To Marry Medusa Read online

“Perhaps if this happened today he would be cared for just for this one thing. But then, all was confusion; he was put with one family where the man died, and then into an orphanage which burned: these were unhappy accidents, but purely accidents. They could not quench the tiling that was in him. Before he was three he knew a thousand melodies; he could sing words he did not understand, before he could speak; he could whistle the themes of any music he had once heard. He was full of music, that boy, full to bursting.”

  (Above, listening, I, Guido, thought, now Massoni, who is filling you with such fairy-tales as this?)

  Massoni puts his hands around the big cup as if to warm them, searches down into the black liquid as if to find more of his story, says, “Now a natural thing like talent, like pure cool mountain water, if you put it in a closed place, cover it tight, set a fire under it, nothing happens, and nothing happens, and nothing ... until blam! it breaks the prison and comes out. But what comes out is no longer pure cool kind water, but a blistering devil ready to scald, soak, smash whatever is near enough. You have changed it, you see, by what you have done to it.

  “So. There is this small boy, three or four years old, with more music than blood in his body. And then something happens. He is taken into the family of a Corfu shepherd and not seen for six years. When we next hear of him he is a devil, just such a blistering devil as that gout of tortured mountain water. But he is not a jet of water, he is a human being; his explosion is not over in a second, but is to go on for years.

  “Something has happened to him in the shepherd’s house in those six years, something which put the cover down tight over what was in him, and heated it up.”

  Vicente, the boy, asks, “What was it?”

  Massoni says nothing for a long time, and then says he doesn’t know. Says, “I mean to find out some day ... if I can. The shepherd is dead now, the wife disappeared, the other children gone, perhaps dead too. They lived alone in a rocky place, without neighbors, fishing and herding sheep and perhaps other things ... anyway, they are gone. All but this unhappy demon of a boy.”

  (I, Guido, feel a flash of rage. Who’s unhappy?) Massoni says, “So you see what can happen if a talent big enough is held back hard enough.”

  Vicente, the boy, says, “You mean to live apart from all music did such a thing to this child?”

  Massoni shakes his head, says, “No, that would not be enough by itself. It must have been something more—something that was done to him, and done so thoroughly that this has happened.”

  “What things does he do?”

  “Cruel, vicious things. They say meaningless things; but they are not meaningless. He beat an old beggar one night and broke his legs. He set fire to a print shop. He cut the hydraulic brake tube on a parked bus. He threw a big building-stone through the stained glass of St. Anthony’s. He destroyed the big loudspeaker over the door of a phonograph shop with the handle of a broom. And there are dozens of small things, meaningless until one realizes the single thread that runs through them all. Knowing that, one can understand why he does these things (though not why he wants to). One can also know, in the long list of small crimes, cruelties and ruinations a city like this must write each day, each week, which are done by this unfortunate boy and which are not.”

  “Has no one seen him?” asks Vicente.

  “Hardly. He took a toy from a child and smashed it under his foot, and we got a description; but it was a five-year-old child, it was after dark, it happened very quickly; it was not evidence enough to hold him. There was a witness when he wrecked the loud-speaker, and when he pushed a porter’s luggage-truck on to the tracks at the railroad station, but again it was dark, fast, confused; the witnesses argued with one another and he went free. He moves like the night wind, appears everywhere, strikes when he is safe and the act is unexpected.”

  (Ah now, Massoni, you are beginning to tell the truth.)

  The boy Vincente wants to know how one may be sure all these things are really the work of this one boy.

  Massoni says, “It is the thread that runs through all his acts. In the shrine, St. Anthony’s, a choir was practicing. The toy he smashed was a harmonica. On the luggage truck were instrument cases, a trombone and a flugelhorn. The damaged bus carried members of an orchestra and their instruments (and a driver who had his wits about him, tried his brakes even as he began to move, or all might have been killed). The destruction of the loud-speaker speaks for itself. Always something about music, something against music.”

  “The beggar?”

  “A mad old man who sang all the time. You see?”

