when the season ends and you have to return to your own kind? How?”

  “I’ll just have to do my best,” she said. “If the people at First Landing think that I’ve done wrong, and that I should have acted differently... well, that’s for them to judge.”

  “Maybe you can suggest that they shoot up with dope and consult the ancestors in order to figure out whether you’re on the right side of fate—except that all the ancestral spirits got left behind on Earth, sixty-six light years away.”

  “For the ulaquel dur’ya,” she said, “the world of uru is as real as this one. Even the dreams of ordinary men and women are sacred and meaningful. They’re the medium in which they see through reality, into the greater realm where this world is simply a fragment, where the futures of men and of worlds are determined, and where the moral order of the universe is preserved. The culumesqua might discover in uru that there was a reason for those people to be killed today. He might find that it was part of some misapprehended pattern—that you were just the instrument through which other forces were working. Perhaps the responsibility for the deaths rested with the dead themselves, in consequence of some evil they harbored. Perhaps powerful sorcerers were at work, attempting to destroy the tribe, requiring the tribe to make powerful magic in reprisal. Don’t mock, Mr. Connolly—your very life depends on the culumesqua’s journey.”

  “At best, on a whim of chance,” he countered, “and, at worst, on a decision he’s already taken. It’s too easy for him to tell them what they want to hear—that I’m guilty and that they can take out their frustrations by killing me. Too bloody easy by half.”

  His head was on fire and he couldn’t find the words to go on. Helplessly, he let his eyes close, and wondered if what was happening really mattered at all. At Martinstown, in the hospital, he’d be a sure bet to recover but out here, in the middle of nowhere, without proper care and proper food, he might be finished any way....already prepared by circumstance as a human sacrifice.

  He didn’t rouse himself from his torpor again until he heard the movements which signified that Maria Asprey was no longer alone in her vigil. She was moving round to sit still closer to his head, while three of the aliens squeezed themselves up against the walls, leaving a clear space between the pallet and the doorway. Into this space moved a fourth aquaman, whose body was decorated with an elaborate costume, decorated with shells and flowers. He was carrying some kind of staff made out of bone, intricately carved.

  Connolly
opened his mouth to speak—to issue some kind of formal protest—but Maria Asprey immediately laid her fingers across his lips. The pressure of her fingertips was very gentle, but the implied command stilled his protest. He looked up at her face, palely lit by the wan light. She tried to smile, and for the first time he thought that she really was on his side. She seemed to be sympathetic, hoping that things would come right for him. She didn’t seem crazy any more.

  There was a rustle and a sequence of clicks as the culumesqua squatted down before him, making passes with the staff as though he were a stage magician declaring to an imaginary audience that without the benefit of wires or mirrors he was about to make Connolly disappear. Eventually, he laid the staff down and produced a small capsule made from a leathery weed-bladder from the folds of his costume. His body was rigid, and his nimble fingers daubed some kind of ointment from the bladder upon his head and breast. Then, raising his eyes aloft, he began to rock gently from side to side, crooning softly in the liquid tones of his language.

  Although the words of the song—if they were words—were unlike those of any human tongue, Connolly found the slow rhythm and the cadence strangely familiar. He felt as though he ought to be yielding to hypnosis, but in fact his mind seemed to be growing clearer. Whenever he made some involuntary movement, Maria Asprey misconstrued it, and tried to restrain him. She lowered her crouch somewhat, and both of her hands began to flow over his face, soothing him with caresses. There was sweat on his brow despite the coolness of the night, and she brushed it away with her fingertips.

  At first, he thought it would be over quite quickly; the silent watchers were clearly expectant. However, they were also patient, and knew the skill of waiting. Time dragged by, and the song dragged on and on, although the culumesqua was clearly no longer conscious. The minutes turned to hours, and Connolly found himself slipping periodically into a trance of his own, lulled more by Maria Asprey’s touch than by the alien crooning. Always, though, he came back from the brink of sleep, letting memories flow through his mind in an unsteady train, intermingling with his hopes and his fears.

  It seems, he told himself silently, that my case is unduly confused. Perhaps the ancestral spirits have never before been faced with a problem of this nature.

  When the silence finally did come, it took him quite by surprise, although he made no convulsive movement to betray himself. The silence lasted for two or three minutes before the aquaman began to speak, the syllables spilling from his tongue in an unnaturally regular stream. The voice sounded deeper now than it had when it was singing, and more remote.

  He didn’t have to ask about the verdict; it was plain in the way Maria Asprey’s hands suddenly gripped his shoulders. She had been praying for him, he was sure, although he had no idea as to which deity her prayers might have been directed.

  He acted swiftly and reflexively, surging forward, with his own hands reaching for the cidumesqua’s unusual throat. She pulled him back, and the others went to help her, though he knew as he collapsed that he wouldn’t have been able to carry through the attack. He was too weak, and they were all too strong.

  * * * *

  When Connolly was quite dead, spread-eagled across a gigantic lily-pad, with his blood spreading out in the shape of a spiny brittle-star along the leaf-veins, Maria Asprey looked down at the fish-spear in her hands, as if surprised to find the barb stained. Then stain didn’t look like blood; in the half-light of the alien night, there was no color.

