The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (126 page)

Two frogs were counting the minnows in a hydropronics trough one morning when a young maiden came down to the water to bathe. “What's that?” one frog (who was called Lavu) asked the other. “That's a human female,” said Lapat, for that was the other frog's name.

“What is she doing?” Lavu asked.

“She is taking off her garments,” Lapat said.

“What are garments?” Lavu asked.

“An extra skin humans wear to conceal themselves from the gaze of strangers,” said Lapat.

“Then why is she taking off her extra skin?” Lavu asked.

“She wants to bathe her primary skin,” Lapat said. “See how she piles her garments beside the trough and steps daintily into the water.”

“She is oddly shaped,” Lavu said.

“Not for a human female,” Lapat said. “All of them are shaped that way.”

“What are those two bumps on her front?” Lavu asked.

“I have often pondered that question,” Lapat said. “As we both know, function follows form and vice versa. I have seen human males clasp their females in a crushing embrace. It is my observation that the two bumps are a protective cushion.”

“Have you noticed,” Lavu asked, “that there is a young male human watching her from the concealment of the control station?”

“That is a common occurrence,” Lapat said. “I have seen it many times.”

“But can you explain it?” Lavu asked.

“Oh, yes. The maiden seeks a mate; that is the real reason she comes here to display her primary skin. The male is a possible mate, but he watches from concealment because if he were to show himself, she would have to scream, and that would prevent the mating.”

“How is it you know so many things about humans?” Lavu asked.

“Because I pattern my life after the most admirable of all humans, the scientist.”

“What's a scientist?” Lavu asked.

“A scientist is one who observes without interfering. By observation alone all things are made clear to the scientist. Come, let us continue counting the minnows.”

 

FEATHERED PIGS

When Bridik was four hundred and twenty-two years old and expecting to moult the next season, she decided to edit an old riddle for her companions. Bridik and her companions were long-lived and feathered pigs playing out an idyll among the oak groves of post-ancient Terra.

“It is recorded in our history,” Bridik said, “that our ancestors served Man and, as reward, Man gave us these lovely black and beige feathers. Who can tell me why Man chose these colors?”

“Aww, Mom! Nobody likes to play that old game anymore,” cried Kirid, her eleventh son. “We'd rather twang the lute and bamboozle.”

“Come, come,” said Bridik. “I am about to moult and it is my right to edit the old riddle.”

“Ohhh, all right,” said Kirid (who was really a dutiful son and not like some we could mention). “Who goes first?”

“That is the place of Lobrok, your father,” she said, “but I don't want to hear him say the colors represent the oak tree alive and the oak tree burned.”

“The kid's right,” said Lobrok. “It's a bore.” Then, noting Bridik's angry glare and her exposed tusks, he said: “But I'll play because it pleases you.”

“Okay, Pop,” Kirid said. “What's the beedeebeedeep answer?”

“Man chose the colors because they represent day and night, the grass of autumn and the ashes of the past.”

“Verrry poetic, Pop!” said Kirid.

“May I go next? Me next?” cried Inishbeby, a fair young thing of hardly one hundred who was making a big play for Kirid.

“Very well,” said Bridik. “You may play in the guest spot.”

“Now, don't tell me,” said Inishbeby. “Let me guess.” She wangled a bamboozly glance at Kirid, then: “Black is for charcoal and beige is for the parchment upon which Man drew with his charcoal.”

“That's worse than stupid,” growled Lobrok. “A lot of us believe Man made parchment from pigskins!”

“I didn't know!” cried Inishbeby. “It doesn't say that at the museum of Man.”

“You've spoiled the riddle,” wailed Bridik. “Now I won't be able to edit it before I moult.”

“Come on, Beby,” said Kirid. “I think we better blow until things cool off here.”

“Ohhh, where are you going to take me?” asked Inishbeby, nuzzling up against Kirid.

“Well … let's go snoot out some truffles and have a picnic.”

