The Best of Margaret St. Clair

THE CAUSES

“God rot their stinking souls,” the man on the bar stool next to George said passionately. “God bury them in the lowest circle of the pit, under the flaying ashes. May their eyeballs drip blood and their bones bend under them. May they thirst and be given molten glass for liquid. May they eat their own flesh and sicken with it. May they—” He seemed to choke over his rage. After a moment he lifted his glass of stout and buried his nose in it.

“You Irish?” George asked with interest.

“Irish? No.” The man with the stout seemed surprised. “I’m from New Zealand. Mother was Albanian. I’m a mountain climber. Why?”

“Oh, I just wondered. What are you sore about?”

The man with the moustache patted the newspaper in his pocket. “I’ve been reading about the H-bomb,” he said. “It makes me sick. I’m cursing the scientists. Do they want to. kill us all? On both sides, I’m cursing them.”

“Yes, but you have to be reasonable,” the man on the second bar stool beyond George argued, leaning toward the other two. “None of us like that bomb, but we have to have it. The world’s a bad place these days, and those Russians—they’re bad cookies. Dangerous.” Uneasily he shifted the trumpet case he was holding on his lap.

“Oh, sure, they’re dangerous.” The man with the stout hesitated, sucking on his moustache. “But basically, the Russians have nothing to do with it,” he said. He cleared his throat. “I know what you’re going to say, but it’s not true. Our real trouble isn’t the Russians… We’re in the mess we’re in because we’ve lost our gods.”

“Hunh?” said the man on the second bar stool. “Oh, I get it. You mean we’ve become anti-religious, materialistic, worldly. Ought to go back to the old-time religion. Is that what you mean?”

“I did not,” the man with the stout said irritably. “I meant what I said. The gods—our real gods—are gone. That’s why everything is so fouled up these days. There’s nobody to take care of us. No gods.”

“No gods?” asked the man on the second bar stool.

“No gods.”

The interchange began to irk George. He finished his drink—bourbon and soda—and motioned to the bartender for another. When it came, he said to the man with the moustache, “Well, if we haven’t got any gods, what’s happened to them? Gone away?”

“They’re in New Zealand,” the man with the moustache said.

He must have sensed the withdrawal of his auditors, for he added hastily, “It’s all true dinkum. I’m not making it up. They’re living on Ruapehu in Wellington—it’s about 9,000 feet—now instead of Olympus in Thrace.”

George took a leisurely pull at his drink. He was feeling finely credulous. “Well, go on. How did they get there?” he asked.

“It started when Aphrodite lost her girdle—”

“Venus!” said the man on the second bar stool. He rolled his eyes. “This ought to be hot. How’d she lose it?”

“Her motives were above reproach,” the man with the stout said stiffly. “This isn’t a smutty story. Aphrodite lent the girdle to a married woman who was getting along badly with her husband for the most usual reason, and the girl was so pleased with the new state of things that she forgot to return it. The couple decided to take a long cruise as a sort of delayed honeymoon, and the woman packed the girdle in her trunk by mistake. When Aphrodite missed it—Olympian society goes all to pieces without the girdle; even the eagles on Father Zeus’s throne start fighting and tearing feathers—it was too late. The ship had gone so far she couldn’t pick up any emanation from it.”

“When did all this happen?” George asked.

“In 1913. You want to remember the date.”

“Well, as I was saying, she couldn’t pick up any emanation from the girdle. So finally they sent Hermes out to look for it—he’s the divine messenger, you know. And he didn’t come back.”

“Why not?” the man on the second bar stool asked.

“Because, when Hermes located the ship, it had put in at New Zealand. Now, New Zealand’s a beautiful country. Like Greece, I guess—I’ve never been there—but better wooded and more water. Hermes picked up the girdle. But he liked the place so much he decided to stay.

