New Celebrations: The Adventures of Anthony Villiers (20 page)
Read New Celebrations: The Adventures of Anthony Villiers Online
Authors: Alexei Panshin
He was hot and shed a jacket, and within minutes put it back on again. The wind-stirred meadow was cool.
He read Mrs. Waldo Wintergood. He read the books with great delight. They were animal stories, one about a poor blind fish that courageously makes its way upstream to expire in ecstasy and be reborn in higher form, the other about a mother and her young in a warm earthen den under high-piled snow and a wind singing icicle songs, and their emergence to the pink and green of spring.
Most people enjoy stories about the workings of nature. However, these books told more about the workings of nature than a conservative Shiawassee author could possibly intend to say, and no doubt were unconsciously loved by their readers for exactly that same reason. For his part, Villiers liked them both as animal stories and as metaphors.
He glanced up to see what appeared to be a small pink alto-cumulus cloud hanging thirty feet above the camp tents in the lower meadow. It hovered there for some minutes, looking like an elegant unsupported coiffure, and then slowly drifted down the mountain.
Villiers picked up the bright orange volume of
The Pewamo Reports
that he had appropriated on impulse. He found the passage on the fauna of Binkin Island. They were there, called plonks, their whither-thither habits described in detail, and their obvious similarities to other aerial life forms discussed.
The next entry was for the native catamount, larger of Binkin Island’s two major carnivores. Thirty yards behind Villiers, a gray catamount at the forest verge put forepaws on a fallen log. It looked toward Villiers and strained its senses for intelligence of this intruder. Suddenly it curled its lip and sneezed convulsively as though to clear its mind and bounded away.
Villiers cocked his head at the sneeze, but since it was not listed in his book as a characteristic cry of the catamount he failed to respond with the lightning reflexes required of a Class B Shield-wearing carnivore observer. When he did look around he saw nothing.
In a little while he came down the hillside, put the books where he had found them, and shouldered his shovel. Ah, the shovel—symbol of simplicity. Proceeding in order of need, he dug a latrine.
* * *
Where does the sea begin? Stern hard rocks lined the coast. Fred skirted stranded tidepools, jumped from rock to rock above exploring seafingers, and at last reached the point where there were no more rocks and the free sea spread before him.
The sides of the rock were covered with a yellow-green cushion of slime, the top was bare and dry. The sea was gentle today and lapped rather than broke. Fred knelt on one knee and let the sea touch a hand. That’s where the sea begins—where a tag-playing wave has a thousand miles to dodge and run.
It was past noon. Fred stood and said, “Well, why don’t we stop and eat?”
He was the elder—past his first prime. He was the stranger here. He was carrying the pack filled with Big Beaver Essentials (The “Ten B.B.E.s”—it’s all in the
Big Beaver Book
). He had set the pace all morning. He had found the way when the terrain was difficult. And yet it was young David who was tired and ready to stop. Tell the truth, Fred was feeling pretty chipper. Only an unselfish regard for his fellow prompted him to propose the rest.
David failed to respond. Fred expected no verbal answer—not even a simple yes or no. But there are nonverbal means of communication and Fred had every reason to expect the flicker at his elbow that meant a nodded head.
At the lack of response, he turned to find no David at all. He turned further and there David was, sitting well back on higher rock, hands on knees, leaning forward, breathing, resting. It is one thing to go hiking; quite another to bounce off on exhausting sidetrips to shake hands with the ocean or discover what the world looks like halfway up a tree.
Fred made his way back across the rocks, slipping once and getting a foot wet, which is the sort of thing that happens when you muck about with oceans. Fred didn’t mind, however, any more than he minded his scrapes and splinters. It is a rare man who can see wet feet as hard-won battle wounds, but that was Fred, a prince faring forth on errant explorations, suffering but succeeding.
The rocks were harder to climb up than to climb down. David reached a small strong hand down to help Fred over the final lip.
“Let’s eat,” Fred said.
The sea danced on his right. On his left, the land was green and lightly rolling. He looked absently at his right palm and then led the way, striding through the rocks and scrub and short grass in search of a good place to stop and sit.
He was feeling good. The sun smiled with shy grace and the neglected wind skipped about in a vain bid for attention. It was a good day to explore, to enjoy the familiar outline of this countryside for its familiarity, and to savor the individualities of detail within the outline that made this place singular.
Fred’s father, in his impatience for his son to make a choice and start having children, as he ought, would say that Fred was approaching Binkin Island in a manner he might better have reserved for women, or better yet, for one woman: with respect, with knowledge, with appreciation, and above all, with enthusiasm. Damned shame, too. Waste, that. He had made a comment of this kind in the course of their last . . . discussion . . . and Fred had not been able to reply.
