T h e C o u n t r y o f t h e K i n d
by Damon Knight
The attendant at the car lot was
daydreaming when I pulled up - a big, lazy-looking
man in black satin chequered down the front. I was
wearing scarlet, myself; it suited my mood. I got out,
almost on his toes.
"Park or storage?" he asked automatically,
turning around. Then he realized who I was, and ducked
his head away.
"Neither," I told him.
There was a hand torch on a shelf in
the repair shed right behind him. I got it and came
back. I knelt down to where I could reach behind the
front wheel, and ignited the torch. I turned it on the axle
and suspension. They glowed cherry red, then white, and
fused together. Then I got up and turned the flame on both
tires until the rubberoid stank and sizzled and melted
down to the pavement. The attendant didn't say anything.
I left him there, looking at the mess on his nice
clean concrete.
It had been a nice car, too; but I could get
another any time. And I felt like walking. I went down
the winding road, sleepy in the afternoon sunlight, dappled
with shade and smelling of cool leaves. You couldn't see the
houses; they were all sunken or hidden by shrubbery, or a
little of both. That was the fad I'd heard about; it was what
I'd come here to see. Not that anything the dulls did would
be worth looking at.
I turned off at random and crossed a rolling
lawn, went through a second hedge of hawthorn in blossom,
and came out next to a big sunken games court.
The tennis net was up, and two couples were
going at it, just working up a little sweat - young, about
half my age, all four of them. Three dark-haired, one blonde.
They were evenly matched, and both couples played well
together; they were enjoying themselves.
I watched for a minute. But by then the nearest
two were beginning to sense I was there, anyhow. I walked
down onto the court, just as the blonde was about to serve.
She looked at me frozen across the net, poised on tiptoe.
The others stood.
"Off," I told them. "Game's over."
I watched the blonde. She was not especially
pretty, as they go, but compactly and gracefully put
together. She came down slowly, flat-footed without
awkwardness, and tucked the racket under her arm; then
the surprise was over and she was trotting off the court
after the other three.
I followed their voices around the curve of
the path, between towering masses of lilacs, inhaling the
sweetness, until I came to what looked like a little sunning
spot. There was a sundial, and a birdbath, and towels lying
around on the grass. One couple, the dark-haired pair, was
still in sight farther down the path, heads bobbing along. The
other couple had disappeared.
I found the handle in the grass without any
trouble. The mechanism responded, and an oblong section of
turf rose up. It was the stair I had, not the elevator, but that
was all right. I ran down the steps and into the first door I
saw, and was in the top-floor lounge, an oval room lit with
diffused simulated sunlight from above. The furniture was all
comfortably bloated, sprawling and ugly; the carpet was deep,
and there was a fresh flower scent in the air.
The blonde was over at the near end with her
back to me, studying the autochef keyboard. She was half
out of her playsuit. She pushed it the rest of the way down and
stepped out of it, then turned and saw me.
She was surprised again; she hadn't thought I
might follow her down.
I got up close before it occurred to her to
move; then it was too late. She knew she couldn't get away
from me; she closed her eyes and leaned back against the
paneling, turning a little pale. Her lips and her golden brows
went up in the middle.
I looked her over and told her a few
uncomplimentary things about herself. She trembled,
but didn't answer. On an impulse, I leaned over and dialed
the autochef to hot cheese sauce. I cut the safety out of
circuit and put the quantity dial all the way up. I dialed
_soup tureen_ and then _punch bowl_.
The stuff began to come out in about a minute,
steaming hot. I took the tureens and splashed them up and
down the wall on either side of her. Then when the first punch
bowl came out I used the empty bowls as scoops. I clotted the
carpet with the stuff; I made streamers of it all along the
walls, and dumped puddles into what furniture I could reach.
Where it cooled it would harden, and where it hardened it
would cling.
I wanted to splash it across her body, but it
would've hurt, and we couldn't have that. The punch bowls
of hot sauce were still coming out of the autochef, crowding
each other around the vent. I punched _cancel_, and then
_sauterne_ (_swt._, _Calif._).
