Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 2)

by Anthology

  "Our aspirations are different from yours," said the elephants. "But we are as proud of our heroes as you are of yours."

  "You have heroes?" said the leader, unable to hide his surprise.

  "Certainly." The elephants rattled off their roll of honor: "The Kilimanjaro Elephant. Selemundi. Mohammed of Marsabit. And the Magnificent Seven of Krueger Park: Mafunyane, Shingwedzi, Kambaki, Joao, Dzombo, Ndlulamithi, and Phelwane."

  "Are they here on Neptune?" asked the leader as his men began returning from the ship.

  "No," said the elephants. "You killed them all."

  "We must have had a reason," insisted the men.

  "They were there," said the elephants. "And they carried magnificent ivory."

  "See?" said the men. "We knew we had a reason."

  The elephants didn’t like that answer much, but they were too polite to say so, and the two species exchanged views and white lies all through the brief Neptunian night. When the sun rose again, the men voiced their surprise.

  "Look at you!" they said. "What’s happening?"

  "We got tired of walking on all fours," said the elephants. "We decided it’s more comfortable to stand upright."

  "And where are your trunks?" demanded the men.

  "They got in the way."

  "Well, if that isn’t the damnedest thing!" said the men. Then they looked at each other. "On second thought, this is the damnedest thing! We’re bursting out of our helmets!"

  "And our ears are flapping," said the leader.

  "And our noses are getting longer," said another man.

  "This is most disconcerting," said the leader. He paused. "On the other hand, I don’t feel nearly as much animosity toward you as I did yesterday. I wonder why?"

  "Beats us," said the elephants, who were becoming annoyed with the whining quality of his voice.

  "It’s true, though," continued the leader. "Today I feel like every elephant in the universe is my friend."

  "Too bad you didn’t feel that way when it would have made a difference," said the elephants irritably. "Did you know you killed sixteen million of us in the twentieth century alone?"

  "But we made amends," noted the men. "We set up game parks to preserve you."

  "True," acknowledged the elephants. "But in the process you took away most of our habitat. Then you decided to cull us so we wouldn’t exhaust the park’s food supply." They paused dramatically. "That was when Earth received its second alien visitation. The aliens examined the theory of preserving by culling, decided that Earth was an insane asylum, and made arrangements to drop all their incurables off in the future."

  Tears rolled down the men’s bulky cheeks. "We feel just terrible about that," they wept. A few of them dabbed at their eyes with short, stubby fingers that seemed to be growing together.

  "Maybe we should go back to the ship and consider all this," said the men’s leader, looking around futilely for something large enough in which to blow his nose. "Besides, I have to use the facilities."

  "Sounds good to me," said one of the men. "I got dibs on the cabbage."

  "Guys?" said another. "I know it sounds silly, but it’s much more comfortable to walk on all fours."

  The elephants waited until the men were all on the ship, and then went about their business, which struck them as odd, because before the men came they didn’t have any business.

  "You know," said one of the elephants. "I’ve got a sudden taste for a hamburger."

  "I want a beer," said a second. Then: "I wonder if there’s a football game on the subspace radio."

  "It’s really curious," remarked a third. "I have this urge to cheat on my wife–and I’m not even married."

  Vaguely disturbed without knowing why, they soon fell into a restless, dreamless sleep.

  Sherlock Holmes once said that after you eliminate the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

  Joseph Conrad said that truth is a flower in whose neighborhood others must wither.

  Walt Whitman suggested that whatever satisfied the soul was truth.

  Neptune would have driven all three of them berserk.

  "Truth is a dream, unless my dream is true," said George Santayana.

  He was just crazy enough to have made it on Neptune.

  "We’ve been wondering," said the men when the two groups met in the morning. "Whatever happened to Earth’s last elephant?"

  "His name was Jamal," answered the elephants. "Someone shot him."

  "Is he on display somewhere?"

