Judith Merril: The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 2

“I didn’t know, madame,” Leuten said politely. “I apologize. We intended, however, to go only as far as La Plume. May we have your permission to do so?”

At the mention of La Plume she went poker-faced. After a moment she waved at the bazooka man. “Destroy, O Phraxanartes, the base machine of the strangers,” she said. Phraxanartes touched the button of his stovepipe. Leuten and I jumped for the ditch, my hand welded to the brief-case handle, when the rocket whooshed into the poor old Ford’s motor. We huddled there while the gas tank boomed and cans and bottles exploded. The noise subsided to a crackling roar and the whizzing fragments stopped coming our way after maybe a minute. I put my head up first. The Duchess and her retinue were gone, presumably melted into the roadside stand of trees.

Her windy contralto blasted out: “Arise, O strangers, and join us.”

Leuten said from the ditch: “A perfectly reasonable request, Norris. Let us do so. After all, one must be obliging.”

“And gracious,” I added.

Good old Duchess! I thought. Good old Leuten! Wonderful old-world, with hills and trees and bunnies and kittens and considerate people...

Leuten was standing on one foot, thumbing his nose, sticking out his tongue, screaming: “Norris! Norris! Defend yourself!” He was slapping my face with his free hand. Sluggishly I went into the posture of defense, thinking: Such nonsense. Defense against what? But I wouldn’t hurt old Leuten’s feelings for the world.

Adrenalin boiled through my veins, triggered by the posture. Spiders. Crawling, hairy, horrid spiders with purple, venom-dripping fangs. They hid in your shoes and bit you and your feet swelled with the poison. Their sticky, loathsome webs brushed across your face when you walked in the dark and they came scuttling silently, champing their jaws, winking their evil gemlike eyes. Spiders!

The voice of the Duchess blared impatiently: “I said, join us, O strangers. Well, what are you waiting for?”

The professor and I relaxed and looked at each other. “She’s mad,” the professor said softly. “From an asylum.”

“I doubt it. You don’t know America very well. Maybe you lock them up when they get like that in Europe; over here we elect them chairlady of the Library Fund Drive. If we don’t, we never hear the end of it.”

The costumed girl was leading the Duchess’s sulky onto the road again. Some of her retinue were beginning to follow; she waved them back and dismissed the girl curtly. We skirted the heat of the burning car and approached her. It was that or try to outrun a volley from the miscellaneous sporting rifles.

“O strangers,” she said, “you mentioned La Plume. Do you happen to be acquainted with my dear friend Phoebe Bancroft?”

The professor nodded before I could stop him. But almost simultaneously with his nod I was dragging the Duchess from her improvised chariot. It was very unpleasant, but I put my hands around her throat and knelt on her. It meant letting go of the briefcase but it was worth it.

She guggled and floundered and managed to whoop: “Don’t shoot! I take it back, don’t shoot them. Pamphilius, don’t shoot, you might hit me!”

“Send ‘em away,” I told her.

“Never!” she blared. “They are my loyal retainers.”

“You try, Professor,” I said.

I believe what he put on then was his classroom manner. He stiffened and swelled and rasped toward the shrubbery: “Come out at once. All of you.”

They came out, shambling and puzzled. They realized that something was very wrong. There was the Duchess on the ground and she wasn’t telling them what to do the way she’d been telling them for weeks now. They wanted to oblige her in any little way they could, like shooting strangers, or scrounging canned food for her, but how could they oblige her while she lay there, slowly turning purple? It was very confusing. Luckily there was somebody else to oblige, the professor.

“Go away,” he barked at them. “Go far away. We do not need you any more. And throw away your guns.”

Well, that was something a body could understand. They smiled and threw away their guns and went away in their obliging and considerate fashion.

I eased up on the Duchess’s throat. “What was that guff about the New Lemuria?” I asked her.

“You’re a rude and ignorant young man,” she snapped. From the corner of my eye I could see the professor involuntarily nodding agreement. “Every educated person knows that the lost wisdom of Lemuria was to be revived in the person of a beautiful priestess this year. According to the science of pyramidology--”

Beautiful priestess? Oh.

The professor and I stood by while she spouted an amazing compost of lost-continentism, the Ten Tribes, anti fluoridation, vegetarianism, homeopathic medicine, organic fanning, astrology, flying saucers, and the prose poem of Kahlil Gibran.

The professor said dubiously at last: “I suppose one must call her a sort of Cultural Diffusionist....” He was happier when he had her classified. He went on: “I think you know Miss Phoebe Bancroft. We wish you to present us to her as soon as possible.”

“Professor,” I complained, “we have a road map and we can find La Plume. And once we’ve found La Plume I don’t think it’ll be very hard to find Miss Phoebe.”

“I will be pleased to accompany you,” said the Duchess. “Though normally I frown on mechanical devices, I keep an automobile nearby in case in case of --well! Of all the rude!”

Believe it or not, she was speechless. Nothing in her rich store of gibberish and hate seemed to fit the situation. And fluoridation, organic farming, even Khalil Gibran were irrelevant in the face of us two each standing on one leg, thumbing our noses, and sticking out our tongues.

Undeniably the posture of defense was losing efficiency. It took longer to burn away the foolish glow....

“Professor,” I asked after we warily relaxed, “how many more of those can we take?”

He shrugged. “That is why a guide will be useful,” he said. “Madame, I believe you mentioned an automobile.”

“I know!” she said brightly. “It was asana yoga, wasn’t it? Postures, I mean?”

The professor sucked an invisible lemon. “No, madame,” he said cadaverously. “It was neither siddhasana nor padmasana. Yoga has been subsumed under Functional Epistemology, as has every other working philosophical system, Eastern and Western--but we waste time. The automobile?”

“You have to do that every so often, is that it?”

“We will leave it at that, madame. The automobile, please.”

“Come right along,” she said gaily. I didn’t look on her face. Madam Chairlady was about to spring a parliamentary coup. But I got my briefcase and followed.

The car was in a nearby barn. It was a handsome new Lincoln, and I was reasonably certain that our fair cicerone had stolen it. But then, we had stolen the Ford.

I loaded the briefcase in and took the wheel over her objections and we headed for La Plume, a dozen miles away. On the road she yelped: “Oh, Functional Epistemology and you’re Professor Lewten--”

“Yes, madame,” he wearily agreed.

“I’ve read your book, of course. So has Miss Bancroft; shell be so pleased to see you.”

“Then why, madame, did you order your subjects to murder us?”

“Well, Professor, of course I didn’t know who you were then, and it was rather shocking, seeing somebody in a car. I, ah, had the feeling that you were up to no good, especially when you mentioned dear Miss Bancroft. She, you know, is really responsible for the re-emergence of the New Lemuria.”

“Indeed?” said the professor. “You understand, then, about Leveled Personality Interflow?” He was beaming.