  Connolly hadn’t screamed for mercy, but instead had shouted his wrath until the breath was gone from him. Strangely, all the anger had seemed to be directed at her, but perhaps she was just being over-sensitive. She was, after all, the one who had tried to help him. He was wrong to have taken the view that she had betrayed him in some way. Perhaps it was only to be expected, but it was still wrong. She had done everything that she could, and she had done what she had to do. She had nothing for which to reproach herself.

  It was a pity...such a terrible pity.

  Given more time, she felt sure that she could have enabled him to see things as she saw them, and to understand.

  <>

  * * * *

  THE BAD SEED

  Meg came round, after a fashion, while they were lifting her into the ambulance, but she couldn’t quite get a grip on reality. It was as if her mind had gone limp, relaxing into a kind of exhausted passivity and refusing to take up any but the most elementary responsibilities of consciousness. She was aware of pain but it didn’t seem to be particularly terrible, and she didn’t give it any further thought. She couldn’t seem to further her thoughts at all.

  “Hello,” said the ambulance-man who had sat down beside her. “Can you tell me your name?”

  “Meg,” she said, without hesitation.

  “Good,” he said. “That’s good. You’re going to be all right, Meg.” She felt a sudden surge of pain as he pronounced the words all right, and it made her gasp, but she still felt strangely detached, as though the pain wasn’t really hers. He placed something over her right eye, very gently. It wasn’t the pain of the contact which surprised her but the fact that the point of contact seemed to be so far away, as if her face were no longer where—or perhaps what—it had been before.

  “What’s your full name, Meg?” the paramedic asked, when he’d fastened the dressing. His face seemed to be floating in mid-air at an odd angle. It was red and round. His hair had receded a very long way—almost as far as the tide went out in Swansea Bay, it seemed—and what was left was dappled grey.

  “Hughes,” she said. “Margaret Leonie Hughes.” It was hard to formulate the syllables, and she realized that her lips were swollen and bleeding. Her front teeth weren’t all there.

  “Good. That’s great. Address?”

  “One-one-five Belmoredean Road.” The ambulance was pulling away now. juddering over the rough ground.

  “Good’. Very good. Age?”

  “Twenty-one,” she said, wondering what was so good about anything and everything she said. The ambulance jolted one last time as it went over the pavement and on to the road.

  “Great. Rest now. Just rest. We’ll have you in hospital in no time. You’ll be fine. I’ll just put this over your mouth to help you breathe. Just a precaution. You’ll be fine.”

  The oxygen-jet was cold. She didn’t think she needed it. She let herself relax completely, listening to the throaty roar of the engine and the plaintive wail of the siren. The combination of sounds was strangely absorbing and strangely comforting.

  It wasn’t until the ambulance was drawing up at the hospital that she suddenly realized that she wasn’t twenty-one at all. She was twenty-two, and had been for at least a month. She had forgotten how old she was!

  Hell’s bells, she thought, I’ve got amnesia! That was when it finally came home to her that she’d been hurt, perhaps badly, and that they were taking her to hospital in an ambulance because she was injured, and that the reason everything she said was good was that it was an achievement on her part to be able to say anything at all. She suddenly began to pay attention to the pain, to recognize it as her own, and to tick off its sources one by one.

  Head. Eyebrow. Cheek. Mouth. Ribs. Oh shit. Oh shit....

  She blacked out while they were hurrying the stretcher from the back of the vehicle, while she was still trying to remember what day it was and why she had been lying in the bushes: lying on the moist black soil whose earthy odor still clung to her hair and her naked, bloody legs.

  * * * *

  Meg didn’t have amnesia. It would have been better if I had, she thought, savagely when she finally had the opportunity to organize her thoughts and get the narrative of her life under way again. The more the better. Not just this but all of it. Far, far better if I could start over with a clean sheet...and maybe get it right this time.

  She knew, of course, that she’d handled the rape all wrong, and was still handling it all wrong, but she didn’t seem able to do anything about
it. She’d always been conscious of the danger—how could one not be conscious of such dangers in this day and age?— and she’d always told herself that if ever it happened to her, she’d get it right. She’d scream and she’d scream as loudly as she could, and she’d go for his eyes with her fingernails if she couldn’t reach his balls, and if the worst came to the worst, because he was too big and too well-armed and there was no help near, she’d just grit her teeth and bear it, and come out the other side, and tell herself that it was no big deal and just get on with her life....

  But she hadn’t managed to do any of that. Not one damn thing. There was no excuse, not even the fact that he’d hit her far too hard far too quickly, more than once and more than he really needed to, for purely practical purposes. She hadn’t done anything, because she wasn’t the person she’d always tried to be, the person she’d always wanted to be, the person she’d determined to be in spite of everything....in spite of her failures, in spite of her incompetence, in spite of all the faults which her over-solicitous mother had always been so over-ambitious to correct by means of judicious over-criticism.