  "His right ear, which resembles the outline of the continent of Africa, has a map painted on it and is in the Presidential Mansion in Kenya. They turned his left ear over–and you’d be surprised how many left ears were thrown away over the centuries before someone somewhere thought of turning them over–and another map was painted, which now hangs in a museum in Bombay. His feet were turned into a matched set of barstools, and currently grace the Aces High Show Lounge in Dallas, Texas. His scrotum serves as a tobacco pouch for an elderly Scottish politician. One tusk is on display at the British Museum. The other bears a scrimshaw and resides in a store window in Beijing. His tail has been turned into a fly swatter, and is the proud possession of one of the last vaqueros in Argentina."

  "We had no idea," said the men, honestly appalled.

  "Jamal’s very last words before he died were, ‘I forgive you,’ " continued the elephants. "He was promptly transported to a sphere higher than any man can ever aspire to."

  The men looked up and scanned the sky. "Can we see it from here?" they asked.

  "We doubt it."

  The men looked back at the elephants–except that they had evolved yet again. In fact, they had eliminated every physical feature for which they had ever been hunted. Tusks, ears, feet, tails, even scrotums, all had undergone enormous change. The elephants looked exactly like human beings, right down to their spacesuits and helmets.

  The men, on the other hand, had burst out of their spacesuits (which had fallen away in shreds and tatters), sprouted tusks, and found themselves conversing by making rumbling noises in their bellies.

  "This is very annoying," said the men who were no longer men. "Now that we seem to have become elephants," they continued, "perhaps you can tell us what elephants do?"

  "Well," said the elephants who were no longer elephants, "in our spare time, we create new ethical systems based on selflessness, forgiveness, and family values. And we try to synthesize the work of Kant, Descartes, Spinoza, Thomas Aquinas, and Bishop Berkeley into something far more sophisticated and logical, while never forgetting to incorporate emotional and aesthetic values at each stage."

  "Well, we suppose that’s pretty interesting," said the new elephants without much enthusiasm. "Can we do anything else?"

  "Oh, yes," the new spacemen assured them, pulling out their .550 Nitro Expresses and .475 Holland & Holland Magnums and taking aim. "You can die."

  "This can’t be happening! You yourselves were elephants yesterday!"

  "True. But we’re men now."

  "But why kill us?" demanded the elephants.

  "Force of habit," said the men as they pulled their triggers.

  Then, with nothing left to kill, the men who used to be elephants boarded their ship and went out into space, boldly searching for new life forms.

  Neptune has seen many species come and go. Microbes have been spontaneously generated nine times over the eons. It has been visited by aliens thirty-seven different times. It has seen forty-three wars, five of them atomic, and the creation of 1,026 religions, none of which possessed any universal truths. More of the vast tapestry of galactic history has been played out on Neptune’s foreboding surface than any other world in Sol’s system.

  Planets cannot offer opinions, of course, but if they could, Neptune would almost certainly say that the most interesting creatures it ever hosted were the elephants, whose gentle ways and unique perspectives remain fresh and clear in its memory. It mourns the fact that they
became extinct by their own hand. Kind of.

  A problem would arise when you asked whether Neptune was referring to the old-new elephants who began life as killers, or the new-old ones who ended life as killers.

  Neptune just hates questions like that.

  MOON DOGS

  Michael Swanwick

  He went to a spa where, for a fee, they would drown you as often as you liked. You wouldn't actually die, because they put a shunt in your skull and kept the brain oxygenated, but your body didn't know that and your survival reflexes would kick in so that you'd choke and gag and fight for oxygen as you experienced the desperation of approaching death. You could thrash and struggle for hours. The water was ice-cold and as dark as tea. If you panicked and did too much damage to your body, there was a clinic nearby where you could rest while solicitous friends in white coats cured it.

  After they had emptied his lungs, removed the shunt, and switched on a small fire, the counselors gave Nick a blanket and withdrew, leaving him alone in the woods to contemplate the experience in peace.

