Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 4

“Yes.”

Heri Gonza looked at him without expression and walked toward the stage door. It opened as he approached and four people came in. Flannel, Kearsarge, Horowitz, Iris Barran.

Without a word Flannel stepped up to the comedian and hit him in the stomach. Heri Gonza sank slowly to the floor, gasping.

Horowitz said, “We’ve spent a lot of time deciding what to do about you, Heri Gonza. Flannel wanted just one poke at you and wouldn’t settle for anything else. The rest of us felt that killing was too good for you, but we wanted you dead. So we wrote you that script. Now you’re dead.”

Heri Gonza rose after a moment and walked through the stage door and out to the middle of acres and acres of stage. He stood there alone all night, and in the morning was gone.

Maybe you go for Hemingway. Faulkner? Thomas Wolfe? (With me it’s Dos Passos.) But no matter whom you pick for first place, Steinbeck is probably high up on your list; and for many people he is indisputably the realistic modern novelist.

What’s he doing here?

I may as well say right off that this piece is not science fiction—or science fantasy, or “fantasy-fable” either, I’m afraid (though “fable” and “allegory” are what Playboy called it when they printed it).

But it stops just short of “future history” which would make it legit s-f. And it’s pretty realistic, too. . . .

You could call it historically fantastic realism . . .

Or realty historical fantasy . . .

Or fantastically realistic history . . .

Anyhow, it’s speculative; also it’s satire. And it’s Steinbeck in an unexpected and delightful vein. So here it sits, behind the fiction, and before the fact. . . .

It was pretty draughty in the cave in the middle of the afternoon. There wasn’t any fire - the last spark had gone out six months ago and the family wouldn’t have any more fire until lightning struck another tree.

Joe came into the cave all scratched up and some hunks of hair torn out and he flopped down on the wet ground and bled - Old William was arguing away with Old Bert who was his brother and also his son, if you look at it one way. They were quarrelling mildly over a spoiled chunk of mammoth meat.

Old William said, ‘Why don’t you give some to your mother?’

‘Why?’ asked Old Bert. ‘She’s my wife, isn’t she?’

And that finished that, so they both took after Joe.

‘Where’s Al?’ one of them asked and the other said, ‘You forgot to roll the rock in front of the door.’

Joe didn’t even look up and the two old men agreed that kids were going to the devil. ‘I tell you it was different in my day,’ Old William said. ‘They had some respect for their elders or they got what for.’

After a while Joe stopped bleeding and he caked some mud on his cuts. ‘Al’s gone,’ he said.

Old Bert asked brightly, ‘Sabre tooth?’

‘No, it’s that new bunch that moved into the copse down the gully. They ate Al.’

‘Savages,’ said Old William. ‘Still live in trees. They aren’t civilized. We don’t hardly ever eat people.’

Joe said, ‘We hardly got anybody to eat except relatives and we’re getting low on relatives.’

‘Those foreigners!’ said Old Bert.

‘Al and I dug a pit,’ said Joe. ‘We caught a horse and those tree people came along and ate our horse. When we complained, they ate Al.’

‘Well, you go right out and get us one of them and we’ll eat him,’ Old William said.

‘Me and who else?’ said Joe. ‘Last time it was warm there was twelve of us here. Now there’s only four. Why, I saw my own sister Sally sitting up in a tree with a savage. Had my heart set on Sally, too, Pa,’ Joe went on uncertainly, because Old William was not only his father, but his uncle and his first and third cousin, and his brother-in-law. ‘Pa, why don’t we join up with those tree people? They’ve got a net kind of thing - catch all sorts of animals. They eat better than we do.’

‘Son,’ said Old William, ‘they’re foreigners, that’s why. They live in trees. We can’t associate with savages. How’d you like your sister to marry a savage?’

‘She did!’ said Joe. ‘We could have them come and live in our cave. Maybe they’d show us how to use that net thing.’

‘Never,’ said Old Bert. ‘We couldn’t trust ‘em. They might eat us in our sleep.’

‘If we didn’t eat them first,’ said Joe. ‘I sure would like to have me a nice juicy piece of savage right now. I’m hungry.’

‘Next thing you know, you’ll be saying those tree people are as good as us,’ Old William said. ‘I never saw such a boy. Why, where’d authority be? Those foreigners would take over. We’d have to look up to ‘em. They’d outnumber us.’

‘I hate to tell you this, Pa,’ said Joe. ‘I’ve got a busted arm. I can’t dig pits any more - neither can you. You’re too old. Bert can’t either. We’ve got to merge up with those tree people or we aren’t gonna eat anything or anybody.’

‘Over my dead body,’ said Old William, and then he saw Joe’s eyes on his skinny flank and he said, ‘Now, Joe, don’t you go getting ideas about your Pa.’

Well, a long time ago before the tribe first moved out of the drippy cave, there was a man named Elmer. He piled up some rocks in a circle and laid brush on top and took to living there. The elders killed Elmer right off. If anybody could go off and live by himself, why, where would authority be? But pretty soon those elders moved into Elmer’s house and then the other families made houses just like it. It was pretty nice with no water dripping in your face.

So, they made Elmer a god - used to swear by him. Said he was the moon.

Everything was going along fine when another tribe moved into the valley. They didn’t have Elmer houses, though. They shacked up in skin tents. But you know, they had a funny kind of a gadget that shot little sticks . . . shot them a long way. They could just stand still and pick off a pig, oh . . . fifty yards away - wouldn’t have to run it down and maybe get a tusk in the groin.

The skin tribe shot so much game that naturally the Elmer elders said those savages had to be got rid of. They didn’t even know about Elmer - that’s how ignorant they were. The old people sharpened a lot of sticks and fired the points and they said, ‘Now you young fellas go out and drive those skin people away. You can’t fail because you’ve got Elmer on your side.’

Now, it seems that a long time ago there was a skin man named Max. He thought up this stick shooter so they killed him, naturally, but afterwards they said he was the sun. So, it was a war between Elmer, the moon, and Max, the sun, but in the course of it a whole slew of young skin men and a whole slew of young Elmer men got killed. Then a forest fire broke out and drove the game away. Elmer people and skin people had to make for the hills all together. The elders of both tribes never would accept it. They complained until they died.

You can see from this that the world started going to pot right from the beginning. Things would be going along fine - law and order and all that and the elders in charge - and then some smart aleck would invent something and spoil the whole business - like the man Ralph who forgot to kill all the wild chickens he caught and had to build a hen house, or like the real trouble-maker Jojo au front du chien, who patted some seeds into damp ground and invented farming. Of course, they tore Jojo’s arms and legs off and rightly so because when people plant seeds, they can’t go golly-wacking around the country enjoying themselves. When you’ve got a crop in, you stay with it and get the weeds out of it and harvest it. Furthermore, everything and everybody wants to take your crop away from you - weeds - bugs - birds - animals - men - A farmer spends all his time fighting something off. The elders can call on Elmer all they want, but that won’t keep the neighbours from over the hill out of your corn crib.