“They got worried then, and they sent others of the Olympians out. Iris was first, and then the Muses and the Moirae. None of them came back to Olympus. Those left got more and more alarmed, and one big shot after another went out hunting the girdle. Finally by 1914 there wasn’t anybody left on Olympus except Ares. He said he didn’t much care for the girdle. Things looked interesting where he was. He guessed he’d stay.

“So that’s the situation at present. All the gods except Ares, and once in a while Athena, are on Ruapehu. They’ve been there since 1914. The Maori are a handsome people anyhow, and you ought to see some of the children growing up in the villages around there. Young godlings, that’s what they are.

“Athena doesn’t like it there as well as the others. She’s a maiden goddess, and I suppose there isn’t so much to attract her. She keeps going back to Europe and trying to help us. But somehow, everything she does, no matter how well she means it, always turns out to help that hulking big half-brother of hers.”

“Interesting symbolism,” George said approvingly. “All the gods we’ve got left are Ares, the brutal war god, and Athena, the divine patroness of science. Athena wants to help us, but whatever she does helps the war god. Neat. Very neat.”

The man with the moustache ordered another bottle of stout. When it came, he stared at George stonily. “It is not symbolism,” he said, measuring his words. “It’s the honest truth. I told you I was a mountain climber, didn’t I? I climbed Ruapehu last summer. I saw them there.”

“What did they look like?” George asked lazily.

“Well, I really only saw Hermes. He’s the messenger, you know, and it’s easier for people to look at him without being blinded. He’s a young man, very handsome, very jolly-looking. He looks like he’d play all kinds of tricks on you, but you wouldn’t mind it. They’d be good tricks. He—you could see him shining, even in the sun.”

“What about the others?”

The man with the stout shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it. You wouldn’t understand me. They’re too bright. They have to put on other shapes when they go among men.

“But I think they miss us. I think they’re lonesome, really. The Maori are a fine people, very intelligent, but they’re not quite what the gods are used to. You know what I think?” The man with the moustache lowered his voice solemnly. “I think we ought to send an embassy to them. Send people with petitions and offerings. If we asked them right, asked them often enough, they’d be sorry for us. They’d come back.”

There was a stirring four or five stools down, toward the middle of the bar. A sailor stood up and came toward the man with the moustache. “So you don’t like the government?” he said menacingly. There was a beer bottle in his hand.

“Government?” the man with the moustache answered. George noticed that he was slightly pop-eyed. “What’s that got to do with it? I’m trying to help.”

“Haaaaaa! I heard you talking against it,” said the sailor. He swayed on his feet for a moment. Then he aimed a heavy blow with the beer bottle at the center of the moustache.

The man with the moustache ducked. He got off the bar stool, still doubled up. He drew back. He rammed the sailor hard in the pit of the stomach with his head.

As the sailor collapsed, the man from New Zealand stepped neatly over him. He walked to the front of the bar and handed a bill to the bartender who was standing, amazed, near the cash register. He closed the door of the bar behind him.

After a moment he opened it again and stuck his head back in. “God damn everybody!” he yelled.

After the sailor had been revived by his friends and pushed back on a bar stool, the man with the trumpet case, who had been on the far side of the stout drinker, moved nearer to George.

“Interesting story he told, wasn’t it?” he said cheerily. “Of course, there wasn’t anything to it.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” George answered perversely. “There might have been.”

“Oh, no,” the man with the trumpet case said positively. He shook his head so vigorously that the folds of his pious, starchy, dewlapped face trembled. “Nothing like that.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because…” He hesitated. “Because I know what the real reasons for our difficulties are.”

“Well, what’s your explanation?”

“I—I don’t know whether I ought to say this,” the starchy man said coyly. He put his head on one side and looked at George bright-eyed. Then, as if fearing George’s patience might be on the edge of exhaustion, he said, quite quickly, “It’s the last trump.”

“Who’s the last trump?” the man on the bar stool around the corner from George asked, leaning forward to listen. George knew him by sight; his name was Atkinson.

“Nobody,” the starchy man answered. “I meant that the last trump ought to have been blown ages ago. The world is long overdue for judgment.”

