Yoo Retoont, Sneogg. Ay Noo Read online

  Yoo Retoont, Sneogg. Ay Noo

  Marek S. Huberath

  “From Poland we have ‘Yoo Retoont, Sneogg. Ay Noo.’ by Marek S. Huberath, a story of monsters and mutants in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, which does a remarkable job of humanizing its characters while never shying away from their deformations.”

  From The SFWA European Hall of Fame: Sixteen Contemporary Science Fiction Masterpieces from the Continent, 2007

  Marek S. Huberath

  YOO RETOONT, SNEOGG. AY NOO

  Translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel

  1

  On the floor, several bright spots formed a row. Snorg liked to watch them move slowly across the dull tiles. The spots of light were different from the glow that suffused the Room. He had discovered some time ago that the source of this light was the small windows near the ceiling. He liked to lie on the floor so the spots would warm him. He wanted to do this now. He tried to move his arms but managed only to fall helplessly off the bed.

  “Dags…,” he hissed between clenched teeth. He couldn’t move his numb jaw. “Dags…,” he repeated with an effort.

  One of the Dagses turned his head from the viewscreen-in reaction probably to the thud of the body instead of to Snorg’s voice. Moosy was humming some tune the whole time, making little yawps for the words. The Dags with a few quick jerks pulled his way to Snorg and slapped him in the face, hard. Both Dagses had strong arms. They didn’t use their undeveloped legs much.

  “Pa… pa…,” stammered the Dags, making rhythmic motions with his shoulders to say that Snorg would be able to move his arms in a minute. He started hooking the tangle of wires to Snorg. The other Dags also came, pulling himself, and gave Snorg’s hair a yank. The yank hurt, but pain was what Snorg wanted.

  “My head… head…” A pounding in his skull. “Good… good.”

  The second Dags then poked a finger in Snorg’s eye. Snorg twisted his head away and roared. The first Dags beat at the second Dags, until the second Dags rolled away. Snorg’s eye brimmed with tears, so he couldn’t see if the first Dags was attaching all the electrodes right. But he didn’t worry, because the Dags usually did. He imagined the Dags attaching the wires of the machine, imagined him cocking his head comically as he worked. Both Dagses had eyes set so wide apart, they had to cock their heads.

  “Tavegner!… Want to hear a story?” That was Piecky’s smooth, resonant voice. Snorg admired the way Piecky talked. He could make out every word, although his lack of external ears limited his hearing. Piecky was answered by a loud gurgle. Tavegner still couldn’t move. He announced his presence only by gurgling. Had he stood up, he would have been the tallest of them, taller than Tib or Aspe. Tib only stood, so she was the tallest.

  “I might be taller than Tib, if I could stand,” Snorg thought.

  He was pleased that today he had feeling in his entire head. The pain was a service provided him daily by the Dagses.

  “Piecky, shut up!” shouted Moosy. “You can tell him the story later… I’m singing now.”

  Snorg’s hands were numb, like pieces of wood, but they moved according to his will. He tore himself free of the tangle of wires and tubes. He pinched his arm. There was no feeling. “At least I can move it,” he thought. He inspected the cuts and bruises on his body. Most were healing. But he had two new cuts from his last fall off the bed. Cuts were Snorg’s curse: a moment of inattention, and he could blunder into something and break his skin without knowing it. He was constantly afraid that he wouldn’t notice a cut in time and it would get infected. He crawled to the viewscreen. Tib stood nearby, rigid, while one of the Dagses was trying to pull her clothes off from the bottom.

  “Who dresses her?” Snorg wondered. Every day the Dagses did the same thing, and every day, in the morning, Tib was dressed again.

  Finally Tib’s gray gown fell to the floor, and the Dags started to climb up her leg.

  Snorg watched to see. What happened was what always happened: the little Dags got nowhere. When he was high enough, Tib simply scissored her legs shut. The Dags, resigned, went and squatted in front of the viewscreen and stared open-mouthed at it.

