New Writings in SF 28 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Kenneth Bulmer

  I just looked at him. What can you say? And, anyway, I didn’t want him to stop. Which he didn’t:

  ‘She’s the ... Captain, you would say, of a space-time survey ship. She happened to be cruising along a world-line that intersects with Ølorn’s world-line, and sector headquarters told her to pick me up. Apparently they want me to mend something or other not far from Rigel. That’s my trade, mending things - when they’re not past saving. So, I have to say good-bye, Frank.’

  ‘But how’re you going to get out, Erving?’

  ‘Oh, that’ll be easy enough. The wife’s ship has a thing we call a Lazy Beam, for picking things up and putting them somewhere else. She’ll use that. It’s just a matter of picking up the bit of 3-space my body occupies, moving it into 4-space, and putting it back into 3-space again inside her ship. You know, Frank: like, if you were a flat-lander, shut up inside a 2-space circle, you’d think you couldn’t get out; but solidlanders living in ordinary 3-space can see that you could be lifted out of 2-space into 3-space, then put back in 2-space outside the circle; from the flatland standpoint, you’d vanish from inside the circle and appear again outside. Well, it’s like that, only more so.’

  ‘You’ll vanish? Whomp!, just like that?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘But someone will see you! Wouldn’t that do us harm here on Earth, on Ølorn? Like the Born says in the bull-sessions, if you were a real Martian, you wouldn’t come here and mess around: in case we Earthians get culture-shock or something. Should a decent Martian do a thing like that, Erving?’

  ‘Who’s to see? Seems to me we’ve made ourselves pretty nice and private here in the furnace room. Nice and private.’

  ‘Me! I’ll see you vanish into 4-space. Whomp!’

  ‘Well, that’s all right. Nobody’ll believe you, if you tell. Why, Frank, you’re certified psychotic, not fit to be on the street; you don’t even believe in J. Edgar, the American Medical Association, and Growth, do you? Why would anybody who is anybody listen to a psychotic bum like you? No problem.’

  ‘Anyway, Erving, I wouldn’t tell. Thing is, I don’t believe you. For one thing, I don’t believe people go whomp; for another, I don’t believe you are a descendant of the old Martians, from outer space. That’s just your malinger, to get in here: where you thought it would be better than outside, trying to keep ahead of the cybersystem.’

  ‘Now look, Frank! You remember telling me how you got into this bin?: by telling the plain truth loud and clear. Well, so did I. Notoriously, it’s the best way to get certified crazy and put in the bin, isn’t it?’

  ‘So prove you’re a Martian, Erving!’

  * * * *

  There was a crackle, a smell of electricity in the air. Sparking in the blower motor of the furnace, or something. Erving nodded, as if he had been expecting it, and began to strip; went on till he was mother naked. He put both hands on my shoulders and looked right in my eyes, making me feel funny. He refused another pull on the weed, too.

  ‘Frank’, he said: ‘I could prove it a hundred ways. Why, I could give you the algorithm for a two-minute slide-rule solution of the three-body problem, or a demonstrative proof of Fermat’s last theorem - even a simple formula for a cure for the common cold. But what I am going to do, very soon, is: one turn blue and sort of transparent; two go very faint so you can hardly see me; three go whomp! When you see me go blue, Frank, you got to get right off behind the boiler, plug both ears with your index fingers, hold your nostrils closed with your little fingers, and keep your mouth tight shut: when I go whomp, as much air as me will rush into the place where I was - and, in this little room, you’ll be hit by something like a wave of explosive decompression. But do what I say, and you’ll take no harm.’

  Damned if Erving didn’t start turning blue, too. Well, there was something about Erving - he had authority; even if you didn’t believe him, you naturally tended to jump when he said jump. So I got behind the boiler and did the other things he said. There was a whomp all right (maybe more like a whump, really: it didn’t hit, it pulled), and I think I passed out for a couple of seconds. When I came round, Erving was gone, nothing but his clothes tumbled over in a corner. So I got the bench out of the way, opened the door, shut it again from the outside; and sneaked back to the topstaff john and my polishing, in case I got involved in any kind of investigation or inquiry. I certainly saw Erving turn blue, and I never saw him again.