It came out well chilled in open bottles. I
took the first one and had my arm back just about to
throw a nice line of the stuff right across her midriff, when
a voice said behind me:
"Watch out for cold wine."
My arm twitched and a little stream of the
wine splashed across her thighs. She was ready for it; her
eyes had opened at the voice, and she barely jumped.
I whirled around, fighting mad. The man was
standing there where he had come out of the stair well. He
was thinner in the face than most, bronzed, wide-chested,
with alert blue eyes. If it hadn't been for him, I knew it
would have worked - the blonde would have mistaken the
chill splash for a scalding one.
I could hear the scream in my mind, and I wanted it.
I took a step toward him, and my foot slipped.
I went down clumsily, wrenching one knee. I got up shaking
and tight all over. I wasn't in control of myself. I screamed,
"You - you - " I turned and got one of the punch bowls and
lifted it in both hands, heedless of how the hot sauce was
slopping over onto my wrists, and I had it almost in the air
toward him when the sickness took me - that damned buzzing
in my head, louder, louder, drowning everything out.
When I came to, they were both gone. I got
up off the floor, weak as death, and staggered over to
the nearest chair. My clothes were slimed and sticky. I
wanted to die. I wanted to drop into that dark furry hole that
was yawning for me and never come up; but I made myself
stay awake and get out of the chair.
Going down in the elevator, I almost blacked
out again. The blonde and the thin man weren't in any of
the second-floor bedrooms. I made sure of that, and then I
emptied the closets and bureau drawers onto the floor,
dragged the whole mess into one of the bathrooms and
stuffed the tub with it, then turned on the water.
I tried the third floor: maintenance and storage.
It was empty. I turned the furnace on and set the thermostat
up as high as it would go. I disconnected all the safety
circuits and alarms. I opened the freezer doors and dialed
them to defrost. I propped the stair well door open and went
back up in the elevator.
On the second floor I stopped long enough to
open the stairway door there - the water was halfway
toward it, creeping across the floor - and then searched the
top floor. No one was there. I opened book reels and threw
them unwinding across the room; I would have done more, but
I could hardly stand. I got up to the surface and collapsed on
the lawn: that furry pit swallowed me up, dead and drowned.
While I slept, water poured down the open
stair well and filled the third level. Thawing food packages
floated out into the rooms. Water seeped into wall panels
and machine housings; circuits shorted and fuses blew. The
air conditioning stopped, but the pile kept heating. The
water rose.
Spoiled food, floating supplies, grimy water
surged up the stair well. The second and first levels were
bigger and would take longer to fill, but they'd fill. Rugs,
furnishings, clothing, all the things in the house would be
waterlogged and ruined. Probably the weight of so much
water would shift the house, rupture water pipes and other
fluid intakes. It would take a repair crew more than a day
just to clean up the mess. The house itself was done for, not
repairable. The blonde and the thin man would never live in it
again.
Serve them right.
The dulls could build another house; they built
like beavers. There was only one of me in the world.
The earliest memory I have is of some woman,
probably the creshmother, staring at me with an expression
of shock and horror. Just that. I've tried to remember what
happened directly before or after, but I can't. Before, there's
nothing but the dark formless shaft of no-memory that runs
back to birth. Afterward, the big calm.
From my fifth year, it must have been, to my
fifteenth, everything I can remember floats in a pleasant
dim sea. Nothing was terribly important. I was languid and
soft; I drifted. Waking merged into sleep.
In my fifteenth year it was the fashion in
love-play for the young people to pair off for months or
longer. "Loving steady," we called it. I remember how the
older people protested that it was unhealthy; but we were all
normal juniors, and nearly as free as adults under the law.
All but me.
The first steady girl I had was named Elen.
She had blonde hair, almost white, worn long; her lashes
were dark and her eyes pale green. Startling eyes: they didn't
look as if they were looking at you. They looked blind.
Several times she gave me strange startled
glances, something between fright and anger. Once it was
because I held her too tightly, and hurt her; other times, it
seemed to be for nothing at all.