  “She’s not that stupid,” thought Snorg. “She always closes her legs in time…”

  Tib was a woman-only lately had Snorg realized this. She looked very much like the women the viewscreen showed during the lessons.

  “Her hips maybe are a little narrow, and she’s too tall, but everything else is in place…” Until now he had thought of her as furniture, a motionless decoration of the Room. She seemed even taller from the floor. Someday he would like to talk to her. Tib was the only person in the Room he had been unable to communicate with. Even Tavegner, who lay like a mound of meat and couldn’t utter a word, had interesting things to tell. You conversed with him by the trick of having yes be one gurgle and no two. Tavegner filled almost half the Room, and for a long time everyone thought he was like Tib. It was Piecky who figured out how to talk with him. Before that, the Dagses discovered that Tavegner responded to jabs, because they liked to lounge on his immense, soft, warm body. Clever Piecky worked out the way for Tavegner to gurgle yes for the letter of the alphabet he wanted and to gurgle twice to end a word. Everyone would gather around to listen. Snorg would bring the box that held Piecky, and the Dagses would drag Moosy. All together they would spell out letter by letter.

  “I am Tavegner,” Tavegner said. Then he told them a number of things. He told them he liked it when the Dagses lounged on him, he thanked Piecky, and he asked them to move him a little so he could see the viewscreen better. But lately Tavegner had become lazy: he preferred to be given simple yes-or-no questions.

  Snorg moved himself to Piecky.

  “Piecky, are you a man or a woman?” he asked and began to unwrap the sheet.

  “Stop that, damn it, Snorg… It doesn’t matter what I am.” Piecky’s small body twisted, but Snorg unwrapped it all the way. Then he wrapped it up again.

  “You don’t have anything,” he said.

  “What did you think, stupid?” Piecky sneered. “The Dagses would have found out long ago if I had…”

  Piecky’s head was beautiful. It was larger even than Snorg’s and formed better even than the heads of the people on the viewscreen.

  “You have a beautiful head, Piecky,” said Snorg, to put him in a better humor. Piecky actually blushed at that.

  “I know,” he replied. “And yours is ugly, but normally formed, all in all, except for the ears… I’m the brains here and will be around long after they’ve put you all away.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing… I need the sucker now.”

  Snorg pulled out the wall tube for excrement, plugged it into Piecky, and left him. The viewscreen was showing trees, a lot of trees. They were pretty, colorful, and moved gracefully. Snorg had never seen trees but dreamed of sleeping in one. He imagined branches arranged around him to make a soft, warm bed. The viewscreen always showed pretty things: spreading landscapes, people shaped correctly. He learned a lot of useful information.

  Snorg felt regret that he wasn’t pretty like the people he saw on the viewscreen who engaged in all kinds of complicated activities. From the perspective of the floor and his physical shortcomings, those people seemed perfection. It was his fault he was the way he was instead of like them, though he didn’t know why it was his fault. Watching the viewscreen, he forgot everything. With his eyes he absorbed the scenes and facts that flowed from it. He saw things that had never been in the Room, things that would have remained unknown to him forever without the viewscreen. A woman appeared. She stood unmoving. She was a model to demonstrate the proportions of a correctly formed woman. Near the views
creen, Tib stood unmoving and watched with glassy eyes. Snorg compared her with the woman on the viewscreen. Tib was bald, which made her head different from the head of the woman on the viewscreen, but when Snorg tried to picture hair on Tib’s head, the comparison wasn’t so bad. Tib had delicate ears, which stood out a little and were translucent. Snorg envied her those ears. On the viewscreen, lines appeared, showing the correct proportions. Snorg crawled to Tib to measure her proportions with a string. Not only did she have both arms of equal length, and both legs equal, but also her arms were shorter than her legs, and even in the smallest details Tib’s build agreed with the build of the model. To measure her head in proportion to the rest of her body, he got up on his knees and stretched his arms as high as he could. Everything was right.

  “Her body is completely correct,” he thought, and then realized that he had managed to lift himself up on his numb knees. He immediately fell.