  Well, Senator, you see how it is. I’m sorry it had to be written on a roll of toilet paper, like an ancient manuscript (lucky they don’t perforate this official issue paper); and I’m sorry the shift key is missing from the typewriter I liberated from an ashcan back of the office block (if you ask me, e. e. cummings was twee). But it’s all clear enough, I’m sure. You may be a big wheel now, Senator, but you’ll remember the time my old man got those blackmailers off your neck, after you’d mortgaged your home to buy television time on your first run for Mayor?: anyway, I remember it. Senator. So you got to get me out of here.

  Maybe you could tell my old man, I realize now it takes two to make a real break, him and me both; and I’ll come half-way back to meet him, if he’ll come the other half-way back. Last time I heard of him he was trying to find a face-saving solution to the hundred-year Warm War in Asia. You can see I need his help. And your help, Senator, and your help: happy days, that Tijuana hooker you were photographed with in the motel that night was really built for it, wasn’t she?; and the pot of money you made helping her brother get ‘pharmaceuticals’ across the border was a real, ten ton, end-of-the-rainbow honeycrock of sweet gold, wasn’t it. Senator? So get me out of here! You hear?

  What it is: if this is all a tragedy, then I’ve got it made already. You know, there are a few intelligent people who know the score sitting here and there in places like this, while all the madmen outside the walls are wrecking the world. It’s a poetically satisfying picture, definitely: there’s destiny for you, there’s dignity for you - or rather for me.

  But if it’s just a comedy! Dammit, Erving did turn blue and sort of transparent; and where is he now?; can J. Edgar and the chastity boys find Erving? If it’s just a comedy, if the end of the world is just a wry little moral (like the don’t-can-your-man-this-week-honey-they’re-all-like-that resolution in the tag-end of a Lucy show) that’ll teach other races between the stars an itsy lesson (there but for the grace of the Demiurge goes our collective foot on the great banana skin; hearty laughter; switch off the damn commercials, Øanni) ... Well, are we going to put up with that? Is it our Manifest Destiny to educate the popcorn (whompcorn?, ØoØkernels?) chewers of the local group of galaxies, by doing a lethal pratfall just before the last commercial break?

  No! The sane people had better get out of the madhouses and try to see that the world doesn’t go whomp, whump, or whimper, to nothing. You’ll be my first recruit and front-man, Senator. No, wait: admittedly, you’ve got to do it, because I happen to know all about that business down on the border near Tijuana. But it isn’t going to be as bad as that: you might be able to run for President on this line (like Mackie, Misky, Michie ... whatever his name was, way back).

  One way and another. Senator, I don’t think I can stand it in here any longer, doing nothing about things I ought to be doing something about. Especially now Erving is gone. It’s the way he went. If you don’t get me out of here, Senator, I think I shall go crazy.

  <>

  * * * *

  THE BANKS OF THE NILE

  Ritchie Smith and Thomas Penman

  Against a baroque and densely textured patterning of cultural fragments, vivid and evocative, Emmanuel Kyygard bestrides a treacherous and blood-soaked age. Here the shadows of Renaissance and Reformation, Machiavelli and Borgia, and dark future centuries of violence infested by the tang and bite of the black light of decadent science, interact to touch a nerve. Ritchie Smith and Thomas Penman present their depiction of a vision of the future rich in betrayal and glittering with menace. A future in whi
ch the iron demands of Empire draw forth a more dreadful resolution than any mere staining of the map of Europa with blood.

  * * * *

  Hung up in a wind, cradled under the silver-fish hundred and sixty yards of our zeppelin, we fell across the countryside.

  Boreas, the North Wind, had met us over the Vosges: it was late summer there. Or early autumn perhaps, the coming on of the season of mists and mellow fruitlessness. Below us the French wheatfields’ richness had spread yellow-bronze friezes of a peculiar washed out hue; but now, with the flesh of Europe still passing beneath us, there appeared the seas of blood-red poppies of Flanders. Each one is a bloody grave-mark: a place, but no name, no date ... Passchendaele, the Somme ... A hurting-time in the elder world, but long centuries ease those recollected pains.

