Collected Short Fiction, page 249
Why do men go north?
Something touched Jason’s back. He flinched, waiting for the whip to strike. Nothing happened. He turned. The whip was extended toward him, butt first. Dazedly he closed his hand over it. The other slipped past him. Their bare shoulders brushed. Jason stared at the whip.
It was made of leather. It was about four feet long. The butt fitted solidly in his hand. There were three lashes. Knotted into them were small pieces of jagged metal. The lashes were dark, almost black, except where they were freshly stained with blood. His blood.
Something trickled down his back. He could not take his eyes off the whip.
Impatiently the other moved off down the path. Without volition Jason started after him. As Jason lifted his eyes, the back twitched.
The other was a young man. He seemed scarcely older than Dion. But his back was ridged with old scars and blue cuts crusted with dried blood. The skin stretched tautly across the ribs. From his waist hung unrecognizable rags. His feet were bare.
The back twitched again. Dimly Jason remembered what he was supposed to do. He raised the whip. As he brought it down the strength flowed out of his arm like water. The lashes curled harmlessly around the young man’s shoulders.
The back twitched it off, irritated, as if the lashes were insects.
Gritting his teeth, Jason raised the whip again. He brought it down. The flesh split. Blood welled around the bits of metal. Jason felt sick.
Dion, my son, he thought. Dion. Dion.
He raised the whip. . . .
Dion lolled in a sunken tub of blood-warm water. He reached for the frosted glass on the floor, but the boy was quicker. He picked it up and placed it in Dion’s hand.
“Thank you, Clare,” Dion said lazily. He nodded toward the door. “Will you wait for me?”
The boy’s delicate skin reddened. His dark eyes flashed hatred at Jason as he turned away.
“These are new amusements,” Jason said heavily when the boy was gone.
“Aren’t they,” Dion agreed. It seemed almost too much effort for him to speak. “But then, what have we to do except amuse ourselves? Does it matter, as long as we interfere with no one else?”
“That is the new philosophy?” Jason asked.
“New? Oh, no, it is old. But we have not had the leisure until now. Your grandfather did his work well.” Dion smiled. “Dear great-grandfather Samson, he tamed the sun for us. He harnessed it to our needs, and we no longer have to work. A house? Spray it in a few hours. Power? Great-grandfather Samson’s solar engine on the roof. Food? A few hours a week tending the hydroponics.” He stretched, lazily. “The rest of the time we must amuse ourselves as best we can.”
“That, it seems to me, is self-defeating,” Jason said. “Eventually you will run out of amusements. What will you do then?”
“There will always be something new.”
“You think there is when you are young,” Jason said softly. “But you will grow old, and the world will grow old with you. What will you do then?
Dion shrugged. “I will face that problem when I come to it—if I come to it.”
“Two out of ten,” Jason said reminiscently, “drink death from the ritual cups. Two go into seclusion. One disappears. Which will you choose, Dion?”
“What of the other five?” Dion asked.
Jason looked around the room. The lush, scarlet matting on the floor; the purple grapes; the deep chairs. He felt out of place and depressed. He had never cared for social bathing. “Yes, what of them?” Was their choice any better—or any different?
“What would you have me do, father?” Dion asked. “Waste my life as you have wasted yours? Throw myself into something which is doomed from the start? Oh, everyone knows you have found no fuel. They knew it was folly a long time ago. The last five years you have worked alone.”
“At least,” Jason said, “I had twenty years with something I believed in. What do you believe in?”
“Pleasure,” Dion said. “There are so many different kinds. Physical pleasure, mental pleasure, creative pleasure. Like that, for instance.” He swung an arm lazily at the wall behind Jason.
Jason got up and looked. It was a square of plastic pressed in place against the wall. Jason’s first reaction was that Dion had talent; he had always done well at anything he tried. Lately—Jason had been shocked at the change in him.
The picture was well planned, imaginatively composed, skillfully executed. But there was something horribly wrong with it.
In the foreground of the picture was a naked girl, slim, beautiful, desirable, against a background of gray desert and close-hanging gray clouds. She was bent forward from the waist. Across herback was a long welt, red against the whiteness of her skin. Lashing out from a cloud hand was a black, vicious whip. And on the girl’s face was a look of surrender, of ecstasy, of almost sexual passion.
“Do you like it?” Dion asked.
“No,” Jason said flatly. “It looks like Avis.”
“It is Avis.”
Jason stared at his son. “What do you mean?”
A muscle quivered in Dion’s jaw, but he went on casually. “Avis has gone north. She heard the Prophet predict the end of the world, and she has gone north for a mass purification. She preferred the flagellants to becoming my wife.” Dion’s face was expressionless; his tone was flat.
Jason stared, unbelieving. “And you let her go?”
“Of course,” Dion said. “She is free to do as she wishes, just as I am. How could I stop her? Why should I want to?”
“You let her go north to be whipped?” Jason said incredulously. “To have her back cut into quivering ribbons until she drops. . . .”
“You intrude!” Dion snapped flushing.
“I cannot intrude,” Jason shouted. “I am your father.”