  Shivering, Nick drew the blanket around him. He didn't feel any better than he had before. He hadn't experienced any kind of release at all. His mood was as bleak as ever. Life still felt hopeless.

  A while later, he put on the clothing they had left him, folded up the blanket, switched off the fire, and stood. The night was quiet and dark, lit only by a low moon. There was a path over the hill that led to the lodge. He heard two of the staff laughing quietly over something one had said, just before their propane torches disappeared. But he didn't feel like going back to the lodge and their hired warmth and camaraderie. Not just yet.

  Instead, he put the moon to his back and went the other direction, deeper into the woods, and was quickly lost. He did not care. The woods were tangled and random, a jumble of tree trunks and deadfall, some lying broken on the ground, others propped up by other trees. There was no pattern in them, he reflected, nothing to fix the eye upon. It seemed a perfect metaphor for everything.

  It was then he saw the sycamores, pale in the moonlight.

  The sycamores formed a ghostly ring around an empty darkness. They looked like a Druidic temple. He thought at first that they were former ornamentals—this had been a populous suburb not a century ago—marking the perimeter of a house long fallen to ruin. But then he saw how the ground within sank downward and realized that the bowl-shaped depression they marked was carved by the same small stream that had fed his drowning pool. At its center would be another ceremonial pool, perhaps, or else a minuscule swamp.

  He walked closer and as he did so a pale white flame resolved itself into existence at the center of the darkness. He squinted, unsure as to its reality, and continued walking.

  Then he saw the white shape stoop, and heard a splash of water.

  “Hello?” he said.

  The shape flinched, turned, and in a woman's voice said,

  “Who are you?”

  “My name's Nick. Do you want me to go away?”

  “No, I'm about done here. You can dry me off.”

  Nick walked to the edge of the water. The woman stood knee-deep within it. In the gloom she was hard to see. Her crotch was filled with shadow; her navel was the merest smudge. He couldn't make out her mouth or nose at all. Twin falls of long, dark hair framed eyes that mirrored the black water in which she stood.

  “The towel's by your feet.”

  He was reaching for the towel when something came bounding out of obscurity. It was a gundog, long and as elegantly constructed as antique Swiss clockwork. “Touch the lady and you're a dead man,” it growled. There was a clicking noise from its abdomen.

  “Stand down your armaments, Otto. He's not threatening me.”

  With a mechanical whine the gundog sat. There were other machines in the woods, gray shadows that prowled and circled without rest. Nick tried to count them. Three, six—too many to count.

  The woman stood before Nick and turned her back. “Well?”

  Carefully he dried her off, starting with her hair and shoulders, moving down her back and over her rump. Her body had the sculptural perfection of a Brancusi marble. He crouched to dry the back of her legs, and when he reached the ankles, she turned around to face him. She was so close he could smell her: fresh and clean, with accents of oak-leaf and cedar.

  She took the towel and did her front, then squatted and let Otto blow hot air on her.

  When she was dry, the woman dressed in jeans and a shirt. She wrapped her hair up in the towel, like a turban, and said, “My house is just over the hill. Cocoa?”

  “Why not?”

  * * * *

  The kitchen was bright and clean. They sat at the table and talked. Her name, she said, was Selene. The gundogs came and went, patrolling the grounds, occasionally lying silent at her feet. Their metal nails clicked softly on the floor. “Why do you want to die?” Selene asked, when they'd been talking a while.

  “I don't want to die—it's something I'm trying to purge from my subconscious. But when you've seen your parents die, and your brothers die, and your sister die, and nine-tenths of the kids in the first orphanage die, and half of those in the second ... well. There's bound to be a certain amount of survivor guilt.”

  She studied his face. “No,” she said at last, “it's not that.”

  “Then I don't know what it is.”

  “No. You don't.”

  “And you do?”