“H. G. Wells story,” George murmured.

“I beg your pardon?” said the starchy man.

“Nothing.” George motioned to the bartender and ordered a round of drinks. Atkins on took gin and ginger ale, and the starchy man kirschwasser.

“Why hasn’t the trump been blown?” Atkinson asked, with the air of one tolerating noisy children.

“Because it’s lost,” the starchy man replied promptly. “When the time came to blow it, it wasn’t in Heaven. This wicked, wicked world! Ages ago it should have been summoned to meet its master.” He drooped his eyelids.

George felt his tongue aching with the repression of his wish to say, “Plagiarist!” Atkinson said, “Oh, fooey. How do you know the trump’s been lost?”

“Because I have it here,” the starchy gentleman answered. “Right here.” He patted his trumpet case.

George and Atkinson exchanged a look. George said, “Let’s see it.”

“I don’t think I’d better…”

“Oh, go on!”

“Well… No, I’d better not.”

Atkinson leaned his elbows on the bar and rested his chin on his interlaced fingers. “I expect there’s nothing in the trumpet case actually,” he said indifferently. “I expect it’s only a gambit of his.”

The soft, wrinkled skin of the man who was drinking kirschwasser flushed red around the eyes. He put the trumpet case down on the bar in front of George with a thump, and snapped open the lid. Atkinson and George bent over it eagerly.

The trumpet case was lined with glossy white silk, like a coffin. Against the white fabric, gleaming with an incredible velvety luster, lay a trumpet of deepest midnight blue. It might have been black, but it wasn’t; it was the color of deep space where it lies softly, like a caress, for trillions of miles around some regal, blazing star. The bell of the trumpet was fluted and curved like the flower of a morning glory.

Atkinson whistled. After a moment he paid the trumpet the ultimate tribute. “Gosh,” he said.

The man with the trumpet said nothing, but his little mouth pursed in a small, tight, nasty smile. “Where’d you get it?” George queried. “I’m not saying.”

“How do you know it’s the last trump?” Atkinson asked.

The starchy man shrugged his shoulders. “What else could it be?” he asked.

The door at the front of the bar opened and three men came in. George watched them absently as they walked the length of the bar counter and went into the rear. “But… you mean if this thing were blown, the world would come to an end? There’d be the last judgment?”

“I imagine.”

“I don’t believe it,” Atkinson said after a minute. “I just don’t believe it. It’s an extraordinary looking trumpet, I admit, but it can’t be… that.”

“Ohhhhh?”

“Yes. If it’s what you say, why don’t you blow it?”

The starchy man seemed disconcerted. He licked his lips. Then he said, in rather a hostile tone, “You mean you want me to blow? You mean you’re ready to meet your maker—you and all the rest of the world—right now? Right this minute? With all your sins, with a ll your errors of commission and omission, unforgiven and unshriven on your head?”

“Sure. That’s right. Why not? The longer the world goes on existing, the worse it’ll get. As to sins and all that, I’ll take my chances. They couldn’t be much worse than what—” Atkinson made a small gesture that seemed to enclose in itself the whole miserable, explosive terrestrial globe—“than what we have now.”

Under his breath, George quoted, “‘We doctors know a hopeless case—’”

The starchy man turned to him. “Do you agree with him, young man?” he demanded.

“Yep.”

The man with the trumpet turned bright red. He reached into the case and picked up the trumpet. As he lifted it through the air, George noticed what a peculiarly eye-catching quality the celestial object had. Its color and gloss had the effect on the eye that a blare of horns has on the ear. Heads began to turn toward it. In no time at all, everyone in the bar was watching the starchy man.

He seemed to pause a little, as if to make sure that he had the attention of his audience. Then he drew a deep, deep breath. He set the trumpet to his lips.

From the rear of the bar there burst out a jangling, skirling, shrieking, droning uproar. It was an amazing noise; a noise, George thought, to freeze the blood and make the hair stand upright. There must have been ultrasonics in it. It sounded like a thousand pigs being slaughtered with electric carving knives.

