The Avram Davidson Treasury (39 page)

Old Red Tom, who had been gaping, seemed suddenly to catch at a word. “The House! A hey, yes. Go on to The House. Good now. Mum.”

They started off, more slowly than before, and Old Red Tom, having unhitched his freemartins, followed behind, from time to time calling something unintelligible. “A funny fellow,” said Ezra.

“He talks so
oddly
,” Mikicho said. And Shulamith said that all she wanted was to sit down. Then—

“Oh, look,” she said. “
Look!
”

“They have all come to greet us,” her husband observed.

And so they had.

Nothing like this event had ever occurred in the history of the Blakeneys. But they were not found wanting. They brought the strangers into The House, gave them the softest chairseats, nearest to the burning; gave them cookingmilk and cheesemeats and tatoplants. Fatigue descended on the newcomers in a rush; they ate and drank somewhat, then they sank back, silent.

But the people of the house were not silent, far from it. Most of them who had been away had now come back, they milled around, some gulping eats, others craning and staring, most talking and talking and talking—few of them mumbletalking, now that the initial excitement had ebbed a bit. To the newcomers, eyes now opening with effort, now closing, despite, the people of the house seemed like figures from one of those halls of mirrors they had read about in social histories: the same faces, clothes…but, ah, indeed, not the same dimensions. Everywhere—florid complexions, bulging blue eyes, protruding bones at the forehead, hooked thin noses, flabby mouths.

Blakeneys.

Thin Blakeneys, big Blakeneys, little Blakeneys, old ones, young ones, male and female. There seemed to be one standard model from which the others had been stretched or compressed, but it was difficult to conjecture what this exact standard was.

“Starside, then,” Young Big Mary said—and said again and again, clearsound. “No elses live to Blakeneyworld. Starside, Starside, a hey, Starside. Same as Captains.”

Young Whitey Bill pointed with a stick of burnwood at Shulamith. “Baby grows,” he said. “Rower, rower. Baby soon.”

With a great effort, Robert roused himself. “Yes. She’s going to have a baby very soon. We will be glad of your help.”

Old Whitey Bill came for another look to, hobbling on his canestick. “We descend,” he said, putting his face very close to Robert’s, “we descend from the Captains. Hasn’t heard of them, you? Elses not heard? Funny. Funnyfunny. We descend, look to. From the Captains. Captain Tom Blakeney. And his wives. Captain Bill Blakeney. And his wives. Brothers, they. Jinnie, Mary, Captain Tom’s wives. Other Mary, Captain Bob’s wife. Had another wife, but we don’t remember it, us, her name. They lived, look to. Starside. You, too? Mum, you? A hey, Starside?”

Robert nodded. “When?” he asked. “When did they come from Starside? The brothers.”

Night had fallen, but no lights were lit. Only the dancing flames, steadily fed, of the burning, with chunks and chunks of fat and greasy burnwood, flickered and illuminated the great room. “Ah, when,” said Old Red Tom, thrusting up to the chairseat. “When we children, old Blakeneys say, a hey, five hundredyear. Longlong.”

Old Little Mary said, suddenly, “They funnywalk. They funnytalk. But, oh, they funnylook, too!”

“A baby. A baby. Grows a baby, soon.”

And two or three little baby Blakeneys, like shrunken versions of their elders, gobbled and giggled and asked to see the Starside baby. The big ones laughed, told them, soon.

“Five hundred …” Hayakawa drowsed. He snapped awake. “The four of us,” he said, “were heading in our boat for the Moons of Lor. Have you—no, I see, you never have. It’s a short trip, really. But something happened to us, I don’t know…how to explain it…we ran into something…something that wasn’t there. A warp? A hole? That’s silly, I know, but—It was as though we felt the boat
drop
, somehow. And then, after that, our instruments didn’t work and we saw we had no celestial references…not a star we knew. What’s that phrase, ‘A new Heaven and a new Earth?’ We were just able to reach her. Blakeneyworld, as you call it.”

Sparks snapped and flew. Someone said, “Sleepytime.” And then all the Blakeneys went away and then Hayakawa slept.

It was washtime when the four woke up, and all the Blakeneys around The House, big and little, were off scrubbing themselves and their clothes. “I guess that food on the table is for us,” Ezra said. “I will assume it is for us. Say grace, Robert. I’m hungry.”