  The hum in his ears told him that with the fall he had lost consciousness. When the hum went away, Snorg heard Piecky yelling to Moosy.

  “Relax! Stop fighting!… When he’s done, he’ll go,” Piecky was saying.

  Moosy sobbed. “I can’t stand… He’s disgusting, an animal… Stop! Leave me alone…”

  Snorg lifted his head: one of the Dagses had climbed into the box with Moosy.

  “This is becoming unendurable,” he thought. “We can’t defend ourselves against them… and we can’t live with them.”

  The Dags stopped its hoarse panting and plopped to the floor.

  2

  Piecky was going to tell a story. The Dagses held up his arm for the gesturing, though he could make only the most limited motions with it. He scratched his face with his hand. “That’s great, that’s wonderful,” he said over and over. “You people don’t know how to make use of your bodies.”

  A few slaps by the Dagses brought him around. He began to tell the story.

  “It was a lovely dream.” Piecky closed his eyes. “I was floating in air… It was heavenly… I had these black, flat wings on my sides, the kind we see sometimes on the viewscreen… The air moved with me. It was wonderfully cool,” he said more softly, as if to himself. “Moosy was flying beside me. Her wings were bright green. She had four wings and flapped them so nicely, I was sorry I was only Piecky…”

  From the corner came a gurgle.

  “Tavegner asks you to speak up,” said Snorg, and the next hollow gurgle confirmed that.

  “All right. The room became smaller and smaller,” he continued, “and everything around me got greener and greener. Both the Dagses were flying below us, going in the same direction we were… and it was wonderful, because the sky we were flying toward was an enormous viewscreen, and as you got nearer, you could see the pixels. I could move in any direction…”

  From the corner where Moosy’s box was came a quiet sob. Snorg pulled himself toward her.

  “Do you need anything?” he asked.

  “I wanted to call you, because if one of the Dagses comes, he’ll do the thing I hate again. Put me next to Piecky, could you?” she asked.

  “Did his story move you?” Snorg asked Moosy, regarding her. Unlike Piecky, she had all her limbs, though they were shriveled.

  “It’s not Piecky, it’s Tavegner,” she said through her tears. “The last time Piecky told a story, Tavegner asked to speak by letters… and he said… he said he wanted to go into the grinder instead of Piecky…”

  “Grinder?”

  “Piecky learned about it a long time ago,” Moosy explained. “He analyzes everything they say on the viewscreen. They pick the best of us… those who are formed the best, and the rest-go into the grinder.”

  “You mean, the thing they show on the viewscreen and call war?”

  She nodded yes. “Put me next to Piecky,” she said. “Every time he finishes telling his beautiful dream, he’s so feeble…”

  Making a tremendous effort, Snorg lifted Moosy from her box and put her in the crib Piecky lay in, after which he had to slide back to the floor in a hurry, because Tib was soiling herself. He attached the sucker to her. When she was finished, he grasped her hips with all his strength and pulled himself to his knees.

  “Don’t do it that way, all right… ?” he said, looking up at her. Tib looked down and saw his face twisted with effort. Her ears stuck out a little, and the light shone through them. They seemed extraordinarily beautiful. He clenched his numb jaw and took Tib by the shoulders. He felt that she was helping him, not pulling away but trying to stand straight to support him. She continued staring at his face. Between her parted lips, white teeth were visible.

  Rising, Snorg felt large, gigantic… He stood. For the first time he stood on his paralyzed legs. Now he was looking at her not from below but from above… looking at Tib, who was as high as the sky.

  Everyone stopped talking.

  He decided to take a step. He felt power… Suddenly he saw that one of his feet was moving toward her…

  “Tib! I’m walking…” It was meant to be a shout, but it came out as a snort or sob. Suddenly the Room swayed, and Snorg fell flat on his back with a crash.

