A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  Across Coppard’s rigid shoulder, I saw that the dark mass pressed against the table as if collapsed from an attitude of prayer. It appeared to have no head. Above that part where shoulders might be spilled a pale nimbus of light. I recall thinking that it had exchanged its head for light. That somewhere in the darkness, the head balanced on its severed neck, peering white-eyed toward us.

  U Saya Gyi thumped to his knees on the dusty floor. “It is Haniman, now to us truly his presentation.”

  Coppard pulled a harsh sound from his throat. Striding past U Saya Gyi, he approached the figure, slashed savagely at it with the barrel of his revolver.

  The shape crunched dully. For a hideous second, I thought that it had lifted a hollow mouth and bitten at the gun. Then I heard material tear. In the blaze of the flashlights, the mass came to pieces. It flew apart with a grinding rattle. Dust puffed up. Bits of pale light scattered across the floor.

  Coppard bent to examine the ruin. “Sticks and cloth and phosphorescent paint,” he said.

  U Saya Gyi remained kneeling, his face pressed against the edge of his tented hands.

  Coppard kicked the heap of cloth and began to laugh. “The Wonderful Haniman.”

  I squatted beside the little man and placed my hand on the narrow bone of his shoulder. “What is this?” I asked.

  “Respected Sir, I most heartily wished that you would believe with me of those most splendid things of Haniman.”

  “Why?”

  “Believe me, Sir, I am of all the many past, the last and final of all the rejoiceful priests of serving Haniman, in whose wonders virtue grows.”

  “The last one?” I asked.

  “Who will believe,” he asked, “when I die? But if the glorious white lords of so noble fineness believed, so truly others would come to eager themselves for worship.”

  Coppard came to stand over us, his flashlight beam impaling the floor. “Beltu and As,” he said. “Belus, Nin, Dagon, Hadad, and Baal. Nebo, Ptah, and Ogma—all gods, all dead, all forgotten. Men cringed and slobbered before them, and burnt other men, and spilled blood enough to drown the world. Terrible gods. Every one of them all-powerful. Not one of them remembered today. Dead gods. Including Haniman.”

  “He lives in beautiful serenity, respected sir.”

  Coppard, much amused, swung the beam of his light around. “Beautiful serenity. Under a ruin in the dirt.”

  He began to laugh.

  I lifted U Saya Gyi. He weighed no more than a scrap of paper. His eyes were closed.

  Coppard said, “This is just about worth missing the Frenchman for.”

  He tramped from the chamber and swung off down the corridor, chuckling to himself. I followed, my arm around U Saya Gyi, who lurched and swayed as if the passage reeled under his feet.

  We had progressed perhaps half the distance back toward the entrance, when the voice began. I heard it first as a clear, sweet thread of sound, barely audible. It whispered: “Saya Gyi.”

  The tiny body under my arm jarred as if clubbed.

  The voice called again, stronger, a lovely, melancholy sound rising from no certain point, falling upon us from all sides. The words flowed too fast for my imperfect ability to understand.

  Coppard stopped suddenly and twisted around to stare back toward us. In the glare of his flashlight, I saw U Saya Gyi’s eyes gone huge and staring.

  He pulled free of my arm and tottered past Coppard. His face vacantly regarded the dark. He moved on legs rigid as dried sticks. His sandals scraped along the dirt floor.

  “What’s this?” Coppard cried.

  U Saya Gyi hesitated, swayed left, lurched forward into a chamber. We followed, saw his footprints sharp across smooth mud. He stood loose-limbed in the wet chamber. Then he dropped forward to a huddle, supporting himself on knees and elbows, hiding his face.

  Again the sweet voice whispered. It was in a language too old, too archaic, too quick for me to understand. It was remote as music across the water, lifting and falling, a glittering thread of sound.

  I had no trouble making out what U Saya Gyi said. He spoke so clearly that even I could understand his words.

  He said, “Most Wonderful Haniman, my heart is dirt.”

  Again the sweet thin sound.

  “I have lost the habit of belief, Lord,” U Saya Gyi whispered.