Afterwards they got up and looked around. The room was big and the far end so dark, even with sunshine pouring in through the open shutters, that they could hardly make out the painting on the wall. The paint was peeling, anyway, and a crack like a flash of lightning ran through it; plaster or something of the sort had been slapped onto it, but this had mostly fallen out, its only lasting effect being to deface the painting further.

“Do you suppose that the two big figures could be the Captains?” Mikicho asked, for Robert had told them what Old Whitey Bill had said.

“I would guess so. They look grim and purposeful… When was the persecution of the polygamists, anybody know?”

Current social histories had little to say about that period, but the four finally agreed it had been during the Refinishing Era, and that this had been about six hundred years ago. “Could this house be that old?” Shulamith asked. “Parts of it, I suppose, could be. I’ll tell you what I think,
I
think that those two Captains set out like ancient patriarchs with their wives and their families and their flocks and so on, heading for somewhere where they wouldn’t be persecuted. And then they hit—well, whatever it was that
we
hit. And wound up here. Like us.”

Mikicho said, in a small, small voice, “And perhaps it will be another six hundred years before anyone else comes here. Oh, we’re here for good and forever. That’s sure.”

They walked on, silent and unsure, through endless corridors and endless rooms. Some were clean enough, others were clogged with dust and rubbish, some had fallen into ruin, some were being used for barns and stables, and in one was a warm forge.

“Well,” Robert said at last, “we must make the best of it. We cannot change the configurations of the universe.”

Following the sounds they presently heard brought them to the washroom, slippery, warm, steamy, noisy.

Once again they were surrounded by the antic Blakeney face and form in its many permutations. “Washtime, washtime!” their hosts shouted, showing them where to put their clothes, fingering the garments curiously, helping them to soap, explaining which of the pools were fed by hot springs, which by warm and cold, giving them towels, assisting Shulamith carefully.

“Your world house, you, a hey,” began a be-soaped Blakeney to Ezra; “bigger than this? No.”

Ezra agreed, “No.”

“Your—Blakeneys? No. Mum, mum. Hey. Family? Smaller, a hey?”

“Oh, much smaller.”

The Blakeney nodded. Then he offered to scrub Ezra’s back if Ezra would scrub his.

The hours passed, and the days. There seemed no government, no rules, only ways and habits and practices. Those who felt so inclined, worked. Those who didn’t…didn’t. No one suggested the newcomers do anything, no one prevented from doing anything. It was perhaps a week later that Robert and Ezra invited themselves on a trip along the shore of the bay. Two healthy horses pulled a rickety wagon.

The driver’s name was Young Little Bob. “Gots to fix a floorwalk,” he said. “In the, a hey, in the sickroom. Needs boards. Lots at the riverwater.”

The sun was warm. The House now and again vanished behind trees or hills, now and again, as the road curved with the bay, came into view, looming over everything.

“We’ve got to find something for ourselves to
do,
Ezra said.”These people may be all one big happy family, they better be, the only family on the whole planet all this time. But if I spend any much more time with them I think I’ll become as dippy as they are.”

Robert said, deprecatingly, that the Blakeneys weren’t
very
dippy. “Besides,” he pointed out, “sooner or later our children are going to have to intermarry with them, and—”

“Our children can intermarry with each other—”

“Our grandchildren, then. I’m afraid we haven’t the ancient skills necessary to be pioneers, otherwise we might go…just anywhere. There is, after all, lots of room. But in a few hundred years, perhaps less, our descendants would be just as inbred and, well, odd. This way, at least, there’s a chance. Hybrid vigor, and all that.”

They forded the river at a point just directly opposite The House. A thin plume of smoke rose from one of its great, gaunt chimneys. The wagon turned up an overgrown path which followed up the river. “Lots of boards,” said Young Little Bob. “Mum mum mum.”

There were lot of boards, just as he said, weathered a silver gray. They were piled under the roof of a great open shed. At the edge of it a huge wheel turned and turned in the water. It, like the roof, was made of some dull and unrusted metal. But only the wheel turned. The other machinery was dusty.

“Millstones,” Ezra said. “And saws. Lathes. And…all sorts of things. Why do they—Bob? Young Little Bob, I mean—why do you grind your grain by hand?”