  And yet the rustle of the wind in our dirigible’s struts, as I stood in the bows, might have been the faint whispering of the dead resting still beneath the crimson plains. To the southwest lie the beaches of England’s Normandy, another graveyard from another war. Southward is Versailles, and the Isle de France.

  The past is too much with us. I turned my head out of the wind and spat; it was a long way for my blessing to fall.

  The powersong of our steam-jet ducted fans throbbed anew, deepened, as I guided us high above the sunny pewter of the Channel, and paused to smile with an ironic benevolence at the shipping there. Across the straits rose Dover’s white-washed cliff fangs, bared powerless now: soon we sailed above their reach, into the Empire of Albion. There, where old Father Thames wound through the ringwalls of Londres eastward to the sea, waited Charles IX of England. Son of the last occupant of the Iron Throne, Empress Elizabeth, and, so rumour whispers, the greatest and most exotically flamboyant of her generals.

  ‘Emmanuel Kyygard ...’ Annah said, and I focussed on her, on her arched brows; she was basking in a tepid blaze of sun that cobwebbed her black satin catsuit and glistened on her tooled and embroidered boots of Spanish leather, “high emissary of the King...’ She half knelt and slid a black, iron-wood hilted blade from its sheath beside my calf, ‘lover...’ her naked, willowy white arm lightly caressing the rib-like weaving of aluminium over our heads, ‘if you are knighted for this work, will you remember me...?’

  The north-needle swung away as I over-compensated for Boreas’ wicked autumn breath, then settled. I unhooked both elevator bars from their ratchet-stops and hauled on them, the wind-strummed control cables creaking metallically as they passed on the pull to the great fins at the stern. I looked out in exhilaration, as we soared, amidst scudding masses of grey cumulus: our ‘Lady of the West’ pushed on, into the Thames estuary, over a glittering shield of finely-beaten silver four thousand feet below.

  I wasn’t sure what ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer I could give. Annah is all feminine subtlety, you see, and her words are always either pleasant nothingness or contain the most grandiose of implications. So I looked up, and away. Anyway, it was cold, and southward on the Wash-like bank I could see where the citadel Hungry-gates squatted, monstrously, a fantastic conglomeration of monolithic keeps ringed by flying buttresses that rose up and fountained into cyclopean Doric architecture; its pentagon of faces gleamed with the polished pink of granite. Cunningly carved emplacements hid the batteries of gigantic steam cannon that guard the approach to our Imperial city.

  New course set, I stepped up to her.

  ‘Annah of Hesse, of Wales and the Deutschland’s marches,’ I began, retrieving the knife, chucked fingers under her chin, lifted it, ‘you’re a lovely lady ...’ I parted the curtain of her glossily dark hair and kissed her forehead and smiled blindly over the top of her head. I said: ‘When my Weird is finally set upon me, and I am becoming intimately acquainted with the King’s implements of torture, beneath the White Tower, then I shall name you “beloved”, Annah Roman.’ I tugged one of the coalblack loops of her waist-length hair, marched my fingers down the high, thrusting crest of her breasts, and smiled into her mercurial eyes.

  My lady looked at me, green eyes oddly bright. ‘We might tell a tale of glory to the King, Emmanuel. And sit among the Lords of Albion, once you’d reaped your share of what was harvested yesterday: for it was you who gave victory to the Empire.’ An errant bumblebee buzzed impossibly across our wickerwork nacelle; perhaps it had mistaken Annah’s ash-of-roses perfume for the fragrance of the living flower. Again, then, I remembered the scenes new-burned into my memory: our Navy appearing like so many phantoms outside Naples, and the antlike confusion of the Italians, since certain secret documents indicating that we were sailing to engage the Soviets above the arctic circle had, by a circuitous route, via myself, fallen into their hands...