  “I didn't say that. But if I had your problem, I would at least know what it was. I'll bet you live in one of the new city-cores. Neon, noise, smoky little bars. Everybody crammed as close together as they can get.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So that's evasion. You want to understand yourself, you've got to experience a little isolation. Go off alone by yourself. In the winter, sometimes I go for weeks without seeing another human being.”

  “What exactly do you do out here?”

  “I hunt. That's what the ‘dogs are for. I have a little money and so I hunt. Deer mostly. But I bagged a puma not long back.”

  “It hardly seems fair. All that machinery against one little deer.”

  Her look was unfathomable. “There's the couch. Get some sleep. I'll wake you in the morning and take you out with me.

  You'll see then.”

  The woods were misty and indistinct. Selene led him out into them, her hounds flowing about her like a river of quicksilver. She wore a Teflon jacket over her plaid shirt, and she carried a hunting knife on her belt. Amber goggles hung from a cord around her neck.

  “Okay,” Nick said. “So how is this thing done?”

  “First we deploy the ‘dogs.” Selene swept out an arm and half the pack scattered into the surrounding woods. The remaining six stayed with her, alert and tireless. The sound of the machines thrashing through the undergrowth died away to nothing surprisingly quickly.

  “What do we do now?”

  “Enjoy the woods.” She drew in a deep breath, let it out.

  “Smell those pines! The ‘dogs will let us know when they've flushed something worthwhile.”

  “I think...”

  “Don't. Don't think, don't talk, just walk. And listen. Try to appreciate how lucky you are to be here at all.”

  * * * *

  Hunting, it seemed, consisted largely of walking. Selene moved unhurriedly, picking easy ways, going always deeper into the woods. Occasionally one of the ‘dogs barked once or twice in the distance. “Just letting me know where they are,” she said when Nick asked. “Now, hush.”

  Sometimes she strolled casually, heedlessly along. Other times she would tense, listening, watching, every nerve strained. Nick couldn't figure out the rhythms. Following in her wake, he stared at her long, long legs, her broad shoulders and fine back, her perfect ass. She was an Amazon.

  He couldn't figure her out. He couldn't help wanting her.

  At noon they sent one of the ‘dogs back to the house for sandwiches and a thermos of herbal tea. They ate
sitting on a crumbled foundation wall, halfway up a mountain. One of the gundogs crouched at Selene's feet, staring out over the forest.

  The trees went on forever. “Everything, far as the eye can see, used to be city. No place you've ever heard of either, just an endless sprawl of no-name tract housing, malls, petty manufacturing, sewage treatment plants. And now—”

  “Turn off your ‘dogs,” Nick said.

  “What?”

  “Let's be alone, you and I. Turn off the ‘dogs.”

  “No.”

  He picked up a stick, scraped a line in the dirt. “What are you afraid of?”

  She looked at him again. Those unfathomable green eyes.

  “My husband.”

  “You have a husband?”

  “It's a complicated story.”

  “Tell me.”

  For a long moment she was silent, gathering her thoughts.

  Then she said, “You and I are alike in some ways. We're both orphans. Only my family didn't die of cholera or malaria or typhoid fever. They were killed by Sacred Vaccine.”

  “I don't—”

  “It was a religious cult. There were dozens just like it.

  They thought the human race was facing extinction. So they decided to fight back against the microbes with human sacrifice. Does that make any sense to you?”

  “Well, in a way, yeah. You're afraid, so you take control by becoming what you fear.”

  “My family was lucky—three kids, all healthy. My parents took us out into the country, to isolate us from what was going on. They had enough money to do that.”

  Nick nodded. He knew the type well enough. She was a plague heiress—one of those who stood at the confluence where several streams of inheritance ran together. She'd probably never had to work in her life.

  “One day there was a knock on the door. It was our neighbors. They killed everyone but me. I was the youngest.

  They smeared their sacred sign on my forehead with blood and then married me to one of their members. Then they let me go. I was only five years old. Joshua—my husband—was seven.”