However, what Fred was most enjoying in this day was the chance to share what he saw with an interested fellow. Company always improves travel, as Temujin is reputed to have remarked, and far more men have been anxious to share their travels with good companions than to share the charms of their mistresses. Fred thought he would say as much to his father as proof that impatient analogies are inaccurate analogies, because Fred’s father would never countenance promiscuity and would never think of traveling alone.
They stopped to eat on the sunny side of a stream-cut hollow. Their meals heated themselves in seconds.
“This is pleasant,” Fred said.
David nodded and ate.
“It’s almost warm enough to go swimming.”
David set down his plate. He put a guarding hand to his throat and tested the temperature of the stream with the other. “It’s too cold, sir, “ he said almost inaudibly.
“ ‘Fred.’ ” He rinsed his plate and said, “I think you’re right.”
His eye was caught by a growth of weedy plants that had taken advantage of the shelter of the hollow. “What’s this?” he said, rinsing his mustache. “Not parallel evolution. Come along. We may have dessert here.”
He rose, jumped the stream, and began to examine the plants he had seen. David looked upstream and then down for a better place to jump, saw none, and at last jumped and splashed, earning his own cold and soggy battle scars.
Fred said, “I thought they had kept the island clean, but apparently not.” He delivered a quick botanical lecture on recognition and use, and then snapped off several carefully selected hemp stalks. “That is what we want.”
He set David to gathering wood for a small fire and himself began digging in his pack. He brought out his bright green copy of Volume II of
The Pewamo Reports
and some salt and honey. He’d found his place by the time David had collected his wood.
“Here it is,” he said. “Introduced by Seymour Binkin, one of three alien plant species growing wild on Binkin Island. Apparently Seymour Binkin liked a touch of home.”
He handed the passage to young David and took charge of the wood. With a connoisseur’s eye, he selected the best pieces, recaptured David’s attention, and gave him a quick demonstration in fire building. With the fire brightly burning, he handed a stalk to David and began to carefully toast another.
“You may notice a minty smell,” Fred said. “That’s resin.”
When they were roundly toasted, the stalks were salted gently and dipped in honey.
“Well,” Fred asked, “do you like living off the land?”
David nodded and smiled, and licked a finger. His eyes were black within black, and then he looked away.
With the fire smothered in approved Big Beaver style, they set off again. There is something to be said for lunch breaks. They can heighten appreciation of the day.
5
T
HE EMPIRE IS A GALLIMAUFRY OF CULTURES
of which the so-called High Culture is only one. Cultures are media of expression, like languages. Most men know at least several fluently, shift easily among them, but are most comfortable in one. The High Culture is largely artificial, the native lifestyle of a bare few, understood and practiced by only a small percentage more of mankind. On the other hand, it is a lingua franca. It is the medium of expression of men of birth and education, and those who travel. It is the chief of the invisible forces that hold the Empire together.
The ambitious boy who rises from a mud village to walk the corridors of power on Nashua learns the High Culture while those he was born with and studied with and played with find the weight and shape of their lives, until he may come to doubt his normality, his ability to feel, his sanity. These doubts will be enthusiastically reinforced by all about him. But the High Culture is the ladder to the wider world for which he hopes against hope. From below that wider world is hidden, but one magic day he puts a hand to the final rung and his own green fields lie open before him. It is what might be called apotheosis by education.
Schools and traveling masters who encourage the able to learn the High Culture make the Empire possible. If they were rewarded as they deserve, they would be too wealthy to care to continue their work. Fortunately there are far-sighted men willing to leave them to starve in honor—and the dream goes on, for a while at least.
The cultural stew is in perpetual simmer. Cultures emerge, spread, intermingle, stagnate, recrudesce and die. It is a stately ritual dance, eternally repeated. The High Culture changes rapidly, at least on the surface, the minor cultures more slowly, but all change.
Movement of people can do it, or the influence of neighbors or fallout from the High Culture. Even the unintended acts of passing strangers. A fellow once mentioned a green and pleasant land to a shepherd over a thornbush fire in the desert—a conversational tidbit, no more—and set off a mass migration. In later years he was metamorphosed into an angel, something that happens to few men in their own lifetimes. But he never learned of it, and so was saved embarrassment.
Still, there is no universal culture. The interest of a clan on Controlled Berkshire may have been the major concern of a guild in the Kandahar Appanage, and tomorrow may be the watchword of the day to the entire planet of San Bartolomé de Tirajana. But real unity is impossible—the universe is too large. The common experience of the opening of space ended forever the possibility of one common culture. Which is just as well. It would have been dull.
* * *
A veranda topped by an open balcony formed the front of Green Mountain Lodge. When complete, it would be the second longest veranda on Pewamo, and the largest in a radius of ten light-years that was topped by an open balcony.
