Agent of the Unknown Read online

  Agent of the Unknown

  (revised from "Vulcan's Dolls" – 1952)

  Ace Books

  (1956)**

  Margaret St. Clair

  Chapter One — The Beach

  Don FELT that time on Fyon was a tangible element. It seemed to drip down lazily from the dark fronds of the palm trees, to lie in languid pools against the pink and yellow petals of the frangipani. The trades blew steadily day after day on Fyon, warm and fresh and sweet-scented; and the palm trees, leaning their long slim trunks slantwise to the wind, seemed to be resisting time blowing past them. The pink sands of the beach were as smooth as velvet. The gentle waves wrote on them ceaselessly, like time writing, and left them covered with an elegant calligraphy of long, sinuous ripple marks.

  The botanists who had installed Fyon's flora had spared no expense. Under the trees there were slender-podded vanilla orchids, hibiscus with long, poised stigmas and petals fantastically cut, double sampaguita flowers. There were ilangilang trees starred with drooping scented greenish blossoms, gardenias as high-centered as roses, champak, odorous kamuning. Sunset was brilliant under the palms, and so was morning, and each day was like the one before it, each round and unflawed and perfect as a pearl. It was no wonder that for weeks at a time Don was able to forget that Fyon was nothing but a synthetic pleasure planetoid.

  Worse than that, it was an unsuccessful one. The designers of the planetoid, for all their pains, had somehow missed the taste of the public. There was, it seemed, too much water, too little diversion. Space liners touched there rarely. There were few visitors. The machines that kept Fyon going—the fall of rain, the motion of air, the waves rippling against the beach—ran only because keeping them going was cheaper than shutting them down would have been.

  That morning Don Haig woke unwillingly. For a long time, in his light slumber, he had been conscious of the arthritic pains in his ankles and elbows, of the itching of the sand against his shoulders, of the nausea spreading miserably through his diaphragm and chest. Day was a question he did not want to have to answer. He moaned and burrowed and tried to go back to sleep again. But he was cold and shivering; even with the warm sand against him he was cold. He roused himself at last.

  He sat up in the sand, dodging, with the ease of much practice, the slantwise piece of corrugated iron that served him as roof. He yawned and shivered and yawned again. A drink would have helped his nausea, but it had been so long since he had had the luxury of a drink on first awaking that he hardly formed the wish for it. He blinked the gum from his aching, unfocused eyes until he could see a little. Then he crawled out.

  The day was well advanced. From the angle of the palm trees' shadows, it must be on the nearer side of noon. From an oleander a bird squawked shrilly. Don licked his lips and shivered nervously. He would have liked a palm tree to hold on to. He began to undress.

  He laid his clothing—a sleeveless undershirt and frayed white duck trousers—on the sand near his shelter. As always, he was a little ashamed of his ill cared-for, too-thin body. It was another unwanted, unmet responsibility. He waded out into the surf slowly, feeling the milk-smooth water float some of his misery away, and hoped that it wouldn't make the pain in his joints worse.

  When he came back from his bath he felt a little better. He picked up his clothing and, still naked, walked along the squeaking sand until he came to a particular spot on the beach. Then he turned and walked inward for perhaps fifty meters until he came to a freshwater spring, one of the countless loving refinements the engineers who had built Fyon had installed. The water flowed out clear and cool under the trees, across a bed of spotted agate pebbles and sweet-scented ferns.

  Don Haig drank copiously. He drank again. He scooped up handfuls of the sweet water and slapped it over himself, rinsing away the salt. He didn't want to get saltwater boils once more. He was still thirsty. Again he drank.

  This time he vomited. He brought up nothing but clear fluid, but he was careful to move well away from the spring. When the spasm was over he was weak, but he really did feel better.

  He walked toward the beach again. When the bland air had dried him, he dressed. He was surprised to find a tiny germ of hunger in himself. Food? Solid food? No, but perhaps coffee. And then, of course, a drink.

  That wasn't going to be easy. He smoothed his rough brown hair back, frowning and trying to be intelligent. Fyon was outside the net of social services, and that meant that anything Don got on it had to be paid for with money. Who could he ask for money this morning? Kunitz?