In our group, a pairing that broke up sooner
than four weeks was a little suspect - there must be
something wrong with one partner or both, or the pairing
would have lasted longer.
Four weeks and a day after Elen and I made
our pairing, she told me she was breaking it.
I'd thought I was ready. But I felt the room
spin half around me till the wall came against my palm
and stopped.
The room had been in use as a hobby chamber;
there was a rack of plasticraft knives under my hand. I took
one without thinking, and when I saw it I thought, *I'll frighten
her.*
And I saw the startled, half-angry look in her
pale eyes as I went toward her; but this is curious: she
wasn't looking at the knife. She was looking at my face.
The elders found me later with the blood on
me, and put me into a locked room. Then it was my turn to
be frightened, because I realized for the first time that it
was possible for a human being to do what I had done.
And if I could do it to Elen, I thought, surely
they could do it to me.
But they couldn't. They set me free: they had to.
And it was then I understood that I was the
king of the world. . . .
The sky was turning clear violet when I woke
up, and shadow was spilling out from the hedges. I went
down the hill until I saw the ghostly blue of photon tubes
glowing in a big oblong, just outside the commerce area. I
went that way, by habit.
Other people were lining up at the entrance to
show their books and be admitted. I brushed by them,
seeing the shocked faces and feeling their bodies flinch
away, and went on into the robing chamber.
Straps, aqualungs, masks and flippers were all
for the taking. I stripped, dropping the clothes where I
stood, and put the underwater equipment on. I strode out
to the poolside, monstrous, like a being from another world.
I adjusted the lung and the flippers, and slipped into the
water.
Underneath, it was all crystal blue, with the
forms of swimmers sliding through it like pale angels.
Schools of small fish scattered as I went down. My heart
was beating with a painful joy.
Down, far down, I saw a girl slowly undulating
through the motions of sinuous underwater dance, writhing
around and around a ribbed column of imitation coral. She
had a suction-tipped fish lance in her hand, but she was not
using it; she was only dancing, all by herself, down at the
bottom of the water.
I swam after her. She was young and delicately
made, and when she saw the deliberately clumsy motions I
made in imitation of hers, her eyes glinted with amusement
behind her mask. She bowed to me in mockery, and slowly
glided off with simple, exaggerated movements, like a
child's ballet.
I followed. Around her and around I swam,
stiff-legged, first more child-like and awkward than she,
then subtly parodying her motions; then improving on them
until I was dancing an intricate, mocking dance around her.
I saw her eyes widen. She matched her rhythm to
mine, then, and together, apart, together again we coiled
the wake of our dancing. At last, exhausted, we clung together
where a bridge of plastic coral arched over us. Her cool body
was in the bend of my arm; behind two thicknesses of vitrin -
a world away! - her eyes were friendly and kind.
There was a moment when, two strangers yet
one flesh, we felt our souls speak to one another across
that abyss of matter. It was a truncated embrace - we could
not kiss, we could not speak - but her hands lay confidingly on
my shoulders, and her eyes looked into mine.
That moment had to end. She gestured toward
the surface, and left me. I followed her up. I was feeling
drowsy and almost at peace, after my sickness. I thought . . .
I don't know what I thought.
We rose together at the side of the pool. She
turned to me, removing her mask: and her smile stopped, and
melted away. She stared at me with a horrified disgust,
wrinkling her nose.
"*Pyah*!" she said, and turned, awkward in her
flippers. Watching her, I saw her fall into the arms of a
white-haired man, and heard her hysterical voice tumbling
over itself.
"But don't you remember?" the man's voice
rumbled. "You should know it by heart." He turned. "Hal, is
there a copy of it in the clubhouse?"
A murmur answered him, and in a few moments
a young man came out holding a slender brown pamphlet.
I knew that pamphlet. I could even have told
you what page the white-haired man opened it to; what
sentences the girl was reading as I watched.
I waited. I don't know why.
I heard her voice rising: "To think that I let him
*touch* me!" And the white-haired man reassured her, the
words rumbling, too low to hear. I saw her back straighten.