Dion stood up in the tub and stepped out onto the floor, dripping. He faced Jason proudly. “I am eighteen. You intrude.” He turned away. He went to the dryer and stood before it.
Jason stared at Dion’s back. His body was strong and tall and unblemished. He had inherited that from Jason.
“What is wrong with our race?” Jason said, almost to himself.
“What do you mean?” Dion asked defiantly. “There is nothing wrong with it. We have freedom and leisure. What more can you ask?”
“I don’t know. The will to live? I didn’t notice it before, but I wonder how the race has survived this long.” Jason stood still, thinking. “North, you said? Why do men go north? Dion,” he said humbly, “will you go north with me to find Theron? He went to search for my fuel metal and has not returned.”
“No, father.”
“Will you go with me to find Avis?”
“No, father.”
Jason went to Dion and took his hand. “Please, Dion,” he said.
Dion disengaged his hand. “Clare is waiting,” he said. Smiling, he glanced at the picture on the wall before he turned away.
Jason looked at it once more. The whip seemed to move. . . .
The whip faltered in the air. There was nothing for it to strike. The path was empty in front of Jason. He swayed on his feet and almost fell.
Then he saw it, crumpled at the edge of the path. It looked like an old red rag, tattered. It did not move. Jason decided, vaguely, that it would not move again.
The thought penetrated. He had killed a man. He had whipped a man to death. Jason vomited into the bushes. When he straightened up, his head was a little clearer.
What am I doing here? Why have I killed a man?
He could not remember the answers. Was that the mystery? He wondered. Were those the unanswerable questions?
He felt disembodied. Somewhere, far away, there was something that was stiff, that ached, dully, eternally. It did not matter. It was too far away to matter.
His feet started to carry him, stumbling, down the path. Where am I going? He thought. He did not know the answer to that question either. He stopped thinking about it. He stopped thinking at all.
He plodded forward, the whip dangling forgotten from one hand.
He came back to awareness with a sensation of pain. It was dark now, and it was raining. The water was trickling into the cuts on his back. His back felt like a solid mass of fire.
He was still standing. His face was pressed against something hard and rough. His body had wedged itself into a kind of partial shelter, but his back was unprotected. If it were not for his back, the cool rain would feel good. His face was hot; his body was burning. And then he started to shiver.
He knew what he was facing now. It was a door, a crude kind of door. He fumbled at it.
“Go away!”
He looked up, his eyes unfocused. Had someone said something or was it in his mind? He fumbled again with the door.
The door swung open. He faced a square of light. He blinked. Warmth crept out toward him.
“Go away!” the light said. “Why do you keep coming? Why do you keep bothering me? I don’t want anything to do with any of you.”
Jason raised one hand uncertainly to shade his eyes. It was the hand with the whip in it.
“Oh, I see,” the light said scornfully. “You’ve beaten your partner to death, and you want someone to take his place. Well, I won’t whip you, and I certainly won’t let you whip me. Go on! You’ll find plenty of others farther on. Go away and die!”
Jason nodded, or thought he did. He understood now. He was intruding.
He turned and started off into the night. For a little way the light from the doorway lit up the path and then it was gone. He tripped in the darkness and then his knees went limp. He pitched forward, face down in the mud.
Someone was pulling at him. He had been very peaceful. Someone was turning him over. The rain, cold against his face, shocked his eyes open. A face was bending over him, a woman’s face.
“Jeri,” he said. His voice was so weak that he could scarcely hear it. “Jeri . . .”
The weeds had come back. The lawn was almost indistinguishable. The trees
had edged closer, too, and the vines. They crawled up the sides of the house, smothering it, working at it. Even the colorful plastic seemed dimmed by age. The isolation that the garden community emphasized had almost done its work too well.
Jason remembered when the house was new, when the lawn was green and perfect. He remembered when he had first brought Jeri to the house. They had been young then. They had been young together.
“Do you think,” Jeri had said eagerly, “do you think they could have had anything as beautiful as this before?”
“Before when?”
“Before whatever happened that made the ruins.”
“Do you think they were like us?”
“Oh, yes,” Jeri had said. “Only not as wise and not as much in love.” She had glanced at him, alive with promise. “I think they were just like us, and they did something very bad and then they were punished. We won’t ever be bad, will we, Jason?”
“Never. And I’m sure they never had anything as beautiful.” But he had been staring at Jeri.
She had smiled and slipped her hand into his and they went up to the door. It had opened before them. Hand in hand, they had entered their new home. The door had closed behind. Jeri had twirled, ecstatically.
“We will live here forever,” she had said. “We will never leave. Everything we will ever want is here.”
She had thrown herself into his arms and they had been happy. Everything they had wanted was there. For a time, it had been true.
But Jason left to pursue his dream. It had caused their first quarrel. How can you leave me?
And their second quarrel. It’s madness. Surely you can’t be serious about going millions of miles away!
And the third. It’s foolish. It’s silly. It will never work.
And the others that had come and shed their tears and gone away almost as if they had never been. Almost, but not quite.
Dion had been born and for years Jeri was preoccupied with him. But Dion had left, too. Jason had left and Dion had left, but Jeri had never left. Jeri had stayed.