  The smell of damp rot fouled the air. Against the far wall reeked the dark heaps of sacking. To these U Saya Gyi extended his hands.

  The sweet voice uttered a rising melodic line that became staccato and faded in a diminishing sigh.

  “Perhaps that is true, Reverend Sir,” U Saya Gyi said to the wall. “Perhaps I should most certainly die.”

  His hands relaxed into the mud. When we reached him, he lay in that sprawling looseness from which there is no return.

  Coppard snarled and shook his narrow shoulders. His head lifted, forehead grooved by suspicion. He strode across the muddy floor toward the sacking. There he probed angrily with the barrel of his revolver. After a moment, he straightened, standing high above the slanted beam of his flashlight.

  I came unwillingly to stand beside him. In the light lay a dark brown fragment of skull. It included part of the upper left jaw, eye socket, and frontal bone.

  “Nothing else here,” said Coppard. “Turn off your light.”

  In the darkness, where the skull fragment lay, appeared a dim greenish glowing, not large, hardly the size of a crushed firefly. Coppard snapped on his flashlight and bent over the fragment.

  “Fungus,” he said, pointing below the eye socket. “Luminous fungus. At least not phosphorescent paint.”

  I said, “He came straight here, didn’t he? Straight to this chamber?”

  “When the voice began. Yes.” He looked at me unsmiling but with a grinning superiority behind his face.

  “He must have known the fragment was here,” I said. “He knelt toward it. He spoke toward it.”

  Coppard said sardonically, “You think it’s a relic of Haniman?”

  “Possible,” I said. “Maybe. It just might be.”

  Coppard bent to pick up the piece of skull and it crumbled in his hand to a kind of moist sand, giving off a disagreeable odor.

  “Another dead god,” he said.

  “And the voice?” I asked.

  He said sharply, “Didn’t you watch U Saya Gyi? Or were you goggling around looking for spooks? When the voice spoke, you could see his throat move. An obvious ventriloquial effect.”

  After a long while, I said, “I can’t believe he knew he was doing it.”

  “Perhaps not,” Coppard said, frigidly superior. “Personality disassociation, would be my guess. It isn’t the kind of thing you know. It killed him quick enough.”

  He bent to scrape a teaspoon of the brownish residue into his cigarette case. Snapping the case shut, he thrust it away. “Unique souvenir,” he said. “Personal fragment of a god.”

  We carried U Saya Gyi’s body into the sun and transported him to the guest house at Pagan. Time passed and we returned to Rangoon. The government official, Coppard’s special friend, no longer occupied a desk at the Bureau. We could not locate him, nor did any official seem to know where he had gone. They were extremely polite and assisted us gladly. But the man might never have existed. I doubt that even the Frenchman’s paper could have called him back.

  We conducted our business with another official. The arrangements were reasonably satisfactory, not lavish but more so than we had anticipated.

  About six weeks later, Coppard called me to his room in the hotel. I came reluctantly. By then I could not talk comfortably with him. It seemed to me that he swelled with poison—poison of the mind, poison of the heart. A mist of poison hung around him. To be near him brought sickness into my throat, as if he radiated death, a human adder.

  I stopped just inside the door.

  He extended the gold cigarette case to me. “Remember this, the crumbled piece of skull?”

  “Yes.”

&nb
sp; “Remember how it felt when we touched it? Like moist sand. Very much like moist sand. Remember?”

  “I didn’t touch it.”

  “But you remember how it looked, Mr. Stanton. Surely you can gird up your colossal powers and remember how it looked.”

  “Yes,” I said, edging back from him.

  “But look now.”

  He gestured impatiently. I came reluctantly, taking shallow breaths, keeping my eyes lowered so he would not see how I looked at him.

  In the case lay a coarse brown substance of sandy texture.

  “Feel it,” he directed.

  “I would rather not.”

  “Good God, man,” he flared. “Try not to be a complete fool. Feel it.”

  I gingerly poked my finger tip into what felt to be dry sand.

  He said, “You can feel that, can’t you?” His voice became intense. “It has begun reassembling itself. Clumping together. Becoming bone again.”