She looked across at me . . . only a few yards in that scented,
blue-lit air; a world away . . . and folded up the pamphlet
into a hard wad, threw it, and turned on her heel.
The pamphlet landed almost at my feet. I
touched it with my toe, and it opened to the page I had
been thinking of:
... sedation until his 15th year, when for sexual reasons
it became no longer practicable. While the advisors and
medical staff hesitated, he killed a girl of the group by
violence.
And farther down:
The solution finally adopted was three-fold.
1. _A sanction_ - the only sanction possible to our
humane, permissive society. Excommunication: not to speak
to him, touch him willingly, or acknowledge his existence.
2. _A precaution_. Taking advantage of a mild predisposition
to epilepsy, a variant of the so-called Kusko analog technique
was employed, to prevent by an epileptic seizure any future
act of violence.
3. _A warning_. A careful alternation of his body chemistry
was affected to make his exhaled and exuded wastes emit a
strongly pungent and offensive odor. In mercy, he himself was
rendered unable to detect this smell.
Fortunately, the genetic and environmental accidents
which combined to produce this atavism have been fully
explained and can never again . . .
The words stopped meaning anything, as they
always did at that point. I didn't want to read any farther;
it was all nonsense, anyway. I was the king of the world.
I got up and went away, out into the night, blind
to the dulls who thronged the rooms I passed.
Two squares away was the commerce area. I
found a clothing outlet and went in. All the free clothes
in the display cases were drab: those were for worthless
floaters, not for me. I went past them to the specials, and
found a combination I could stand - silver and blue, with a
severe black piping down the tunic. A dull would have said
it was "nice." I punched for it. The automatic looked me over
with its dull glassy eye, and croaked, "Your contribution book,
please."
I could have had a contribution book, for the
trouble of stepping out into the street and taking it away
from the first passer-by; but I didn't have the patience. I
picked up the one-legged table from the refreshment nook,
hefted it, and swung it at the cabinet door. The metal shrieked
and dented, opposite the catch. I swung once more to the same
place, and the door sprang open. I pulled out clothing in handfuls
till I got a set that would fit me.
I bathed and changed, and then went prowling
in the big multi-outlet down the avenue. All those places
are arranged pretty much alike, no matter what the local
managers do to them. I went straight to the knives, and
picked out three in graduated sizes, down to the size of
my fingernail.
Then I had to take my chances. I tried the
furniture department, where I had had good luck once
in a while, but this year all they were using was metal. I
had to have seasoned wood.
I knew where there was a big cache of cherry
wood, in good-sized blocks, in a forgotten warehouse
up north at a place called Kootenay. I could have carried
some around with me - enough for years - but what for,
when the world belonged to me?
It didn't take me long. Down in the workshop
section, of all places, I found some antiques - tables and
benches, all with wooden tops. While the dulls collected
down at the other end of the room, pretending not to notice,
I sawed off a good oblong chunk of the smallest bench,
and made a base for it out of another.
As long as I was there, it was a good place to work,
and I could eat and sleep upstairs, so I stayed.
I knew what I wanted to do. It was going to be a
man, sitting, with his legs crossed and his forearms resting
down along his calves. His head was going to be tilted back,
and his eyes closed, as if he were turning his face up to the sun.
In three days it was finished. The trunk and
limbs had a shape that was not man and not wood, but
something in between: something that hadn't existed before I
made it.
Beauty. That was the old word.
I had carved one of the figure's hands hanging
loosely, and the other one curled shut. There had to be a time
to stop and say it was finished. I took the smallest knife, the
one I had been using to scrape the wood smooth, and cut away
the handle and ground down what was left of the shaft to a
thin spike. Then I drilled a hole into the wood of the figurine's
hand, in the hollow between thumb and curled finger. I fitted
the knife blade in there; in the small hand it was a sword.
I cemented it in place. Then I took the sharp blade
and stabbed my thumb, and smeared the blade.
I hunted most of that day, and finally found
the right place - a niche in an outcropping of striated
brown rock, in a little triangular half-wild patch that had
been left where two roads forked. Nothing was permanent, of
course, in a community like this one that might change its
houses every five years or so, to follow the fashion; but this
spot had been left to itself for a long time. It was the best I
could do.