 

THE DADDY BOX

To understand what happened to Henry Alexander when his son, Billy, came home with the ferosslk, you're going to be asked to make several mind-stretching mental adjustments. These mental gymnastics are certain to leave your mind permanently changed.

You've been warned.

In the first place, just to get a loose idea of a ferosslk's original purpose, you must think of it as a toy designed primarily for educating the young. But your concept of
toy
should be modified to think of a device which, under special circumstances, will play with its owner.

You'll also have to modify your concept of education to include the idea of occasionally altering the universe to fit a new interesting idea; that is, fitting the universe to the concept, rather than fitting the concept to the universe.

The ferosslk originates with seventh-order, multidimensional beings. You can think of them as Sevens. Their other labels would be more or less incomprehensible. The Sevens are not now aware and never have been aware the universe contains any such thing as a Henry Alexander or a human male offspring.

This oversight was rather unfortunate for Henry. His mind had never been stretched to contain the concept of a ferosslk. He could conceive of fission bombs, nerve gas, napalm and germ warfare. But these things might be thought of as silly putty when compared with a ferosslk.

Which is a rather neat analogy because the shape of a ferosslk is profoundly dependent upon external pressures. That is to say, although a ferosslk can be conceived of as an artifact, it is safer to think of it as alive.

To begin at one of the beginnings, Billy Alexander, age eight, human male, found the ferosslk in tall weeds beside a path across an empty lot adjoining his urban home.

Saying he
found
it described the circumstances from Billy's superficial point of view. It would be just as accurate to say the ferosslk found Billy.

As far as Billy was concerned, the ferosslk was a box. You may as well think of it that way, too. No sense stretching your mind completely out of shape. You wouldn't be able to read the rest of this account.

A box then. It appeared to be about nine inches long, three inches wide and four inches deep. It looked like dark green stone except for what was obviously the top, because that's where the writing appeared.

You can call it writing because Billy was just beginning to shift from print to cursive and that's the way he saw it.

Words flowed across the box top:
THIS IS A DADDY BOX.

Billy picked it up. The surface was cold under his hands. He thought perhaps this was some kind of toy television, its words projected from inside.

(Some of the words actually were coming out of Billy's own mind.)

Daddy box?
he wondered.

Daddy was a symbol-identifier more than five years old for him. His daddy had been killed in a war. Now, Billy had a stepfather with the same name as his real father's. The two had been cousins.

New information flowed across the top:
THIS BOX MAY BE OPENED ONLY BY THE YOUNG.

(That was a game the ferosslk had played and enjoyed many times before. Don't try to imagine how a ferosslk enjoys. The attempt could injure your frontal lobes.)

Now, the box top provided Billy with precise instructions on how it could be opened.

Billy went through the indicated steps, which included urinating on an ant hill, and the box dutifully opened.

For almost an hour, Billy sat in the empty lot enraptured by the educational/creative tableau thus unveiled. For his edification, human shapes in the box fought wars, manufactured artifacts, made love, wrote books, created paintings and sculpture … and changed the universe. The human shapes debated, formed governments, nurtured the earth and destroyed it.

In that relative time of little less than an hour, Billy aged mentally some five hundred and sixteen human years. On the outside, Billy remained a male child about forty-nine inches tall, weight approximately fifty-six pounds, skin white but grimy from play, hair blond and mussed.

His eyes were still blue, but they had acquired a hard and penetrating stare. The motor cells in his medulla and his spinal cord had begun increasing dramatically in number with an increased myelinization of the anterior roots and peripheral nerves.

Every normal sense he possessed had been increased in potency and he was embarked on a growth pattern which would further heighten this effect.

The whole thing made him sad, but he knew what he had to do, having come very close to understanding what a ferosslk was all about.

It was now about 6:18 p.m. on a Friday evening. Billy took the box in both hands and trudged across the lot toward his back door.

