Рэй Брэдбери: The Exiles

«So?» Mr. Dickens tilted his head, impatient to return to the party, the music, the food. «Perhaps you can explain why we are here? How did we come here?»

«War begets war. Destruction begets destruction. On Earth, a century ago, in the year 2020 they outlawed our books. Oh, what a horrible thing-to destroy our literary creations that way! It summoned us out of-what? Death? The Beyond? I don't like abstract things. I don't know. I only know that our worlds and our creations called us and we tried to save them, and the only saving thing we could do was wait out the century here on Mars, hoping Earth might overweight itself with these scientists and their doubtings; but now they're coming to clean us out of here, us and our dark things, and all the alchemists, witches, vampires, and were-things that, one by one, retreated across space as science made inroads through every country on Earth and finally left no alternative at all but exodus. You must help us. You have a good speaking manner. We need you.»

«I repeat, I am not of you, I don't approve of you and the others,» cried Dickens angrily. «I was no player with witches and vampires and midnight things.»

«What of A Christmas Carol?»

«Ridiculous! One story. Oh, I wrote a few others about ghosts, perhaps, but what of that? My basic works had none of that nonsense!»

«Mistaken or not, they grouped you with us. They destroyed your books-your worlds too. You must hate them, Mr. Dickens!»

«I admit they are stupid and rude, but that is all. Good day!»

«Let Mr. Marley come, at least!»

«No!»

The door slammed. As Poe turned away, down the street, skimming over the frosty ground, the coachman playing a lively air on a bugle, came a great coach, out of which, cherry-red, laughing and singing, piled the Pickwickians, banging on the door, shouting Merry Christmas good and loud, when the door was opened by the fat boy.

Mr. Poe hurried along the midnight shore of the dry sea. By fires and smoke he hesitated, to shout orders, to check the bubbling caldrons, the poisons and the chalked pentagrams. «Good!» he said, and ran on. «Fine!» he shouted, and ran again. People joined him and ran with him. Here were Mr. Coppard and Mr. Machen running with him now. And there were hating serpents and angry demons and fiery bronze dragons and spitting vipers and trembling witches like the barbs and nettles and thorns and all the vile flotsam and jetsam of the retreating sea of imagination, left on the melancholy shore, whining and frothing and spitting.

Mr. Machen stopped. He sat like a child on the cold sand. He began to sob. They tried to soothe him, but he would not listen. «I just thought,» he said. «What happens to us on the day when the last copies of our books are destroyed?»

The air whirled.

«Don't speak of it!»

«We must,» wailed Mr. Machen. «Now, now, as the rocket comes down, you, Mr. Poe; you, Coppard; you, Bierce-all of you grow faint. Like wood smoke. Blowing away. Your faces melt―»

«Death! Real death for all of us.»

«We exist only through Earth's sufferance. If a final edict tonight destroyed our last few works we'd be like lights put out.»

Coppard brooded gently. «I wonder who I am. In what Earth mind tonight do I exist? In some African hut? Some hermit, reading my tales? Is he the lonely candle in the wind of time and science? The flickering orb sustaining me here in rebellious exile? Is it him? Or some boy in a discarded attic, finding me, only just in time! Oh, last night I felt ill, ill, ill to the marrows of me, for there is a body of the soul as well as a body of the body, and this soul body ached in all of its glowing parts, and last night I felt myself a candle, guttering. When suddenly I sprang up, given new light! As some child, sneezing with dust, in some yellow garret on Earth once more found a worn, time-specked copy of me! And so I'm given a short respite!»

A door banged wide in a little hut by the shore. A thin short man, with flesh hanging from him in folds, stepped out and, paying no attention to the others, sat down and stared into his clenched fists.

«There's the one I'm sorry for,» whispered Blackwood. «Look at him, dying away. He was once more real than we, who were men. They took him, a skeleton thought, and clothed him in centuries of pink flesh and snow beard and red velvet suit and black boot; made him reindeers, tinsel, holly. And after centuries of manufacturing him they drowned him in a vat of Lysol, you might say.»

The men were silent.

«What must it be on Earth?» wondered Poe. «Without Christmas? No hot chestnuts, no tree, no ornaments or drums or candles-nothing;

nothing but the snow and wind and the lonely, factual people….»

They all looked at the thin little old man with the scraggly beard and faded red velvet suit.

«Have you heard his story?»

«I can imagine it. The glitter-eyed psychiatrist, the clever sociologist, the resentful, froth-mouthed educationalist, the antiseptic parents―»

«A regrettable situation,» said Bierce, smiling, «for the Yuletide merchants who, toward the last there, as I recall, were beginning to put up holly and sing Noel the day before Halloween. With any luck at all this year they might have started on Labor Day!»

Bierce did not continue. He fell forward with a sigh. As he lay upon the ground he had time to say only, «How interesting.» And then, as they all watched, horrified, his body burned into blue dust and charred bone, the ashes of which fled through the air in black tatters.

«Bierce, Bierce!»

«Gone!»

«His last book gone. Someone on Earth just now burned it.»

«God rest him. Nothing of him left now. For what are we but books, and when those are gone, nothing's to be seen.»

A rushing sound filled the sky.

They cried out, terrified, and looked up. In the sky, dazzling it with sizzling fire clouds, was the rocket! Around the men on the seashore lanterns bobbed; there was a squealing and a bubbling and an odor of cooked spells. Candle-eyed pumpkins lifted into the cold clear air. Thin fingers clenched into fists and a witch screamed from her withered mouth:

«Time to go,» murmured Blackwood. «On to Jupiter, on to Saturn or Pluto.»

«Run away?» shouted Poe in the wind. «Never!»

«I'm a tired old man!»

Poe gazed into the old man's face and believed him. He climbed atop a huge boulder and faced the ten thousand gray shadows and green lights and yellow eyes on the hissing wind.

«The powders!» he shouted.

A thick hot smell of bitter almond, civet, cumin, wormseed and orris!

The rocket came down-steadily down, with the shriek of a damned spirit! Poe raged at it! He flung his fists up and the orchestra of heat and smell and hatred answered in symphony! Like stripped tree fragments, bats flew upward! Burning hearts, flung like missiles, burst in bloody fireworks on the singed air. Down, down, relentlessly down, like a pendulum the rocket came. And Poe howled, furiously, and shrank back with every sweep and sweep of the rocket cutting and ravening the air! All the dead sea seemed a pit in which, trapped, they waited the sinking of the dread machinery, the glistening ax; they were people under the avalanche!

«The snakes!» screamed Poe.

And luminous serpentines of undulant green hurtled toward the rocket. But it came down, a sweep, a fire, a motion, and it lay panting out exhaustions of red plumage on the sand, a mile away.

«At it!» shrieked Poe. «The plan's changed! Only one chance! Run! At it! At it! Drown them with our bodies! Kill them!»

And as if he had commanded a violent sea to change its course, to suck itself free from primeval beds, the whirls and savage gouts of fire spread and ran like wind and rain and stark lightning over the sea sands, down empty river deltas, shadowing and screaming, whistling and whining, sputtering and coalescing toward the rocket which, extinguished, lay like a clean metal torch in the farthest hollow. As if a great charred caldron of sparkling lava had been overturned, the boiling people and snapping animals churned down the dry fathoms.