I had the paper ready: it was one of a batch I
had printed up a year ago. The paper was treated, and I knew
it would stay legible a long time. I hid a little photo capsule
in the back of the niche, and ran the control wire to a staple
in the base of the figurine. I put the figurine down on top of
the paper, and anchored it lightly to the rock with two spots
of all-cement. I had done it so often that it came naturally; I
knew just how much cement would hold the figurine steady
against a casual hand, but yield to one that really wanted to
pull it down.
Then I stepped back to look: and the power and
the pity of it made my breath come short, and tears start
to my eyes.
Reflected light gleamed fitfully on the
dark-stained blade that hung from his hand. He was
sitting alone in that niche that closed him in like a coffin.
His eyes were shut, and his head tilted back, as if he were
turning his face up to the sun.
But only rock was over his head. There was no sun for him.
Hunched on the cool bare ground under a pepper
tree, I was looking down across the road at the shadowed
niche where my figurine sat.
I was all finished here. There was nothing more
to keep me, and yet I couldn't leave.
People walked past now and then - not often.
The community seemed half deserted, as if most of the
people had flocked off to a surf party somewhere, or a
contribution meeting, or to watch a new house being dug
to replace the one I had wrecked. . . . There was a little
wind blowing toward me, cool and lonesome in the leaves.
Up the other side of the hollow there was
a terrace, and on that terrace, half an hour ago, I had
seen a brief flash of color - a boy's head, with a red cap on it,
moving past and out of sight.
That was why I had to stay. I was thinking how
that boy might come down from his terrace and into my
road, and passing the little wild triangle of land, see my
figurine. I was thinking he might not pass by indifferently,
but stop: and go closer to look: and pick up the wooden man:
and read what was written on the paper underneath.
I believed that sometime it had to happen. I
wanted it so hard that I ached.
My carvings were all over the world, wherever
I had wandered. There was one in Congo City, carved of
ebony, dusty-black; one on Cyprus, of bone; one in New Bombay,
of shell; one in Chang-teh, of jade.
They were like signs printed in red and green,
in a color-blind world. Only the one I was looking for would
ever pick one of them up, and read the message I knew by heart.
TO YOU WHO CAN SEE, the first sentence said,
I OFFER YOU A WORLD. . . .
There was a flash of color up on the terrace. I
stiffened. A minute later, here it came again, from a different
direction: it was the boy, clambering down the slope, brilliant
against the green, with his red sharpbilled cap like a
woodpecker's head.
I held my breath.
He came toward me through the fluttering
leaves, ticked off by pencils of sunlight as he passed. He
was a brown boy, I could see at this distance, with a serious
thin face. His ears stuck out, flickering pink with the sun
behind them, and his elbow and knee pads made him look
knobby.
He reached the fork in the road, and chose
the path on my side. I huddled into myself as he came nearer. _Let
him see it, let him not see me_, I thought fiercely.
My fingers closed around a stone.
He was nearer, walking jerkily with his
hands in his pockets, watching his feet mostly.
When he was almost opposite me, I threw the stone.
It rustled through the leaves below the niche
in the rock. The boy's head turned. He stopped,
staring. I think he saw the figurine then. I'm sure he saw it.
He took one step.
"Risha!" came floating down from the terrace.
And he looked up. "Here," he piped.
I saw the woman's head, tiny at the top of the
terrace. She called something I didn't hear; I was standing up,
tight with anger.
Then the wind shifted. It blew from me to the boy. He whirled
around, his eyes big, and clapped a hand to his nose.
"Oh, what a stench!" he said.
He turned to shout, "Coming!" and then he was gone,
hurrying back up the road, into the unstable blur of green.
My own chance, ruined. He would have been the
image, I knew, if it hadn't been for that damned woman, and
the wind shifting. . . . They were all against me, people, wind
and all.
And the figurine still sat, blind eyes turned up to the rocky sky.