  Kunitz had yelled at him the last time he had asked, called him a damned drunken nuisance. Don look abstractedly at the lambda-shaped red birthmark on the inside of his left elbow, and laughed. It was accurate enough. Don was a nuisance even to himself.

  After a moment he decided to walk along the beach and see if he could pick something up. It had worked twice, out of all the times he had tried it. Once he had found a beautiful pink shell, very unusual, and sold it to a tourist. The other time it had been an inexpensive watch somebody had dropped.

  He set off, dragging his feet. He passed an unobstrusive robot gardener, busy weeding among the hibiscus, and thought for a moment of dismantling it and trying to sell the pieces. It was impractical: they'd only jail him, give him more psychotherapy, tell him he was happy. And there wasn't any rum in jail.

  He walked a kilometer and a half up the long curving beach before he decided to go back. Would it have to be Kunitz after all? Kunitz had liked him once. Don wished there was someone else to beg from besides him.

  The long waves rolled in on the pink sands and were sucked back with a low roar. They broke with a prodigal display of foam, rich as pearls on the blue-green glinting of the water. Don watched for a second, divided between aesthetic appreciation and the categorically imperative need for a drink. Then he turned to take the path that led to Kunitz' house.

  At the last moment he halted, frowning. Had he seen a speck, visible only between waves, at the water's edge? He sighed, and then went creakily down to see what it was. When he thought of that discovery afterward, he was always to remember that he had forgotten to roll up his trousers' legs and had, in consequence, got them wet.

  He had to wait for the wave to go back before he saw the object. Then he stooped and scrabbled with his fingers. What he had seen was round and small, and part of it was buried. The digging made his knuckles hurt.

  He pulled the object out of the sand with a sucking noise. He brushed wet sand from it with his shaky forefinger. It was—it was—

  His knees were getting weak. He moved the few steps back to the beach and sat down suddenly. And yet, even before he had brushed all the sand from it, he had, somehow, known.

  She was small, no higher than the length of his hand. She was made of some golden, faintly luminous material, the color of a Gloire de Dijon rose, and to his fingers she had the mingled coolness and warmth of living flesh. Don looked at her with an exhausted, incredulous delight. She was the most beautiful thing he had seen in his life.

  A woman, tiny, naked, perfect. Perfect with the perfection not of nature, but of art, for a woman's living body had no such harmony. No breathing woman ever had just that perfect slope of breast and cheekbone and hip. He held her in his hand, a marvel, a delight, no bigger than the palm that held her. Her face was sad and compassionate. And down her cheeks there were flowing tiny, tiny tears.

  Don hesitated. After all, he had just fetched her out of the water. The tears might be from the spray. Very carefully he pulled a fold of his undershirt forward and blotted at the wonderful little face with it. And when he took the cloth away, there were more tears.

  He wiped his fingers on his trousers. With vast delicacy he touched his i
ndex finger to her cheek. He tasted it. Yes, there was salt on his finger. Salt, like tears.

  He stared at her. She was a phoenix, a miracle. "You ... you ..." he said to the doll, and then fell silent. She was not something to be put into words.

  Where had she come from? What was she? It didn't really matter. It seemed to Don Haig that until the moment he had plucked her out of the sand his life had been an unimportant dream, a boring fantasy. He had been cold, cold to the bone, dazed with cold, only half alive. Now he was warm.

  He sat a little longer, holding her, marveling at her. Then he got to his feet. He would take her to Kunitz.

  Chapter Two — The Lost Wings

  Kunitz lived in a house. It had only one room, but that put him, of itself, at once in a higher social class than Don, who merely lived in a shelter scooped indifferently out of the sand.

  He was more respectable than Don, too, in other ways. He drank, but not constantly, and when he did drink he drank phlomis, not rum. He had a little money. He could read. Don had heard the bartender in Baade, the little settlement, speak respectfully more than once of that accomplishment of Kunitz'. (The bartender, like a good many other people, could only scan isotypes.) Don had told the bartender once that he himself could read, but by then he had been very much down on his luck, and the bartender hadn't believed him.