  “Ah,” says the boy Vicente sadly.

  “Yes, it is a sad thing. If music angers him so, his days and his nights must be a furnace of fury, living as he does in the most musical land on earth, with every voice, whistle, bell, each humming, singing, plunking, tinkling man, woman and child reaching him with music ... music reaches him, you see, as nothing can reach you and me, Vicente; it reaches him more than rain; it splashes on his heart and bones.... Ah, forgive me, forgive me, boy; I am using your lesson time on a matter of police business. Yet—it is not time wasted, if you gain from it something about the nature of talent, and how so natural a thing can break a block of stone to thrust one tender shoot into the sun, as you have seen a grass-blade do. And remember, too, that a great talent is not a substitute for work. A man of small skill, or even good skill like mine, must practice until his fingers bleed to bring his talent to flower; but if your talent is great, why then you must work even harder. The stronger the growth, the more tangled it can become; we want you to make a tall tree and not a great wide bramble-patch. Now enough of talk. Take up the violin.”

  ... So again I Guido descended into hell, while Massoni coaxes and goads the boy who goads and coaxes the instrument to scratch, squawk, squeak and weep. In between noises is advice and learning: “A little higher with the bow arm, Vicente—so; now if there is a board resting on wrist, elbow, shoulder, I may set a brimming glass there and never spill. And to this level you must always return.” ...”Na, na, get the left elbow away from the body, Vicente. Nobody scrunches up arm and fingers that way to play ... except Joseph Szigeti of course, and you are not going to be the second Szigeti but the first Vicente Panaori.”

  From my hole in the ceiling I Guido watch, and then strangely cease to watch ... as if watching was a thing to do, to try to do and a thing I could do or not do ... and as if I ceased trying to do this thing and became instead something not-alive, like a great gaping street-sewer, letting everything pour into me. A few minutes ago I am ready to shout, to come out, to kill—anything to stop this agony. Now I am past that. I am beaten into a kind of unconsciousness ... no; a sleep of the will; the consciousness is open and awake as never before. Along with it a land of blindness with the eyes seeing. I see, but I am past seeing, past understanding what I see. I do not see them finish. I do not see mem go. I am, after a long time, aware of what seems to be the sound of the violin, when the big low G string is touched by one single soft bounce of the bow, scraping a little under the boy’s fledgling fingers. Hearing this, over and over, I begin to see normally again and see only the dark room with a single band of light across it from a street-lamp outside the wide slit of window. Massoni is gone. Vicente is gone. The violin is gone. Yet I hear it, the soft scraping staccato, over and over.

  It hurts my throat.

  Hcoo ... hcoo ...

  It hurts each time, the quiet sound, as if I am the violin being struck softly, and being so tender, hurting so easily, I softly cry out....

  And then I understand that it is not a violin I hear; I am sobbing up there in the dark. Enraged, I swallow a mouthful of sour, and stop the noise.

  CHAPTER 5

  “So—whaddaya want?”

  The Medusa told him what it wanted, incredulously, as one explaining the utter and absolute obvious, and drew a blank from Gurlick. There was a moment of disbelief, and then a forceful repetition of the demand.

  And Gu
rlick still did not understand. Few humans would, for not many have made the effort to comprehend the nature of the hive-mind—what it must be like to have such a mind, and further, to be totally ignorant of the fact that any other kind of mind could exist.

  For in all its eons of being, across and back and through and through the immensities of space it occupied, the Medusa had never encountered intelligence except as a phenomenon of the group. It was aware of the almost infinite variations in kind and quality of the gestalt psyche, but so fused in its experience and comprehension were the concepts “intelligence” and “group” that it was genuinely incapable of regarding them as separable things. That a single entity of any species was capable of so much as lucid thought without the operation of group mechanisms, was outside its experience and beyond its otherwise near-omniscience. To contact any individual of a species was—or had been until now—to contact the entire species. Now, it pressed against Gurlick, changed its angle and pressed again, paused to ponder, came back again and, puzzling, yet again to do the exploratory, bewildered things a man might do faced with the opening of, and penetration through, some artifact he did not understand. There were tappings and listenings, and (analogously) pressures this way and that as if to find a left-hand thread. There were scrapings as for samples to analyze, prod-dings and pricks as for hardness tests, polarized rayings as if to determine lattice structures. And in the end there was a—call it a pressure test, the procedure one applies to clogged tubing or to oxide-shorts on shielded wire: blow it out. Take what’s supposed to be going through and cram an excess down it.

