“Hell, no!”
“You are going to be a Valenian with a difference,” he said.
“Same as you?”
“Opposite of me.”
I said, “Devil’s Adversary, meet the genuine, already crowned Devil’s Advocate. From now on, I will be the Valenians’ lawyer, and I intend to see that they survive.”
“You have been chosen by the Council?”
“Signed, sealed and practically delivered.”
“Before you go to the nest, approach me for a last farewell. Look me in the eye and see a brilliant curiosity.”
He tilted his head toward me, and the outer portion of his eye nearest me acted as a mirror and revealed the Chamber and its contents. Before I turned away from him, I caught a glimpse of the last human being I would see for a long time. It was a tiny nigger gal with blue-black body and crazy eyes. A brilliant curiosity.
* * * *
The nest is the laboratory. It preps oddities, like, say, Valenians who are unusually large, or the Devil’s Adversary, or the Devil’s Advocate, or anybody different for whom the Valenians form an affection. To them, life forms are all the same. They don’t care at all.
The nest sucks. Not out, but in. Into me went the chemicals necessary for my preservation. I felt bloated and well sucked by the time the nest finished with me.
A bit shrunken in size, but not much because I was small to start with, I was lifted by Dalia and kissed good-bye.
“We had a good time,” I said. “Love you.”
“I’ll see you after a short sleep.”
“It won’t be you. You’re going to die and I’ll be playing with another Dalia when the nest life span comes.”
“What’s the difference?” she said, and of course she was right.
The egg sac was warm and cozy. The tube was stiff when Dalia placed it in my throat. Immediately reality became fuzzy.
“Mattu, do you think the nest can give me a nice fur coat, next life span?” I said.
“It is a very capable organism. If you desire to grow fur—”
“Will it be shiny white like yours?”
Oh, how the gleam in his eyes pierced me. “Little girl, didn’t anyone ever warn you about wishing for the moon?”
I settled back, disgruntled, but not too much. “Mattu, you’re my friendly enemy and I’ll get you next time around.” It was the last thing I said.
I was aware of the sac’s contents pressing at me from all sides. My knees touched my chest, my chin touched my knees, my arms hugged my legs, I felt more comfortable than I had in my mother’s womb. If she were alive, she would understand. She gave me life, which, as I said before, was a mound of crap. Anyone would do the same as I was doing.
I heard Dalia close the sac. I sucked on the tube. It softened in my mouth. Sweet nectar slid and dropped and beckoned sleep. I was still aware as Dalia flew me to my resting place, scarcely felt it when I hit the ocean and sank.
In a minute I’ll take the deep nap. In the meantime, I think of the future. I am happy. Come the resurrection, I’ll live again. I am the Devil’s Advocate. As for you who are going to be around when I wake up, you mothers had better watch it. Blacky, my better half, my conscience, is dead. I killed her. Now there is only myself, and it is a thing you created. Here’s to an everlasting vacation in Hades.
<
* * * *
PHOENIX HOUSE
Jesse Miller
It came across the desert, in a jeep nobody was driving, and its message was Hate.
Easterly, Nevada, 2016. In all the world, one of the few things remaining unchanged was the wind. It never ceased whistling sand in from the desert, where there was no one to be stung. The sand hissed against the porcelain flanks of the ghost town’s Carvel. It duned and piled in strange, eddy-chosen places.
Across the earth, over broken porches, banging shutters, howling unimpeded, whistled the wind. Through rusted streets, against crumbling buildings, currents of air flowed like water.
In New York, the Verrazano Bridge began its sweep whole from the Staten Island side, ending in the middle of nowhere. Halfway out over the Narrows, cables blew dangling like the ragged hem of a woman’s skirt.
Perhaps a hundred survivors led nomadic lives, scattered throughout the world. A few had settled, briefly, and children had come again to the earth. That was better; the children remembered nothing but their own lives. The remnants of men wandered, after fourteen years they wandered yet, as if in a dream.
Jake had been by himself for so long he had forgotten what it was like to be anyplace other than the desert. He was a hermit; he had learned desert ways, and he acted so wise and steady, there was a sort of crust about him.
It was not that he deliberately shunned contact with people, or that he hated civilization. What he remembered of humanity was heaven, and he wrote almost every day in his notebooks about the people he recalled.
“The blowup,” he printed neatly, “was an act of nature.” He looked up, out through the open door to the mountains, always on the horizon. Laying his palm against his forehead, he returned to the diary. “Our technology proved itself lo be no more than dust. Our planet was simply too crowded. There wasn’t enough of anything to go around.
“Now, in her wisdom, Nature has the few humans left struggling with the mutants. We are natural enemies.” Jake put down his pen, thinking for a moment about the little graveyard behind the shack. “May the best man win,” he added finally, slapping the thick diary closed.
The mutants had shown no more evidence of trying to stick together than the humans. They too led a solitary and nomadic life, scattered about the world. The mutants displayed a ferocious curiosity, and they examined whatever interested them in a way that could only be described as brutal. To be trapped by a curious mutant, young and eager to learn, often meant mutilation, sometimes death.