  3

  The Room had two other occupants, whom Snorg never met, because they both used the same machine he did. While he was active, they slept. They were Aspe and Dulf. Aspe resembled Tavegner in shape, though she wasn’t his equal in size. Piecky said she was intelligent and nasty. She couldn’t speak, but communication with her presented no problem. She never detached her artificial arms and loved to play tricks on Piecky or Tavegner. Snorg hoped to talk with her someday, and with Dulf, who lay curled in a fetal position and whose incredibly wrinkled skin made you think he was ancient, though he was the same age they all were, that is, just past puberty.

  Tib stopped fouling the Room, she learned to go to Snorg when she felt the need. Snorg, seeing her, usually was able to get the sucker. Tib began to respond to him: sometimes she would walk to the part of the Room where he was lying and stand by him, looking at him. She was much more active than she had been before.

  “I underestimated you, Snorg,” Piecky said once. “You’re okay… You were able to make contact with Baldy. I couldn’t, though I tried plenty… You’ve changed, Snorg. Before, you looked like an animal that’s beaten all the time. Now one can see thought in your face.”

  “Animal” meant primitive, mindless, and strong. Occasionally the viewscreen showed pictures of real animals that were long extinct. Snorg was pleased by Piecky’s compliment and understood why Piecky had given it. From that day Snorg practiced to strengthen his fortitude and will. After the moment when an exertion of will forced his unfeeling legs to make the first step, will became for him the most important thing. He could take many steps now, though often they ended with a dangerous fall. He stood by leaning on Tib’s body, but he walked by himself, and she only helped him a little. Sometimes, when he woke, he could move his arms without the help of the Dagses, and without the machine.

  “You can see the will in my face,” he told Piecky.

  Piecky, lying down, lifted his head and looked.

  “You’re right,” he said. “The lines have hardened, the corners of your mouth turn down. But you better hurry, Snorg. I have the feeling we won’t be together long…”

  What Piecky relied on was his brain. He would spend hours at the keyboard of a viewscreen and, if one of the Dagses didn’t unscrew his artificial hand as a joke, he would tap at the keys continually. Learning was his passion, and being with the machine. Snorg knew that you could make Piecky happy by setting him down at the keyboard and letting him sit there for hours.

  4

  Snorg decided to teach Tib to speak. Piecky advised him to press her hand to his throat so she could feel the vibrations of his vocal cords. For this purpose, in order to stand, Snorg grabbed her by the hips. But he did it too suddenly, and Tib fell. It was the first time he saw her on the floor. One of the Dagses, seizing the opportunity, quickly got between her legs, which had been t
hrown apart. Snorg swung, and the little one, from the blow, went rolling across the floor. There was blood.

  “Snorg! Stop!” cried Piecky. “You’ll hurt him.”

  “It’s my blood,” said Snorg, inspecting his hand. “I cut my hand on him.”

  Tib had pulled herself together and sat up. The Dagses didn’t approach her, watching Snorg carefully.

  “Maybe it’s good you did that,” said Piecky. “I would have, if I could, for Moosy… They do with her what they want, whenever they want.”

  Snorg took Tib’s hand and placed the palm on his throat.

  “Tib,” he said, pointing at her. She watched him in silence.

  “Tib,” he repeated. She looked frightened.

  He passed his hand along her face, touched a pink ear, and was surprised: Tib’s ear had no opening.

  “Piecky!” he shouted. “You’re a genius! You were right. She’s deaf. Only by touch…”

  Over and over, with extreme care to be correct, he pronounced her name. He had complete control of his mouth now. After one of the times, her lips moved, and she gave a muffled, hollow noise: “Ghbb…” She got to her feet and repeated it several times.

  “Ghbb… ghbbr.” She said it louder and louder, walking across the Room.

  “She’ll wake Dulf,” Piecky said.

  Snorg gestured for her to come. She came and sat. Again he started saying her name.

  5

  Tib learned quickly. Soon she could say her name, Snorg’s, Piecky’s, and several other words. Piecky was of the opinion that her sight was not good either and that most information came to her through touch. He wasn’t sure, however, whether this was physiological or whether Tib’s brain was simply unable to process all the data entering through her eyes.