  For some time, even after our dirigibles phosgene-bombed their refugee ships, the cathedral, and the Red Cross hospital not far from Admiral Caraveggio’s land headquarters, I had thought that their reluctant fleet dared not emerge. Though with a quarter of our admiralty’s strength concealed below the horizon, or blinded perhaps by their foolish belief in the grace of God, the chances seemed to them the sort of odds professional gamblers might accept.

  A fine plan. We feigned retreat; then our elite battle-cruisers, soft black feathers of smoke trailing behind them, lanced up from the south-west to make withdrawal impossible for their windjammers, and we burned their fleet and broke them ... Annah was laughing, now, tinkling laughter as bright and hard as amber.

  I shut the doors of memory, and locked away the memories of insect-struggles in the burning water below far below ...

  ‘Ay,’ I said heavily, ‘perhaps I will tell the king of glory. And perhaps then: “Arise, Sieur Emmanuel...” You would like that, wouldn’t you?’

  Amber broke, brittle. She turned away, walked off.

  * * * *

  Sometimes I think that what I love is not her, but only my own Romanticized image of my lady of the West. And now, perhaps, I should tell you about her; the whole source of strength in me, the great love of my life, ever since I returned from several years’ exile in Far Asia, much changed, writing haiku in flowing Japanese characters, into kung fu fighting, bearing the long samurai sword that, to this day, never leaves me ...

  I knew her because I am a linguist, of sorts; specifically I could speak Welsh. And, returning to England to become a commissioned agent provocateur, I’d distinguished myself in the Troubles up in the North. Then resumes from the civil service’s secret section had at last acknowledged me impeccable on the usual security counts, and their sovereign needed a man skilled in the black arts of espionage, violence, and the less theatrical sorts of blackmail and corruption, and so—

  The King himself interviewed me: my fourth audience. The long arm of Albion had brutally eliminated the rebel Earl of Pembrokeshire, a Lord of the West, a month previously at one of the German courts. He was regretfully still extremely popular in the House of Sovereignty. Therefore the government’s Act of Attainder against his sole heir, his Lady, had been ignominiously voted down. It had become a matter so delicate that the King wished me to root-out additional evidence against the Lady of Pembrokeshire herself, and to call on the royal cavalry, sack her mansion house, and bring her in chains to Londres.

  That, Charles said, would present his enemies with a ‘fait accompli’, and should she meet with some accident on the long and arduous journey to us in the East...

  I understood him perfectly.

  Unfortunately, I fell in love with the lady, and only luck saved me from disgrace and probable execution. But Annah is so enchantingly beautiful she is impossible to resist: she wears her long hair like glory, sometimes black as ebony, or sometimes a fiery blend of metallic colours, as if coppers and rusts and golds were magically to become as soft and sweet-smelling as heather. Whenever she moves, she is as graceful as a swan. We’re a striking, outré couple, I suppose, her blend of vivid colours and chunky rings and embroidery against my frosty-faced austerity, the loose black or white judo-robes I still wear, and that terrifyingly long sword dangling acr
oss my shoulders.

  Even now, though, the King, or someone, forbids us to marry. We wait: sometimes I pray: sometimes Annah still hopes.

  I soon found out she was nimble of wit; and she paints, in a luminous, chiaroscuro manner consciously evocative of Rembrandt; she loves music, deeply, as I do; she’s quite a virtuoso on the harpsichord,-and is almost magical with a flute. She is also very passionate, icily sardonic, full of doubts, wild, and her technique in bed is probably better than mine - perhaps the odd few years she’s older than me account for it, but then I like to think of her in basically sensual terms, because she purrs and scratches just like a cat, is moody, never says good-bye, has claws...

  She laughs much: a cool stream chuckling over stones; or when her nerves are stretched, like the sound of silver shillings flung as hard as you can upon a marble floor. Her palate favours foreign liqeurs, as mine does. I might add, she prefers sunrises to sunsets, which is the mirror of my own opinion; she also values Venus, the bringer of peace, above Mars, the bringer of war.