At Jake’s desert outpost there was an occasional human visitor. He called these migrants “pilgrims” in his notes. They all had stories which varied only in degree of horror.
There was a sweet well in the hermit’s yard. All who came through stopped for at least a day, and tales were exchanged into the starriest parts of the night. Jake was happy then: he felt important and vital.
Many pilgrims came to the shack injured, and a few died there. There had been a girl, a few months ago. Jake recalled her now as he drew water from the well. She was covered with burns, and she walked stiffly. She saw Jake and did not see him.
The desert man interposed himself in her path, and she collapsed in his arms. Jake dragged her to a cool place and went to the well. When he returned, cradled her head and dabbed her lips with water, she opened her eyes, and they were lackluster.
Jake buried her with the others, but he remained haunted. He felt, more and more each season, that time was passing him, and he told himself as he filled his books that he was essential to the continuance of the human race.
“There will be others,” he wrote.
* * * *
On one of his two-day treks to Easterly, he had found a tin placard, hot with the sun. It was yellow, and in blue letters it bore the legend “Yoo Hoo, America’s Favorite Chocolate Drink.” Smiling ruefully, Jake had stooped and turned the sign over. The blank side was covered with white, and in sun-faded red paint there were two words: “Phoenix House.” He nailed the sign to the side of his shack, and it looked just right.
In his notes, he wrote more and more about the methods of nature, and he began to think of himself as wiser than he really was. After his evening meal he stood out in the yard and watched the sun go down behind the shack, tinting the big metal mountains pink.
His favorite time of all was when a storm came and he could watch it from the moment it was conceived, against the mountain slopes, until it was fully upon him, battering all that he owned, and scaring him out of his senses. He thought of these shows as a gift of nature.
It was his habit to lean against the doorjamb, a piece of grass be
tween his teeth, and watch the turbulence brewing. First there was always the feeling of hot disturbance and conflict. A midday chill suddenly passed through the air. Then the hermit looked up and out, and he saw darkening streaks, like smoke, tossing and swirling out over the desert. He saw far-off bright flashes, followed by great slow rolls of mumbling thunder.
It quickly darkened then, and Jake trembled with anticipation. It wasn’t because he was a novice, but because he had gone through storms before that he became so nervous as the wind grew and the dark thickened.
Sand and debris came flying in off the desert and thunked into the sides of Phoenix House. The shack creaked and slapped like an old ship, and the hermit lit his Coleman lantern.
During the most savage parts of the storm, Jake frequently felt overcome with the sensation that his dry house was on the verge of flying apart around him. He grew certain he would be left naked, clutching his lantern and grinning, grinning insanely with terror into the raging wind and the howling dark.
Pulling the log nearer, he crouched over the crinkled pages and scribbled notes at the height of the storm, so that he could see later how frightened he had been, how full of repentance and promises, and he would be reminded of how glad he should be just to be alive. “Life,” he wrote, “is free for no man.”
When the turbulence had passed, the sky rapidly cleared and filled with stars, and the hermit, like the desert, was glad and refreshed, and they slept together.
“Convulsions,” he observed, “are natural, and renew my confidence.”
* * * *
On an afternoon three months after the girl had appeared and died, the hermit stood in his doorway looking out over the plain. He saw the air at the edge of his vision fairly congeal with the weight of an impending storm.
There was something slightly wrong, a little too powerful about the way the dark rain clouds were swirling. The charcoal-colored turbulence was high and piley; the air around the shack cooled more rapidly than it had ever done, as far back as Jake could recall.
Nature brewed all her storms in pretty much the same way, step by step, so that by the time the storm was upon you, you would be ready to believe the weather had always been the way it was at present. But on this afternoon it was as though certain phases of the buildup were missing. Jake was puzzled. Out there, in the center of the growing turmoil, he could see a curious light.
The more he concentrated on that point of artificial brightness, the more he could tell about it. After a moment he saw that the light was coming toward him; then he could see that it was moving very fast before the storm, and at last, there was that huge rooster-tail of dust kicked up by fast-moving vehicles in the sand.
Whoever it was had a long way to go before he arrived at the shack. Jake wasn’t sure there was time to get here before the storm. In his excitement, he ran out into the yard and jumped up and down, waving his arms and yelling. The prospect of having company during a storm filled him with glee.
Then something happened. The purpling boiling clouds towered high behind the onrushing vehicle, and suddenly Jake could see what was happening out there as though he were standing a few yards away. He saw that the vehicle was a jeep. Then he saw there was no one behind the wheel. In the back a woman sat upright, her hair long and blowing behind her, and she was beautiful. But where her eyes should have been there were only hard orbs of electric sparkle. Greenish, now blue . . . she was a mutant.
The vision could only be coming from a telepathic contact with the mutant. “She knows I’m here,” Jake said aloud, and he began to think about a place to hide.
