Short Fiction Poul Anderson (reading a book .TXT) 📖

He sat down and put his arms about her and let her cry herself out. Then he remained for a while stroking her hair and saying nothing.

She bit her lip to keep it steady. Her voice was like a small child’s, high and toneless and frightened. “It bit,” she said.

“It was an illusion,” he murmured.

“No. It bit at me. And its eyes were dead. It came out of the floor there, and it was all in rags.”

“You had an illusion frighten you,” he said. “A psyche-feeder flying nearby caught your increased nervous output, drew on it, and that of course frightened you still more⁠ ⁠… they’re easy to drive away, Eileen. They don’t like certain pulse patterns⁠—you just think at them the way I showed you⁠—”

“It was real,” she insisted, quietly, with something of a child’s puzzlement that anything should have wanted to hurt her. “It was black, but there were grays and browns and red too, and it was ragged.”

He went over to the cupboard and got out a darkly glowing bottle and poured two full glasses. “This’ll help,” he said, trying hard to smile at her. “Prosit.”

“I shouldn’t,” said Eileen, still shakily but with some return of saneness. “Junior⁠—”

“Junior won’t take harm from a glass of wine,” said Langdon. He sat down beside her again and they clinked goblets and drank. The fire wavered ruddily before them, filling the room with warm restless light and with dancing shadows from which Eileen looked away.

“I’ll get an electronic range installed soon,” said Langdon, trying to fill the silence with trivia. “It can’t be convenient for you cooking on an ancient-style stove.”

“I thought they didn’t work on Tanith⁠—electronics, I mean,” she answered with the same effort of ordinariness.

“Not at first, with the different laws prevailing here. In the first few decades, we were forced back to the old chemical techniques like fires. That’s one reason so few colonists ever came, or stayed long if they did come. But bit by bit, little by little, we’re learning the scientific laws and applying them. They’ve had all the standard household equipment available here for a century, I guess, but by that time I’d already built this place and liked my own things, fires and stoves and all the rest, too well to change. But now that I’ve got a wife to do my housekeeping, I ought to provide her with conveniences. In fact, I should have done so right away.”

“It isn’t that, Joe,” she said. “I’d have squawked long ago if those little things made any difference. I like handling things myself rather than turning them over to some robot. It’s fun to cook and get wood, but Joe, it’s no fun when a thing rises out of the steam and screams at you. It’s no fun when electric sparks jump over the house and all of a sudden there’s only fear, the whole place is choked with fear⁠—” She shuddered closer against him.

“This planet is haunted,” she whispered.

“The laws of nature are a little different,” he answered as calmly as he could. “But they are still laws. Tanith seems like a chaos, governed by living spirits and most of them malignant, only because you don’t see the regularity. Its pattern is too different from what you’re used to. Terra herself must have seemed that way to primitive man, before he discovered order in nature.

“Our scientists here are slowly finding out the answers. Talk to old Chang sometime, he can tell you more about it than I. But I can see the order now, a little of it, and it’s a richer and deeper thing than the rest of the universe.

“And you live forever.” He gripped her shoulders and looked into her wide eyes. He had to expel the demons of terror from her. A woman five months pregnant couldn’t go on this way. He was suddenly shocked by how thin she had grown, and she never stopped shivering under his hands.

“You won’t grow old,” he said slowly. “We’ll be together forever, Eileen. And our children won’t die either.”

She looked away from him, and sudden bitterness twisted her mouth. “I wonder,” she said thinly, “whether immortality is worth having⁠—on this planet.”

Suddenly she stiffened, and her lips opened to scream again. Langdon forgot the hurt of her words and looked wildly about the room. But there was only the furniture and the firelight and the weaving shadows. Inside the blood-red windows, the room was sane and real and human.

Eileen shrank against him. “It’s over there,” she gasped. “Over there in that corner, creeping closer⁠—”

Langdon’s face grew bleak, and there was a desolation rising in him. Illusions of one sort or another were part of daily life on Tanith, but they had reality in that they were produced by physical processes and more than one person could perceive them. But hallucinations were another story.

He thought back over two hundred years to the first attempts to colonize. Of an initial three hundred or so, over two-thirds had left within the first three years. And many of them had been insane when the ships took them home.

Men came to Tanith and stayed if they could endure it. But if they couldn’t, and tried to stay anyway, they soon fled from the unendurable madness of its reality to a safer and more orderly madness of their own.

From what he had heard, few of them were cured again, even back on Terra.

“I’ve got to see Chang,” he said.

The colonists on Tanith tended to live well apart from each other, and unless they owned the new televisors designed especially for the planet their only contact was physical. Once a month or so he would go to the planet’s one town for supplies and a mild spree, and somewhat oftener he would spend a while at another house or have guests himself. But most of the time he had been alone.

And as a man grew older, without loss of physical and mental faculties, he