Short Fiction - Algis Budrys (chrysanthemum read aloud .TXT) 📗

new transporter out of materials nothing like those in the one that broke and marooned him here.”

“And it won’t function?” Charpantier asked. “There is that risk. But why shouldn’t he try? What’s insane in that?”

“I fear it might work. I fear it might work in ways a transporter should not.” And I shivered, for if I say something I feel it, and I do not feel anything I don’t believe is right. I have been wrong, but not often⁠ ⁠… or perhaps I forget.

Charpantier smiled. “How should a Veld transporter work?”

“That’s not the point!” I cried at Charpantier’s obstinacy in being Charpantier. “I don’t have to know. The Veld has to know, and be insane enough to try something different. Look⁠—” I said, searching, being my own kind of man, now, and letting the words come straight from the images in my head. “Assume a man. Assume a man stranded on an island, for years. Assume he has ways of realizing his heart’s desire, if only he can find the things to work with. But it’s a small island. And while it’s a good island how can it give a marooned man not only comfort but heart’s desire? He searches. He perhaps send messengers, if he himself cannot penetrate the jungle; such messengers as he can command. And, in the end, after years, he knows he cannot have exactly what he wants. But he can have something very near it. So, in the end, he takes a rag, and a bone, and a hank of hair⁠—”

“And makes a woman?” Charpantier laughed. “If he fails, what of it?”

“But if he succeeds, Charpantier! If he succeeds!” Couldn’t he see? “What sort of woman?”

Charpantier looked at me for a moment, but I hadn’t made him see. He saw only me, and I had taken up his time without delivering value. So he chastised me.

“The Veld made me and you. Are you dissatisfied?”

He had that trick, Charpantier. If you tried to give him a problem he couldn’t solve, he gave you a greater problem of your own, to add to the one you already carried.

I picked up my bag and followed him up the hill to the Foundation, where the Veld timelessly waited.

It was dusk, and as I walked I turned my eyes up to the stars. One eye was larger than the other, and a different color. My nose sat askew on my lumpen face. Though Charpantier was a hunchback, and lacked a finger, still he was a handsome hunchback. But I, whom the Veld had made second, with Charpantier’s example, was merely whole. And from my eyes, tears.

We entered the Foundation. It had been erected around the Veld, when he first came and there were men who could question.

Now the building was neat and kept up, but all its many rooms were empty, and all its many machines were still. Charpantier had his cottage on the West⁠—a very learned man had used it, while working with the Veld⁠—and I had mine on the East, where a military commander had kept his family.

The Veld lived in the heart of the Foundation, in the odd-shaped room whose walls traced the configuration he had been forced to assume when his broken transporter had interrupted his journey between⁠—where?⁠—and the home he pined for. Men came from the town below the hill to care for the building, but Charpantier or I had to go fetch them. They no longer questioned. They distressed us with their constant need for commanding, and so every time they were finished with their work we commanded them homeward. No Earthly creature lived on the hill.

The Veld was kindly, but an end comes to kindness. The time came when the questioning of men would have led them, if answered, irrevocably into Veldish ways.

It was perhaps a kindness, too, that the Veld did what he did to questioning creatures. But however it may have been, now there were only men to be commanded. Charpantier commanded in the West, and I in the East, and the Veld, though he permitted us to question all men, and each other, commanded us.

Charpantier and I did not often speak to each other while in the Foundation. We were too near the Veld, and insufficiently full of ourselves. But as we rode down the elevator, with its noise of metal sliding all alone in the world, Charpantier looked at me. And I knew what he looked.

I have thought to myself that Charpantier says of everything: “Why is this thing not perfect?” while I say to myself: “Where is the perfection in this thing?” Surely my thought is as potent as his. But you see his advantage over me, for he was forever safe from what I might look at him, but I, I was not safe.

We reached the chamber of the Veld. We opened the door and displayed our accumulation to his perceptions.

“My-being reflects you,” the Veld told us from his perception, and seeing that he was become beautiful, I knew we had done well. “Now will I make, and take my way, and you in your sorrow stay to see the world restored.”

This was as he had promised the world, and us, before he put an end to questioning. Though only we remembered. But I wondered⁠—I did not question; I wondered⁠—as I imagined his making of the new transporter, taking my imagined thing from what I knew of how he had made us; I wondered whether the world was safe.

I thought of the chamber beside this one, where we had been born. I had often been there, only to look. There is the tank⁠—the Rochester, Minnesota, Biophysical Equipment Co. tank. And there is the Velikaya Socialisticheskaya Rossiya coagulator, and the I.B.M. 704, and the Braun, Boveri heater. There stand the cabinets, with their Torsen, Held Artztmetal refrigeration units. And the cabinets stand full of flasks and ampules, and there is the autoclave full of Becton-Dickinson Yale syringes, and dangling from the wall are the Waldos the Veld used