Everyone in the bar had jumped at the sudden clamor, but the effect on the starchy man was remarkable. He jumped convulsively, as if he had sat on a damp tarantula. His eyes moved wildly; George thought he had turned pale.

He shouted, “They’re after me!” He shouted it so loudly that it was perfectly audible even above the demoniac noise of the bag pipes. Then he grabbed up the trumpet case, slammed the trumpet in it, and ran out of the bar on his neat little patent leather feet.

The two bagpipers came out from the rear of the bar, still playing, and began to march toward the front. Apparently they had noticed nothing at all of the episode of the dark blue trumpet. The third man followed in the rear, beating on a small drum. From time to time he would put the drum sticks to his upper lip and seem to smell at them.

“Remarkable, isn’t it?” Atkinson said to George over the racket. “Only bar I ever was in where they kept bagpipes in the rear to amuse the customers. The owner’s Scottish, you know.”

The instrumentalists reached the front of the bar. They stood there a moment skirling. Then they executed an about-face and marched slowly to the rear. They stood there while they finished their number. It was long, with lots of tootling. At last they laid their instruments aside, advanced to the bar, and sat down on three bar stools near the center. They ordered Irish whiskey.

“Wonder where he got that trumpet,” Atkinson said thoughtfully, reverting to the man with the trumpet case. “Stole it somewhere, I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“Too bad he didn’t get to blow it,” George answered. He ordered Atkinson and himself another drink.

“Oh, that!” Atkinson laughed shortly. “Nothing would have happened. It was just a fancy horn. You surely don’t believe that wild yarn he told us? Why, I know what the real reason for all our troubles is!”

George sighed. He drew a design on the bar counter with his finger. “Another one,” he said.

“Eh? What? Oh, you were talking to yourself. As I was saying, I know the real reason. Are you familiar with Tantrist magic and its principles?”

“Unhunh. No.”

Atkinson frowned. “You almost sound as if you didn’t want to hear about this,” he observed. “But I was talking about Tantrist magic. One of its cardinal tenets, you know, is the magic power of certain syllables. For instance, if you persistently repeat Avalokiteshvara’s name, you’ll be assured of a happy rebirth in Heaven. Other sounds have a malign and destructive power. And so on.”

George looked about him. It was growing late; the bar was emptying. Except for himself and Atkinson, the pipers and the drummer, and a man around the corner of the bar from George, who had been sitting there silently against the wall all evening, the stools were empty. He looked at Atkinson again.

“About 1920,” Atkinson was saying, “a lama in a remote little valley in Tibet—” George noticed that he pronounced the word in the austere fashion that makes it rhyme with gibbet—“got a terrific yen for one of the native girls. She was a very attractive girl by native standards, round and brown and plump and tight, like a little bird. The lama couldn’t keep his eyes off her, and he didn’t want to keep his hands off either. Unfortunately, he belonged to a lamistic order that was very strict about its rule of chastity. And besides that, he was really a religious man.

“He knew there was one circumstance, and one only, under which he could enjoy the girl without committing any sin. He decided to wait for it.

“A few months later, when the girl was out pasturing the buffalo, or feeding the silk worms, or something, she saw the lama coming running down the side of the hill toward her. He was in a terrific froth. When he got up to her, he made a certain request. ‘No,’ the girl answered, ‘my mother told me I mustn’t.’ You see, she was a well-brought-up girl.”

George was looking at Atkinson and frowning hard. “Go on,” he said.

“I am going on,” Atkinson answered. “The lama told her to go home and ask her mother if it wasn’t all right to do what the holy man told her. He said to hurry. So she did.

“When she came back the lama was sitting on the field in a disconsolate position. She told him it was all right, her mother had said to mind him. He shook his head. He said, ‘The Dalai Lama has just died. I thought you and I could cooperate to reincarnate him. Under the circumstances, it wouldn’t have been a sin. But now it’s too late. Heaven has willed otherwise. The job has already been attended to.’ And he pointed over to a corner of the field where two donkeys were copulating.