  I looked at the grainy powder, which contained nothing solid, and carefully wiped my finger clean.

  “I can’t tell,” I said.

  “I cannot account for it,” he said. “It is most remarkable. It is gradually returning to bone.”

  I left him and stood in the hotel lobby, watching the busy flow. Of those passing, most were Buddhist, some Christian. Not one of that bright crowd knew of Haniman. For Haniman’s last priest was dead and Haniman’s bones lay dispersed and silent.

  Only two men remembered Haniman. But that, as it happened, was enough. So long as human mind remembers him, Haniman lives. Even sustained by the minds of unbelievers, his godhead dwindled and shrunk, he is not altogether powerless. Not altogether.

  For years, I was not conscious of his power. Had I been aware, I still would not have resisted. You grow tired, at last, of your own limitations, sensing those faults of character and intelligence you are unable to change.

  One day Haniman glowed in my mind.

  “Yes,” I said to him. “Yes. Please.”

  Slowly, weakly, calmly, thought by thought, he brought change. I welcomed it. He drew me quietly. Why should I resist?

  Coppard resisted. It was bitter for him, long and harsh and bitter. I visit him twice a year, but he does not look up or open his eyes. He lies quite still, gripping the gold case.

  But what was I, in my wretched imperfections, to resist. How can mud resist the sculptor’s fingers?

  How admirable he is, the Wonderful Haniman, passionless and kind, alive inside me, where the soul glows.

  THE STARDRIFTER GROUNDED

  Bruce Boston

  In the sordid company of assorted off-world cronies, human and not so, stranded like himself, the stardrifter waits out one rapid day after another in the back streets of a starport city. Circling too close for comfort to a brilliant white dwarf, sweltering beneath the cloud-clotted skies of a seasonless alien clime, the stardrifter waits out the short years—six-and-a-half odd local to every solo year on Earth—though he has long since ceased to calculate the conversions. He knows that time by any world’s standard is no longer on his side.

  His aimless anger, his fits of despair and restlessness, he combats with whatever intoxicants, legal or not so, happen to come his way. He relieves his boredom by an occasional tryst with some native courtesan, creatures blue-skinned and angular, their customs and language strange, but no stranger than he has known before. Creatures of a species nocturnal by nature, yet still humanoid, soft in the right places, passionate enough in like fashion to his own human passions.

  They can often be beautiful, he thinks, in their own blue and angular way. As slender and graceful, he tells himself, as the sentient saplings of . . . Midas VII? . . . Althor VIV?

  The stardrifter has visited so many worlds in his random passage through the light years that more than a few have become muddled in his mind: fauna and flora, cities, mountains and plains, superimposed upon one another like a series of shifting transparencies.

  In his higher moments, when his thoughts seem to run clear and vast as the limitless boundaries of space itself, the vistas and landscapes he has seen flit through his rising consciousness like a generic panorama that encompasses the essence of all that is provocative and alien, all that has determined the compulsive though ill-defined quest of his life.

  Each morning the stardrifter leaves the cramped quarters of his squat and blocky native hut. He treks through the ever-muggy streets, joined by others of his kind, to read the notices posted on a union board:

  Europa, Class AA, freight, Earth Registry,

  Inbound for Sol by way of Bryan’s Star,

  WANTED: one mate, two mechs, one navigator

  Deepfarer, Class B, exploration, Centauri Registry,

  Extended tour of Klee Rift

  WANTED: second engineer, knowledge of Megan plasma drive.

  His skills are as numerous and varied as the worlds he has traversed. His union dues are paid in coin, his spacer’s dues in service. All of his papers are scrupulously in order. Yet again and again some bleak-eyed purser, some second officer still downy behind the ears, tells him—at times with a brief nod of sympathy, more often with brusque indifference—that he is too old to work the great C-ships and bear the rigors of stardrive.

  Too old to ride the spokes of light like fire in his thighs, too old to brave the vacuum.

  Over mugs of a vaporous and icy native brew that cold-burns the gullet and cool-trips the mind, Zenthyl, his friend from Nullé IV, tries to tell him that any world that is livable can also be lovable.