  It must be nearly noon. The shadows of the duku trees were at their smallest extent. Kunitz would surely be up.

  Don rapped on the door, lightly at first, and then harder. No answer. He knocked again. Silence. He began to bang.

  At the fourth bang Kunitz stuck his head out of the paneless, bamboo-framed window. He looked irate. "What the hell ... Oh, it's Don. I told you I wouldn't loan you any more money. Go away."

  "I don't want any money," Don answered. The statement in itself was astonishing. "Look here, Kunitz. I want to talk to you. I've ... got something you might like to see."

  Kunitz looked at him speculatively. He rubbed the grayish stubble on his upper lip and bumbled. "All right," he said resignedly. "Mind, it won't work if it's a touch. I won't give you a loan."

  "Shut up about the loan. I know."

  Kunitz came to the door. He was wearing faded blue trousers, slippers, and no shirt. Ten or fifteen years older than Don, he had a vigorous, stocky body that was beginning to slip into fat. Now he looked sleepy and annoyed.

  "Knock the sand off your pants, can't you?" he snapped at Don as the younger man started over the threshold. "I don't like sand all over my floor."

  Obediently Don bent and cleaned himself. He was very careful to avoid putting any strain on the doll. He had slipped her into his pocket.

  "Lumbago, Don?" Kunitz asked in a slightly more friendly tone. "Or is it souse's arthritis again?"

  "Neither," Don answered, unresenting. "I ..."

  "Well, sit down." They had passed into the house's cool, shadowy interior. "What is it, anyway?"

  Don seated himself in one of the high-backed rattan armchairs. It was hard for him to begin. A more than physical modesty restrained him. It seemed to him that he could feel the doll inside his pocket, and that she was slightly warm. He cleared his throat once, twice. Kunitz looked at him keenly.

  "Go on," he said.

  "I—well, I—"

  "Oh, I'll get us a drink. Will phlomis be all right? That's all I have left. You drink phlomis, don't you, Don?"

  "Sure. Anything."

  Kunitz got the glasses and heavy, inlaid phlomis bottle from a bamboo-faced cabinet. His disordered bed was on the right. He sat down on it and raised his glass to Don. "Da skrie," he said loudly. It was an old Martian toast.

  "Da skrie," Don answered. He sipped at his drink. It was, as phlomis always was, too sweet. He could feel it curdling and looping oilily in his empty stomach from his throat.

  "What is it?" Kunitz demanded once more. He was growing angry again.

  Don hesitated. It was now or never. Overcoming an intense reluctance, he pulled the doll out of his pocket. He set her down carefully on the table in front of Kunitz.

  Kunitz' deep-set eyes widened. Don thought he turned a little pale. After a perceptible silence he said, "Don. Do you know what you've got?"

  "I'm ... I'm not quite sure."

  "Do you know how valuable it is?"

  "I suppose it would be,"

  "Where did you find it? You didn't steal it, I suppose."

  "No. She was half buried in the sand down on the beach."

  "Oh, on the beach!" Kunitz lifted his graying eyebrows. "In the sand! You found her, just like that? One of Vulcan's weeping dolls?"

  "I found her. I wasn't sure she was one of the dolls. I used to hear about them when I was just a kid. I don't remember it very well. I thought it was just a story."

  Kunitz grunted. "No. You can see that it's not. There's a doll like that—it could almost be a twin of the one you ... found—in the museum in New York. They only put the thing on display every four or five years. Just often enough so that people can't say there's any censorship. They don't like to show the doll oftener because it unsettles people. 'Unsettles,' you know, covers almost anything these days."

  "And the doll is valuable?" Don asked. It seemed to him that this point was the least important aspect of his discovery, but he was reluctant, with the same deep reluctance he had felt toward showing Kunitz the doll in the first place, to discuss what he felt did matter.

  "Oh, God. Yes. The one in the New York museum is the only one—let's be conservative, we haven't got the deep space drive yet—the only one this side of Aldebaran. There probably aren't any more dolls anywhere. As far as that goes, no one had ever really supposed there might be two of them, for all the proverbs and the stories."