“The girl began to laugh. As I said, she was a well-brought-up girl, but she couldn’t help it. She laughed and laughed. She almost split her sides laughing. And the poor lama had to sit there listening while she laughed.

“You can’t excuse him, but you can understand it. He’d wanted her so much, he’d thought he was going to get her, and then those donkeys—Well, he began to curse. He began to curse those terrible, malign Tantrist curses. He’s been cursing ever since.

“Ever since 1920, he’s been cursing. Once in a while he pauses for breath, and we think things are going to get better, but he always starts in again. He says those dreadful Tantrist syllables over and over, and they go bonging around the world like the notes of enormous brass bells ringing disaster. War and famine and destruction and revolution and death—all in the Tantrist syllables. He knows, of course, that he’ll be punished by years and years of rebirths, the worst possible kind of karma, but he can’t help it. He just goes on saying those terrible syllables.”

George looked at him coldly. “Two Kinds of Time” he said.

“Hunh?”

“I said, you read that story in a book about China called Two Kinds of Time. I read it myself. The donkeys, the lama, the girl—they’re all in there. The only original part was what you said about Tantrist curses, and you probably stole that from someplace else.” George halted. After a moment he said passionately, “What’s the matter with everybody tonight?”

“Oh, foozle,” Atkinson replied lightly. “Om mani padme hum” He picked up his hat and left the bar.

After a minute or so, the two pipers followed him. That left George, the silent man in the corner, and the instrumentalist who had played on the drum. George decided to have one more drink. Then he’d go home.

The silent man who was leaning against the wall began to speak.

“They were all wrong,” he said.

George regarded him with nausea. He thought of leaving, but the bartender was already bringing his drink. He tried to call up enough force to say, “Shut up,” but heart failed him. He drooped his head passively.

“Did you ever notice the stars scattered over the sky?” the man in the corner asked. He had a deep, rumbling voice.

“Milky Way?” George mumbled. Better hurry and get this over with.

“The Milky Way is one example,” the stranger conceded.

“Only one. There are millions of worlds within the millions of galaxies.”

“Yeah.”

“All those millions of burning worlds.” He was silent for so long that George’s hopes rose. Then he said, “They look pretty hot, don’t they? But they’re good to eat.”

“Hunh?”

“The stars, like clams…”

“Beg your pardon,” George enunciated. He finished his drink. “Misjudged you. You’re original.”

The man in the corner did not seem to have listened. “The worlds are like clams,” he said rapidly, “and the skies at night present us with the glorious spectacle of a celestial clambake. They put them on the fire, and when they’ve been on the fire long enough, they open. They’re getting this world of yours ready. When it’s been on the fire a little longer, it’ll open. Explode.”

George realized that that last drink had been one too many. He didn’t believe what the man in the corner was saying. He wouldn’t. But he couldn’t help finding a dreadful sort of logic in it. “How’ju know this?” he asked feebly at last.

The man in the corner seemed to rise and billow. Before George’s horrified and popping eyes, he grew larger and larger, like a balloon inflating. George drew back on the bar stool; he was afraid his face would be buried in the vast unnatural bulk.

“Because,” said the inflating man in a high, twanging voice, “because I’m one of the clam-eaters!”

This horrid statement proved too much for George’s wavering sobriety. He blinked. Then he slid backward off the bar stool and collapsed softly on the floor. His eyes closed.

The billowing form of the clam-eater tightened and condensed into that of a singularly handsome young man. He was dressed in winged sandals and a winged hat; from his naked body there came a soft golden light.

For a moment he stood over George, chuckling at the success of his joke. His handsome, jolly face was convulsed with mirth. Then, giving George a light, revivifying tap on the shoulder with the herald’s wand he carried, the divine messenger left the bar.