His mother, whose left arm still bore bruises from a blow struck by her husband, was peeling potatoes at the kitchen sink. She was a small blonde woman, once doll-like, fast turning to mouse.

At Billy's entrance, she shook tears out of her eyes, smiled at him, glanced toward the living room and shook her head—all in one continuous movement. She appeared not to notice the box in Billy's hands, but she did note the boy appeared very much like his real father tonight.

This thought brought more tears to her eyes, and she turned away, thus failing to see Billy go on into the living room despite her silent warning that his stepfather was there and in a bad mood.

The ferosslk, having shared Billy's emotional reaction to this moment, created a new order of expletives which it introduced into another dimension.

Henry Alexander sensed Billy's presence in the room, lowered the evening newspaper and stared over it into the boy's newly-aged eyes. Henry was a pale-skinned, flabby man, going to fat after a youth spent as a semi-professional athlete. He interpreted the look in Billy's eyes as a reflection of their mutual hate.

“What's that box?” Henry demanded.

Billy shrugged. “It's a daddy box.”

“A what?”

Billy remained silent, placed the box to his ear. The ferosslk had converted to a faint audio mode and the voices coming from the box for Billy's ears alone carried a certain suggestive educational quality.

“Why're you holding the damn thing against your ear?” Henry demanded. He had already decided to take the box away from the boy, but was drawing the pleasure-moment out.

“I'm listening,” Billy said. He sensed the precise pacing of these moments, observed minute nuances in the set of his stepfather's jaw, the content of the man's perspiration.

“Is it a music box?”

Henry studied the thing in Billy's hand. It looked old … ancient, even. He couldn't quite say why he felt this.

Again, Billy shrugged.

“Where'd you get it?” Henry asked.

“I found it.”

“Where could you find a thing like that? It looks like a real antique. Might even be jade.”

“I found it in the lot.” Billy hesitated on the point of adding a precise location to where he'd found the box, but held back. That would be out of character.

“Are you sure you didn't steal it?”

“I found it.”

“Don't you sass me!” Henry threw his newspaper to the floor.

Having heard the loud voices, Billy's mother hurried into the living room, hovered behind her son.

“What's … what's the matter?” she ventured.

“You stay out of this, Helen!” Henry barked. “That brat of yours has stolen a valuable antique and he—”

“A Chinese box! He wouldn't.”

“I told you to stay out of this!” Henry glared at her. The box had assumed for him now exactly the quality he had just given it: valuable antique. Theft was as good as certain—although that might complicate his present plans for confiscation and profit.

Billy suppressed a smile. His mother's interruption, which he assumed to be fortuitous since he did not completely understand the functioning of a ferosslk, had provided just the delay required here. The situation had entered the timing system for which he had maneuvered.

“Bring that box here,” Henry ordered.

“It's mine,” Billy said. As he said it, he experienced a flash of insight which told him he belonged as much to the box as it belonged to him.

“Look here, you disrespectful brat, if you don't give me that box immediately, we're going to have another session in the woodshed!”

Billy's mother touched his arm, said: “Son … you'd better…”

“Okay,” Billy said. “But it's just a trick box—like those Chinese things.”

“I said bring it here, dammit!”

Clutching the box to his chest now, Billy crossed the room, timing his movements with careful precision. Just a few more seconds … now!

He extended the box to his stepfather.

Henry snatched the ferosslk, was surprised at how cold it felt. Obviously stone. Cold stone. He turned the thing over and over in his hands. There were strange markings on the top—wedges, curves, twisting designs. He put it to his ear, listened.

Silence.

Billy smiled.

Henry jerked the box away from his ear. Trick, eh? The kid was playing a trick on him, trying to make him look like a fool.

“So it's a box,” Henry said. “Have you opened it?”

“Yes. It's got lots of things inside.”

“Things? What things?”

“Just things.”

Henry had an immediate vision of valuable jewels. This thing could be a jewel box.