  Don finished his phlomis. He set the sticky glass down on the table. "What proverbs?" he asked.

  "Oh, the Martians say, 'Crying as much as one of Vulcan's weeping dolls,' and 'As hard up for brains as Vulcan's weeping dolls are for dry cheeks.' And then there are the stories."

  "Tell me one of the stories," Don asked. For some reason—it couldn't be the phlomis—he felt a little light-headed. "Who is Vulcan, anyway?"

  "Vulcan himself? He's a craftsman, an artificer. He lives on an artificial metal planetoid at the end of our galaxy. They say"—Kunitz smiled faintly—"that he's always attended by two brass hounds of his own making, two animals which have keener senses than any real ones ever had, and that the light in his workshop is furnished by beautiful figures of women who move about without being ordered to cast light where he needs it in his work. The illumination, you see, comes from the end of their translucent arms. Vulcan is immortal—"

  "Is he a god?" Don interrupted.

  "No-o-o-o, I don't think so." Kunitz picked up the phlomis bottle and poured more liquid in the glasses. "He can do miraculous things, but except for his long life he's not miraculous himself. He spends his days making objects of incredible workmanship. Things, I mean, on the borderline between the animate and the inanimate, like the little lady you found in the sand. The Martians call him 'Master of Life and Half-Life'. Oh, Yes, and they have another proverb I forgot to mention: 'When the dolls stop weeping, the world will change.' "

  "Um. Do you think the stories are true, Kunitz?"

  The older man shrugged. "How should I know? They certainly don't sound very ... probable. On the other hand, I've seen things once or twice that I simply couldn't believe ordinary human hands created. Miracles. And then there's the testimony of what you found in the sand this morning, the weeping doll."

  Don had scarcely taken his eyes off the figure while they had been talking. Now he picked it up very carefully between thumb and forefinger and balanced it in the palm of his hand. "Kunitz, what do you think makes her weep?"

  "You mean what mechanism—? Oh, I see. Why is she weeping. Well, it's a silly idea"—Kunitz chuckled rather self-consciously—"but when I look at her I feel that she's weeping for all the miserable things, even the things that I've forgotten, that have e
ver happened to me. Pretty egotistical, I guess. She makes me feel troubled, and comforted, at the same time. I told you the doll in New York was said to have an 'unsettling' effect. Here, let me handle her."

  Rather unwillingly, Don permitted Kunitz to take the doll from his palm. The older man examined the figure carefully. He said, "You know, I don't think she's complete."

  "What do you mean? I never saw anything more perfect."

  "Yes, of course, but look here, on the back of her shoulders." He pointed. "See those rough places? It looks as if something had been cut away there, or never added. The rough spots go clear down the shoulder blades to just above the loins. Do you see them, Don?"

  "Yes." Haig gulped phlomis. "I think—"

  "What? Go on."

  "It's just an idea. But I think maybe she used to have wings."

  "Wings!" Kunitz looked surprised, and then pleased. "Yes, I suppose that would fit the marks. H'um. I'd almost swear you were right."

  There was a silence. Don Haig finished his drink. Kunitz looked up at the ceiling and down at the floor. He cleared his throat. He said, not very loudly, "I believe I used to have wings."

  Don looked at him. The older man seemed quite serious, and almost perfectly sober. "Rudimentary wings, you know. They couldn't have been good for anything."

  "That's interesting."

  "Yes, I suppose so. Look here, Don, what are you going to do with the doll?"

  "Sell her, I guess." This happened to be quite untrue. "She ought to be worth a lot, from what you say. I could have all I wanted to drink for the rest of my life."

  "And you think that would make you happy?"

  "As happy as anything would, I guess."

  Once more, a silence. Don was feeling a trifle nauseated. Phlomis, with its disgusting sweetness, never agreed with him. "It's none of my business, Don," Kunitz said, "but why don't you have the synthetic childhood? It might ... fix you up."

  "Oh, I've had it. Didn't you know? It was a waste of time and energy. I just couldn't believe in it. The psychotherapist kept hissing at me, 'You are counter-suggesting to yourself!' and then we'd get into an argument. It was all too unreal."