In its present state, Green Mountain Lodge was an eyesore. Half the lodge looked like half of a lodge sitting on the hillside. The other half was lodge-in-posse, not lodge-in-esse. There were neat ugly piles of building material sitting patiently outside the lodge waiting for the miracle of transubstantiation. In the meantime, the effect was of a Chinese puzzle abandoned in frustration.
Green Mountain Lodge was begun by Hannifin General and left half-completed when that company lost its Pewamo concession in the isostatic readjustments that followed the breakup of Nieman, Mullin and Lund. Hannafin was happy to take its compensation and leave—when Pewamo was actually opened after two hundred and fifty years, the speeches made and the foundations laid, no one had seemed to notice. Not at all a proper Hannafin market. Not at all what Hannafin expected. Some even say that it contrived to lose its concession, and the suggestion has a certain plausibility.
The present proprietor of Green Mountain was a little man named Caspar Smetana, blessed with a graying mustache, determination, and the confident belief that life was an adventure. He was so earnest and so drab that no one would ever believe the joy he took in throwing a blind and random dart at life and contriving to meet the consequences.
He had once even coped with fame. He and his wife had had a loyal local following as “Pickles and Daisy” on another world so long before that weeks and months might pass without a memory of those once upon a times before he had trudged off after another rainbow. Only on rare summer nights did he and Daisy lock their doors and break into the old routines.
“Oh,” he would say, “don’t remind me. We were wild then.”
Daisy would agree, but it wasn’t true. Caspar Smetana was never overtly wild in his life. The memory made him feel devilish, though, and that was the main thing. He would hum and smile all the next day.
Daisy Bell Rise Up and Tell the Glory of Emanuel had been raised in a Christian family, but she had left her family, her religion, and the bulk of her name for the altogether unprepossessing man she had married and followed from planet to planet, job to job, life to life. Life with Caspar was consistently interesting, and she thought he was sexy. She was happy being with Caspar and he was happy making life up as he went along.
He owned this lodge for two reasons. The first was that it was incomplete. The second was that he was a convinced Hinkeelian who even bestowed faith on the Solimões Factor—believe that, if you will—and he found Pewamo romantic.
Business so far was more interesting than good. A student with eyes as wild as his hair. A moon-faced yagoot who plays the mandolin. An oversized name day toy of an alien come riding up the hill on a red tricycle. Business like that you couldn’t call good—but interesting, yes.
Ralph Weinsider picked his way around the mandolin with determined precision. Thirty feet away Daisy Smetana drove nails with even greater determination, though with rather less precision, the sound of her hammer turned into a clatter by the echoing hillside.
Caspar Smetana bringing drinks out to the shade of the porch heard hammering with mandolin accompaniment. Ralph heard only his own music, a small gift he was presenting with the aid of the mandolin that he had found. John was conscious of neither music nor hammering. Feeling outshone, he was numbering his talents to himself, trying to choose an appropriate one to bring forth at the proper moment—first opportunity. Torve heard both hammer and mandolin, appreciated both, and tapped a furry foot in Trog measure.
Ralph muted his music and nodded as Smetana set his drink down. “Thank you.”
Smetana said, “If you want something more, I won’t be here. You either have to fetch for yourself or lean over the railing. Call.”
Ralph tipped back in his chair and looked over the railing. He could see Daisy and her hammer. He’d heard them before but his mind had done nothing with the information.
“Hey, are you building something?” he asked. He loved to watch construction in progress, when he happened to notice it.
John looked up. “Of course,” he said. “They’re finishing this building.”
“With our own hands,” Smetana said. “Workmen we can’t afford. Now if you’ll excuse me.”
“Say, could I watch you?” Ralph asked. He stopped playing and set his mandolin aside. “I won’t be in your way.”
“I guess,” said Smetana. His first impression of the boy had not been favorable—who likes yagoots, after all?—but at greater acquaintance he did seem harmless and friendly. “I guess it’s all right.” Watching work might be good for him.
Small group dynamics are incredible. John had been aching for the chance to impress Torve, but with Ralph gone, he found he had nothing of worth to say to the Trog. Over his fumbling mumble was the racket of one hammer, and then two. When there were three, he used that as excuse to break off and look over the railing. Yes, Ralph was working, too.
“They’re letting me hammer,” Ralph called. “Come on down.”
Torve said, “I think I hammer, too.”
So they went down and they all hammered. The strangest things can be fun for the strangest reasons. The work was fun partly because they didn’t have to do it, and partly because they were all doing it. Regardless of what you may have been told, that is the way the Pyramids were built.
The sun slanted down along the front of the lodge. The air was cool enough to be stimulating, warm enough to be pleasant. The rising and falling hammers made a constant tattoo.
John worked furiously, Ralph steadily, Torve slowly. Torve was bemused by the way a nail would retreat into the wood after it had been hit on the head.