The driver shrugged. “Have’s to make flour, a hey. Bread.”

Obviously, none of the machinery was in running order. It was soon obvious that no living Blakeney knew how to mend this, although (said Young Little Bob) there were those who could remember when things were otherwise: Old Big Mary, Old Little Mary, Old Whitey Bill—

Hayakawa, with a polite gesture, turned away from the recitation. “Ezra… I think we might be able to fix all this. Get it in running order. That would be something to do, wouldn’t it? Something well worth doing. It would make a big difference.”

Ezra said that it would make all the difference.

Shulamith’s child, a girl, was born on the edge of a summer evening when the sun streaked the sky with rose, crimson, magenta, lime, and purple. “We’ll name her
Hope
,” she said.

“Tongs to make tongs,” Mikicho called the work of repair. She saw the restoration of the water-power as the beginning of a process which must eventually result in their being spaceborne again. Robert and Ezra did not encourage her in this. It was a long labor of work. They pored and sifted through The House from its crumbling top to its vast, vast colonnaded cellar, finding much that was of use to them, much which—though of no use—was interesting and Intriguing—and much which was not only long past use but whose very usage could now be no more than a matter of conjecture. They found tools, metal which could be forged into tools, they found a whole library of books and they found the Blakeney-made press on which the books had been printed; the most recent was a treatise on the diseases of cattle, its date little more than a hundred years earlier. Decay had come quickly.

None of the Blakeneys were of much use in the matter of repairs. They were willing enough to lift and move—until the novelty wore off; then they were only in the way. The nearest to an exception was Big Fat Red Bob, the blacksmith; and, as his usual work was limited to sharpening plowshares, even he was not of much use. Robert and Ezra worked from sunrise to late afternoon. They would have worked longer, but as soon as the first chill hit the air, whatever Blakeneys were on hand began to get restless.

“Have’s to get back, now, a hey. Have’s to start back.”

“Why?” Ezra had asked, at first. “There are no harmful animals on Blakeneyworld, are there?”

It was nothing that any of them could put into words, either clearsound or mumbletalk. They had no tradition of things that go bump in the night, but nothing could persuade them to spend a minute of the night outside the thick walls of The House. Robert and Ezra found it easier to yield, return with them. There were so many false starts, the machinery beginning to function and then breaking down, that no celebration took place to mark any particular day as the successful one. The nearest thing to it was the batch of cakes that Old Big Mary baked from the first millground flour.

“Like longlong times,” she said, contentedly, licking crumbs from her toothless chops. She looked at the newcomers, made a face for their baby. A thought occurred to her, and, after a moment or two, she expressed it. “Not ours,” she said. “Not ours, you. Elses. But I rather have’s you here than that Runaway Little Bob back, or that Thin Jinnie… Yes, I rathers.”

There was only one serviceable axe, so no timber was cut. But Ezra found a cove where driftwood limbs and entire trees were continually piling up; and the sawmill didn’t lack for wood to feed it. “Makes a lot of boards, a hey,” Young Little Bob said one day.

“We’re building a house,” Robert explained.

The wagoner looked across the bay at the mighty towers and turrets, the great gables and long walls. From the distance no breach was noticeable, although two of the chimneys could be seen to slant slightly. “Lots to build,” he said. “A hey, whole roof on north end wing, mum mum, bad, it’s bad, hey.”

“No, we’re building our own house.”

He looked at them, surprised. “Wants to build another room? Easier, I say, me, clean up a no-one’s room. Oh, a hey, lots of them!”

Robert let the matter drop, then, but it could not be dropped forever, so one night after eats he began to explain. “We are very grateful for your help to us,” he said, “strangers as we are to you and to your ways. Perhaps it is because we
are
strange that we feel we want to have our own house to live in.”

The Blakeneys were, for Blakeneys, quiet. They were also uncomprehending.

“It’s the way we’ve been used to living. On many of the other worlds people do live, many families—and the families are all smaller than this, than yours, than the Blakeneys, I mean—many in one big house. But not on the world we lived in. There, every family has its own house, you see. We’ve been used to that. Now, at first, all five of us will live in the new house we’re going to build near the mill. But as soon as we can we’ll build a second new one. Then each family will have its own …”