There was something inside me that told me to
take my disappointment and go away from there, and not come
back.
I knew I would be sorry. I did it anyway: took
the image out of the niche, and the paper with it, and climbed
the slope. At the top I heard his clear voice laughing.
There was a thing that might have been an
ornamental mound, or the camouflaged top of a buried house.
I went around it, tripping over my own feet, and came upon the
boy kneeling on the turf. He was playing with a brown and white
puppy.
He looked up with the laughter going out of his
face. There was no wind, and he could smell me. I knew it
was bad. No wind, and the puppy to distract him - everything
about it was wrong. But I went to him blindly anyhow, and fell
on one knee, and shoved the figurine at his face.
"Look - " I said.
He went over backwards in his hurry: he couldn't
even have seen the image, except as a brown blur coming at
him. He scrambled up, with the puppy whining and yapping
around his heels, and ran for the mound.
I was up after him, clawing up moist earth and
grass as I rose. In the other hand I still had the image clutched,
and the paper with it.
A door popped open and swallowed him and
popped shut again in my face. With the flat of my hand I
beat the vines around it until I hit the doorplate by accident
and the door opened. I dived in, shouting, "Wait," and was in a
spiral passage, lit pearl-gray, winding downward. Down I went
headlong, and came out at the wrong door - an underground
conservatory, humid and hot under the yellow lights, with
dripping rank leaves in long rows. I went down the aisle raging,
overturning the tanks, until I came to a vestibule and an elevator.
Down I went again to the third level and a
labyrinth of guest rooms, all echoing, all empty. At last I
found a ramp leading upward, past the conservatory, and at
the end of it voices.
The door was clear vitrin, and I paused on the near
side of it looking and listening. There was the boy, and a
woman old enough to be his mother, just - sister or cousin, more
likely - and an elderly woman in a hard chair holding the puppy.
The room was comfortable and tasteless, like other rooms.
I saw the shock grow on their faces as I burst
in: it was always the same, they knew I would like to kill
them, but they never expected that I would come uninvited into
a house. It was not done.
There was that boy, so close I could touch him,
but the shock of all of them was quivering in the air, smothering,
like a blanket that would deaden my voice. I felt I had to shout.
"Everything they tell you is lies!" I said. "See here -
here, this is the truth!" I had the figurine in front of his eyes,
but he didn't see.
"Risha, go below," said the young woman quietly.
He turned to obey, quick as a ferret. I got in front of him again.
"Stay," I said, breathing hard. "Look - "
"Remember, Risha, don't speak," said the woman.
I couldn't stand any more. Where the boy went I
don't know; I ceased to see him. With the image in one hand
and the paper with it, I leaped at the woman. I was almost
quick enough; I almost reached her; but the buzzing took me in
the middle of a step, louder, louder, like the end of the world.
It was the second time that week. When I came
to, I was sick and too faint to move for a long time.
The house was silent. They had gone, of course. . .
the house had been defiled, having me in it. They wouldn't
live here again, but would build elsewhere.
My eyes blurred. After a while I stood up and
looked around at the room. The walls were hung with a
gray close-woven cloth that looked as if it would tear, and I
thought of ripping it down in strips, breaking furniture,
stuffing carpets and bedding into the oubliette. . . . But I didn't
have the heart for it. I was too tired. Thirty years. . . . They
had given me all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory
thereof, thirty years ago. It was more than one man alone
could bear, for thirty years.
At last I stooped and picked up the figurine, and
the paper that was supposed to go under it - crumpled now,
with the forlorn look of a message that someone has thrown
away unread.
I sighed bitterly.
I smoothed it out and read the last part.
YOU CAN SHARE THE WORLD WITH ME. THEY CAN'T
STOP YOU. STRIKE NOW - PICK UP A SHARP THING AND STAB,
OR A HEAVY THING AND CRUSH. THAT'S ALL. THAT WILL MAKE
YOU FREE. ANYONE CAN DO IT.
Anyone. Someone. Anyone.
_The Country of the Kind_, by Damon Knight, copyright © 1955 by Fantasy
House, Inc.
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