Daisy was a pleasant-faced woman of middle years. She liked Ralph and John and Torve, but then she liked everybody. After an hour or so she brought out cookies and cold drinks and they all stopped work.
John inspected a blister on his index finger. He had an idea and he turned it over in his mind looking for the best handle.
“Sir,” he said, “how would you like a crew of workmen to finish the building?”
“I would like, of course,” Smetana said, taking a neat bite from his cooky. “This is good, Daisy. This is very good. You must keep the recipe. But as I told you, workmen we can’t afford to hire.”
John waved at Ralph. “We have friends, sir. I think they’d work half days for food and a place to sleep.”
“Do you think so?” Ralph said. The majority of his friends didn’t work.
“Of course,” John said. “I’ll bet we can find thirty. All they have to find out is that things are exciting here, and they’ll come.”
“Do they work only so good as you?” Smetana asked.
“I don’t think they’re any better,” John said, more interested in defending his own work than in defending his friends.
“Well . . .” said Smetana.
“Now, Smetana,” Daisy said. “You just don’t want to have your fun taken away. Say yes. It would be nice to have noise and young people around, and maybe then we could be a real resort, and not just a half-finished one.”
“I think about it,” Smetana said, an answer technically known as an indirect yes.
When they returned to work, Ralph took John aside. “What do you have in mind?” he said.
“It’s simple,” John said. “We get the right thirty people over here. We work in the morning. Or half of us work in the morning and half in the afternoon. The rest of the time, we run a factory.”
“A factory?”
“A factory. Remember?”
“Oh, yes. Yes!” Ralph drew in a breath and let it out audibly to show how impressed he was by the idea.
“Start thinking of people,” said John.
That’s the way they spent the rest of the afternoon, thinking of people. The light was slow and gold when they began to cover their lumber and put their tools away.
Then a blue bicycle came hard-pedaled up the road.
“It’s Fillmore,” Ralph said, moving down the veranda steps. “He’s a good worker. That’s one. Hey, Fillmore. Fillmore, hey.”
Fillmore Djaha brought his bicycle to a halt with the flair of Pheidippides arriving with the news from Marathon (save that he did not drop dead). He took a gasping breath of air and pointed blindly behind him.
“Admiral Beagle,” he said. He still did not drop dead—maybe the resemblance was not that great.
* * *
Admiral Beagle arrived on Binkin Island in the afternoon shuttle from Pewamo Central. There were other passengers—women returning from a day in the metropolis, two men in I.S. uniforms, a young fellow buried determinedly in a book, a handsome silver-haired man—but the Admiral paid them no attention. He spent his time profitably by making difficult decisions. They had been difficult for his subordinates; they were not difficult for him. More than once he wielded his red
X
with exasperation that anyone could fail to see such obvious unacceptability.
When the ship landed, he closed his case, looked at the women with a suspicion which was returned, and strode out into the slow mellow glow of late afternoon sunshine. The wind raised dust whorls that danced in golden showers. The Admiral should have stopped to watch, but didn’t.
The landing field was bounded by farms and the headquarters of the Development Area. The women set out briskly for home. The silver-haired man and the men in I.S. uniform went into the main building of the Development Area. The young man headed for the racks of rental bicycles by the landing field gate. The Admiral looked about for more acceptable transportation and, seeing none, at last went himself into the main building.
The silver-haired man was saying, “Thank you. And I apprehend I may rent a bicycle without?”
“That is correct, sir.”
Admiral Beagle said, “I am Admiral Beagle.”
“Yes, sir. May I help you?”
“I wish transportation to Green Mountain Resort.”
“If you go out to the main road, Green Mountain is a mile to the right. If you go left, it’s on the order of ninety miles. You can walk the distance or ride a bicycle.”
“Sir!”
“I’m sorry. There’s no other transportation on Binkin Island. If you want to call Green Mountain, they’ll send a pedicab down, but it will take an hour. Perhaps more.”
“Have you no official vehicles?”
“Yes, sir, but they’re not available for private use.”
“This is scarcely the attitude I expect to encounter, young man. I’m no ordinary private citizen. I am Admiral Beagle.”
“Sir, I know who you are, but I’m afraid I can’t help you.”
This was the excuse for a tantrum that relieved the ill humours of travel and restored the red in the Admiral’s cheeks. It did not, however, gain him the use of an official vehicle. He compromised by taking the name of the polite young man at the Information Desk.
The polite young man at the Information Desk waited until the Admiral’s back was turned and then he put a hand beside his mouth and said, “Old Leadhead,” in an insistent voice.
That had been the Admiral’s Navy nickname, bestowed on him by unloving subordinates. The Admiral whirled around but the young man had his head in a drawer.
The Admiral found the road and signs pointing to Green Mountain and to the various camping areas. He was not about to learn to ride a bicycle, so he began walking, adding this indignity to his nephew’s account. Not by the ear, by the nose.