The house was depressing. Jason decided that he should not have come. Why had he come? To tell Jeri— To tell Jeri what? To tell Jeri that he was going north where no one lived, where the ruins were, where the sun did not shine enough to supply a house’s power needs, where a searcher after a rare metal had disappeared, where a girl was being whipped on by a lash from the sky?
How could he tell Jeri? He did not know himself why he was going. Was he searching for a lode of a heavy, unstable metal that would power a dream-ship? Was he hunting for a lost man who had vanished on a mission for him? Was he chasing a lost girl his son had loved?
Or was it all this? Was it this and something more? Was he seeking the answer to a question he could not even frame?
Where did we come from? Why are we sick? Why does the past end a few hundred years ago?
Why do men go north?
How could he tell Jeri? Jason knew he could not tell Jeri. He had come here, as he had come before, in search of someone who was lost, lost long ago, someone who would never be found.
Jason stepped in front of the door. The door did not open, as it had not opened years before.
“Jeri will not see anyone,” the door said, as it had said then. “No one will be admitted. Do not intrude.”
“I am Jason,” he said.
“Jeri will not see anyone,” the door repeated. “No. . . .”
“Suddenly forty years of civilization slipped away. He pounded on the door. “Jeri,” he shouted. “Jeri!”
The only answer came from the door. “Jeri will not see. . . .”
Jason turned away. It was futile. The door would keep on until he left. This is the way it had been years before. He had come home, unsuspecting, and the door would not open.
How many years has it been? he thought. Five years? Six?
Others had shut themselves away. Others had cut themselves off from the world. Two out of ten, Micah had said. But he had never thought that Jeri would shut herself up, that she would shut him away from her.
He could force his way into the house, but he shuddered at the thought.
Perhaps she is dead. It has been a long time. She might very well be dead. He thought of her as being dead. It did not disturb him.
As he walked away from the clearing that was disappearing into the forest it had been carved from, he knew that he would never come back. Jeri was dead.
Good-by, Jeri. . . .
He came back to life slowly. A coolness was on his forehead. It felt good. He lay there for a little, savoring his return from death. He opened his eyes.
“Jeri,” he said, but he knew he was being foolish. Jeri had been blond. This girl was dark-haired and young—only a little older than Dion—and beautiful in a wild, untamed way. Perhaps that is what had misled him. She was as beautiful as Jeri had been.
The odor of something delicious made his mouth water. He could not remember the last time he had eaten. The coolness was lifted from Jason’s forehead. Jason sniffed.
“Here,” the girl said. “Eat.”
Jason opened his mouth. The girl put a spoon to his lips. Jason let the warm broth trickle down his throat. It was delicious. He tried to raise himself a little higher.
A groan broke from his throat.
“Lie still,” she said.
Jason lay still. She fed him broth until the bowl was empty. While she went to put the bowl away, Jason looked around the room. It was small and bare and crude.
The walls had been hand fashioned out of wood. The floor was the same. The chairs and a table had been sawed and fitted together with pegs and laced with rope. An open fire was laid in a stone opening against one wall. Jason stared at it. He had not seen an open fire for a long time.
There was something wrong about the room. Jason puzzled about it for a moment and then gave up.
He was lying in a bunk built against one wall. It was the only bunk. Jason wondered where the girl had slept.
The girl was back. She was not so tall as Jeri had been. She seemed sturdier and curved where Jeri had been slim. Even in a rough-woven cloth shirt and pants she looked very desirable.
“Turn over,” she said.
Jason tried to turn, but the pain in his back stopped him midway. He fell back.
“Try again,” she said. “I’ll help.”
He tried again. She helped him with an arm that seemed strong and capable. He lay on his stomach.
She pulled a covering of cloth from his back. He winced as it stuck to his flesh.
Something liquid trickled on his back. It burned for a moment and then was cool. She rubbed it in. After a moment his back began to feel better. It lost some of its stiffness, and her hand felt gently sensual rubbing it.
“How did you get mixed up with them?” she asked.
He turned his head to look at her. “How do you know I’m not one of them?”
“You’ve never been beaten before,” she said. “I’ve seen them. Too many of them. Their backs are masses of ridges. Besides,”—she smiled at him—“you talked while you were feverish. They never talk. They don’t even groan.”
“What did I say?”
“You kept mumbling questions.”
“What questions?”
“‘Why am I being whipped?’ you said. And over and over again, ‘Why do men go north?”’
Jason laughed harshly. “Did I answer them?” She shook her head. “Do you know the answers?” he asked.
“Do you?”
He looked at her sharply and then around the room. Definitely, there was something wrong with it.
“I know the answer to one of them,” he said. His eyes clouded over as if with pain. He remembered. . ..
The helicopter had taken him a long way, but it reached the edge of the power beams and settled to the earth like a winged seed. After finding the other helicopter, locating the trail was easy. The path led north.
The forest was different here. There were more elms and beeches and maples; they grew thick and wild. And the air was much cooler than anything he had ever known.
After the second day his food gave out. He hesitated at the edge of the path next morning. He had never been hungry before, not for long. Then he started off at a fast walk, wearing off the stiffness brought on by the unaccustomed exercise and the cold night. The path still led north.