She was pushing at him even now. He could feel her power in her message. She was broadcasting her name, “Ta Chaunce, Ta Chaunce . . .” It seemed to Jake that his brain was beginning to burn around the edges. He fought to shut her out, but he was battered and stunned by the unearthly light, growing and spreading in conjunction with the storm, like some malignancy radiating from the woman in the driverless jeep. He felt the first traces of the nausea that comes with unacceptable telepathic contact.
The jeep had swept closer, and now Jake could hear a faint buzzing. The awful light shifted from a pastel flickering to a harder, Day-Glow orange. It flashed and sputtered like a high-voltage wire. Behind the flashing there was a random snapping of white-hot lightning, big thick electric branches appearing for seconds at a time before the crash of thunder.
The young presence in the jeep sent out waves of malevolence, and Jake fought to free his mind from hers. His hands found the Coleman lantern, and he began to pump it up.
Ta Chaunce had been drawn to Jake’s area by the feeling of age and solitude she had picked up from his shack. She felt the desert wisdom of the hermit, inert and crinkly, waiting to be ripped and probed. For probing and ripping was her way, even with herself, although she never meant to hurt anyone or anything.
Jake could feel in Ta Chaunce a mixture of pride and confidence, with undercurrents of wonder and the careless freedom of unchallenged power. The images of Ta Chaunce crowded into him; involuntarily, his hands went up to cover his ears.
“Roll,” Ta Chaunce thought. “Faster.” The driverless jeep responded, careening across the desert. The mutant perched in the back with her dark hair shining and blowing, idly perceiving the hermit’s desperation.
When she arrived, screeching and bouncing, Ta Chaunce caused the jeep to slow and cruise around the shack. Chewing gum, she sniffed the air as the jeep circled, jouncing in ruts, investigating.
“Cease,” she thought, and the jeep came to a halt behind the shack, by the graves. Ta Chaunce silently got down and stood tall beside the hermit’s cemetery. The tumultuous air whirled around the spot like a funnel.
When their eyes met, fear overwhelmed the hermit. Ta Chaunce walked purposefully toward him, and he dropped his lantern and ran.
She did not watch him go. Her immediate purpose was to examine the shack: she could study the hermit later. Once she had discovered the secret of the shack, she need never again be puzzled by such things. And later, when she had examined the hermit, she would know this type too; and from the study of one she would learn the weaknesses and strengths of many.
She paused in the entrance of Phoenix House. The air was suddenly thick and cold, and Jake stopped, quivering in the sudden, ethereal quiet. Ta Chaunce’s boots were loud on the floor. She could smell time working in the house, and she was careful where she stepped.
“What do you want?” Jake’s voice quavered.
She turned and regarded him through the doorway, but made no sound except for the hissing and fizzing of her horrible sparkling eyes. Then her thoughts began to bombard his senses. Jake squeezed his eyes shut and pressed the sides of his head with his hands, as if he could force her images from his brain.
The shack was glowing with her power. Her mind was smoking here, touching there, passing up some things for later examination. What she touched unfolded, like a flower, then dropped, burned out and dead.
Jake felt her turning to the old piece of flypaper dangling from the center of the ceiling. It was a brittle strip of yellow paper, and the hermit could feel the mutant comparing it to the tattered windowshade, and then to himself.
Abruptly her mind went deeper into his. Revelation and irrelevance together assailed the hermit’s overloaded senses. He was torn between his drive to comprehend a little, and the need to survive whole. But his desire far outpaced his ability, and he buckled under the pressure of insistent unwanted visions. Jake’s eyes watered and he gasped for breath. His hands appeared in the sand before him, his throat caught, and he began to vomit.
Together the desert man and the mutant felt the sun, in days and days gone by, moving across the floor of Phoenix House with slow warming strokes. Ta Chaunce probed. She put the shack and the hermit through time past. There were nights of the shack groaning and ticking as the cold swept down from the mountains and the day’s heat rushed out to the open desert sky with nothing to retain it. The void above filled an
d refilled with stars, year after year.
Jake felt his brain slip the way a pail full of water sometimes slipped a foot or two in the well. He shook and wept while his head pulsed with the imagery of the mutant. Jake went down on his side, curling into the fetal position.
In the shack, Ta Chaunce felt the hermit fall, but she was not disturbed. Human emotion was not hers; compassion was a thing alien to her. She was equipped marvelously to explore and wander in a broken world. Now she was tuning in on an anonymous voice from some time far away. As she focused on that distant calling, her hooded eyes opened fully and the shack blazed as though it were filled with flares. Outside, Jake groaned and writhed; he squeezed his eyes shut.
The voice Ta Chaunce had picked up was located before even the arrival of the hermit. The speaker had been staring at the starry sky of the desert and had said, full of awe: “The more you look, the more you see . . .” It was this man who had painted the sign “Phoenix House.”
Orbit 16 - [Anthology] Page 15