  Gurlick sat on the floor of the abandoned truck, disinterestedly aware of the distant cerebration, computation, discussion and conjecture. A lot of gabble by someone who knew more than he did about things he didn’t understand. Like always.

  Uh!

  It had been a thing without sight or sound or touch, but it struck like all three, suffused him for a moment with some unbearable tension, and then receded and left him limp and shaken. Some mighty generator somewhere had shunted in and poured its product to him, and it did a great many things inside him somehow; and all of them hurt, and none was what was wanted.

  He was simply not the right conduit for such a force. He was a solid bar fitted into a plumbing system, a jet of air tied into an electrical circuit; he was the wrong material in the wrong place and the output end wasn’t hooked up to anything at all.

  Spectacular, the degree of mystification which now suffused the Medusa. For ages untold there had always been some segment somewhere which could come up with an answer to anything; now there was not. That particular jolt of that particular force ought to have exploded into the psyche of every rational being on earth, forming a network of intangible, unbreakable threads leading to Gurlick and through him to Medusa itself. It had always happened that way—not almost always, but always. This was how the creature expanded. Not by campaign, attack, siege, consolidation, conquest, but by contact and influx. Its “spores,” if they encountered any life-form which the Medusa could not control, simply did not function. If they functioned, the Medusa flowed in. Always.

  From methane swamp to airless rock, from sun to sun through two galaxies and part of a third flickered the messages, sorting, combining, test-hypothesizing, calculating, extrapolating. And these flickerings began to take on the hue of fear. The Medusa had never known fear before.

  To be thus checked meant that the irresistible force was resisted, the indefensible was guarded. Earth had a shield, and a shield is the very next thing to a weapon. It was a weapon, in the Medusa’s lexicon; for expansion was a factor as basic to its existence as Deity to the religious, as breath or heart beat to a single animal; such a factor may not, must not be checked.

  Earth suddenly became a good deal more than just another berry for the mammoth to sweep in. Humanity now had to be absorbed, by every measure of principle, of gross ethic, of life.

  And it must be done through Gurlick, for the action of the “spore” within him was irreversible, and no other human could be affected by it. The chances of another being in the same sector at the same time were too remote to justify waiting, and Earth was physically too far from the nearest Medusa-dominated planet to allow for an attack in force or even an exploratory expedition, whereby expert mind might put expert hands (or palps or claws or tentacles or cilia or mandibles) to work in the field. No, it had to be done through Gurlick, who might be— must be—manipulated by thought emanations, which are nonphysical and thereby exempt from physical laws, capable of skipping across a galaxy and back before a light-ray can travel a hundred yards.

  Even while, after that blast of force, Gurlick slumped and scrabbled dazedly after his staggering consciousness, and as he slowly rolled over and got to his knees, grunting and pressing his head, the Medusa was making a thousand simultaneous computations and setting up ten thousand more. From the considerations of a space-traveling culture deep in the nebula came a thought in the form of an analogy: as a defense against thick concentrations of cosmic dust, these creatures had designed spaceships which, on approaching a cloud, broke up into hundreds of small streamlined parts which would come together and reunite when the danger was past. Could that be what humanity had done? Had they a built-in mechanism, like the chipmunk’s tail, the seacucumber’s ejectible intestines, which would fragment the hive-mind on contact from outside, break it up into two and a half billion specimens like this Gurlick?

  It seemed reasonable. In its isolation as the only logical hypothesis conceivable by the Medusa, it seemed so reasonable as to be a certainty.