  “Take a steady mate,” wise Zenthyl counsels. “Forge a new life for yourself. Forget the foolishness of starlust.”

  Yet Zenthyl is not of human kin—far from it—and his race is more adaptable to the fetid damp of this greenhouse world. His scales do not sweat like porous flesh by rapid day and rapid night. His lungs do not succumb to chronic infections short year in and short year out. Fungi do not sprout like manic verdigris in the crevices between his toes.

  So the stardrifter continues to plan and dream.

  He takes whatever work he can find. He saves whatever money he can manage to save. Up and down the crooked humpbacked streets of this sprawling port, distributing handbills he can barely read, bills imprinted with a blue native dye that leaves greasy ineradicable stains upon his fingers and clothes. Tedious midnight lessons in Altagerian, the lingua franca of the spaceways, to some local merchant with off-world aspirations. Day labor at the space docks, handling crates hammered beneath far distant skies, the stuff of many worlds passing beneath his increasingly calloused palms.

  If he manages to save the necessary fare for passage, his age will no longer be a problem. He will survive the wrenching mind/body trauma of deep-space leaps safe within the drugged coma of cold storage, cradled by the cushioned security of a gravity coffin. But exactly where his yearned-for passage will carry him remains a mystery, as much to himself as to Zenthyl or any of his other stray companions.

  He knows his only real home is in motion from one transient destination to the next . . . a spacer’s berth in the emptiness between worlds . . . where gravity free he can dream the universe and its infinite possibilities . . . the tachyon drive spitting at his back . . . the roar of the fusion reactors like a base descant against the white static of the stars.

  Drinking in a spacer’s bar is costly, so some nights he drinks alone. And when he has had his fill and his fill again, he staggers into the tepid night, bare to the waist, his belly gray-haired and round as a pot, still hard beneath the aging flesh. His eyes and thoughts are empty. In his heart there is a raging incandescence, a flagrant wilderness of light; above there is nothing but a vague gray blackness.

  If the overcast would part for just a moment. If he could know for one sure instant that the light years still await his passage. If he could once again see the night sky, the sidereal host in all its splendor: giant red Beltegeuse, bright Procyon with its wealth of planets, Alcor and Mizar in their flaming binary dance. But
those are only names, and beyond the closely packed cloud cover, he can no longer be sure they remain.

  One evening, higher than usual on some reckless combination of drug and drink, he finds a stub of chalk among his meager store of possessions. Upon the dark slate walls of his hut, while curious children watch and others shake their heads at the inscriptions of a madman, he sketches the constellations of Earth as he remembers them. He draws lines between the stars he may never see again. He shouts out the names of fabled animals, calls upon the powers of ancient goddesses and gods. Yet when he examines his own handiwork by the damp and quickly rising light of a hungover dawn, he sees only the scrawled graffiti of a firmament that could be as mythical as its legendary denizens. He sees an abstract illusion without substance or form.

  A stardrifter grounded . . . a stardrifter no more.

  In less than a score of short years, that seem ever shorter as they continue to pass, he will heed wise Zenthyl’s advice. He will take a steady native woman, if woman you could call her. He will attempt to make a new life for himself. Instead of stars he will console his empty soul with the dream of a someday heir, an impossible blue-human child of his improbable blue union.

  RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS

  Daniel Marcus

  The fog brought me a gift this morning. When I woke in the pre-dawn stillness to relieve myself it lay over everything like cotton ticking. I stepped out onto the porch and held my hand in front of my face. I could barely see it, a splayed dark outline, the space between the fingers like webbing in the half-dark.

  I went back to sleep and when I awoke again the fog was thinner. Not completely gone, but the sky had that bright gray look like there was blue up there somewhere. On the porch railing, next to a small potted cactus, was the head of a mountain lion. There was a dark, irregular stain on the wood underneath it and the fur around what was left of its neck was torn and bloody. Its eyes were open and its mouth was fixed in a snarl. As I watched, an ant crawled up the matted fur of its cheek, explored for a moment, and disappeared into a nostril.