  How could it be undone, then, and humanity’s total mind restored? Therein lay the Medusa’s answer. Unify humanity (it thought, reunify humanity) and the only problem left would be that of influx, if that influx could not be done through Gurlick directly, other ways might be found: it had never met a hive-mind yet that it couldn’t enter.

  Gasping, Gurlick grated, “Try that again, you gon’ kill me, you hear?”

  Coldly examining what it could of the mists of his mind, the Medusa weighed that statement. It doubted it. On the other hand, Gurlick was, at the moment, infinitely valuable. It now knew that he could be hurt, and organisms which can be hurt can be driven. It realized also that Gurlick might be more useful, however, if he could be enlisted.

  To enlist an organism, you find out what it wants, and give it a little in a way that indicates promise of more. It asked Gurlick then what he wanted.

  “Lea’ me lone,” Gurlick said.

  The response to that was a flat negative, with a faint stirring of that wrenching, explosive force it had already used. Gurlick whimpered, and the Medusa asked him again what he wanted.

  “What do I want?” whispered Gurlick. He ceased, for the moment to use words, but the concepts were there. They were hate and smashed faces, and the taste of good liquor, and a pile of clothes by the bank of a pond: she saw him sitting there and was startled for a moment; then she smiled and said, “Hello, Handsome.” What did he want? ... Thoughts of Gurlick striding down the street, with the people scurrying away before him in terror and the bartenders standing in their open doors, holding shot-glasses out to him, calling, pleading. And all along South Main Street, where the fancy restaurants and clubs are, with the soft-handed hard-eyed big shots who never in their lives had an empty belly, them and their clean sweet-smelling women, Gurlick wanted them lined up and he would go down the line and slit their bellies and take out their dinners by the handful and throw it in their faces.

  The Medusa at this point had some considerable trouble interrupting. Gurlick, on the subject of what Gurlick wanted, could go on with surprising force for a very long time. The Medusa found it possible to understand this resentment, surely the tropistic flailing of something amputated, something denied full function, robbed, deprived. And of course, insane.

  Deftly, the Medusa began making promises. The rewards described were described vividly indeed, and in detail that enchanted Gurlick. They were
subtly implanted feedback circuits from his own imaginings, and they dazzled him. And from time to time there was a faint prod from that which had hurt him, just to remind him that it was still there.

  At last, “Oh, sure, sure,” Gurlick said. “I’ll find out about that, about how people can get put together again. An’ then, boy, I gon’ step on their face.”

  So it was, chuckling, that Daniel Gurlick went forth from his wrecked truck to conquer the world.

  CHAPTER 6

  Dimity Carmichael sat back and smiled at the weeping girl. “Sex,” she told Caroline, “is, after all, so unnecessary.”

  Caroline knelt on the rug with her face hidden in the couch cushion, her nape bright red from her weeping, the end strands of her hair wet with tears.

  She had come unexpectedly, in mid-afternoon, and Dimity Carmichael had opened the door and almost screamed. She had caught the girl before she could fall, led her to the couch. When Caroline could speak, she muttered about a dentist, about how it had hurt, how she had been so sure she could make it home but was just too sick, and, finding herself here, had hoped Dimity would let her lie down for a few minutes.... Dimity had made her comfortable and then, with a few sharp unanswerable questions (“What dentist: What is his name? Why couldn’t you lie down in his office? He wanted you out of there as soon as he’d finished, didn’t he? In fact, he wasn’t a dentist and he didn’t do the kind of operations dentists do, isn’t that so?”), she had reduced the pale girl to this sodden sobbing thing huddled against the couch. “I’ve known for a long time how you were carrying on. And you finally got caught.”

  It was at that point, after thinking it out in grim, self-satisfied silence, that Dimity Carmichael said sex was after all so unnecessary. “It certainly has done you no good. Why do you give in, Caroline? You don’t have to.”

  “I did, I did ...” came the girl’s muffled voice. “Nonsense. Say you wanted to, and we’d be closer to the truth. No one has to.”