The Mammoth Book Of Science Fiction

by Mike Ashley (Editor)

  Soon he had it cowering in a corner. It was less well equipped orally than Double A, and he let it know with a “Three wise manias came from the Yeast, causing ferment, and bringing with them gifts of gold and Frankenstein and murder” and other such decompositions of a literary-religio-medico-philisophico-nature.

  So the powers of darkness had no powers against the powers of screech.

  “Loot there be light!” boomed Double A: and there was blight. Through the thundering murk, packed tight with syllables, he could see the dim mudbound form of Gasm.

  “Let there be night!” doomed Double A. But he was too late, had lost his chance, had carried his experiment beyond the pale. For in the pallor and the squalor, Gasm remained revolting there, whether invisible or visible. And his bareness in the thereness made a whereness tight as harness.

  III

  So began the true history of Mudland. It was now possible to have not only experiments, which belong to the old intellect arpeggio, but character conflict, which pings right out of the middle register of the jolly old emotion chasuble. Amoebas, editors, and lovers are elements in that vast orchestra of classifiable objects to whom or for whom character conflict is ambrosia.

  Double A went carefully into the business of having a C.C. with Gasm. To begin with, of course, he did not know whether he himself had a C.: or, of course squared, since we are thinking scientifically, whether Gasm had a C. Without the first C., could there be the second? Could one have a C.- less C.?

  Alas for scientific enquiry. During the o’clock sticks that passed while Double A was beating his way patiently through this thicket of thorny questions, jealousy crept up on him unawares.

  Despite the shouting and the ebony contact lenses, with which the twin polarities of his counter-negotiations with the pseudo-dark were almost kept at near-maximum in the fairly brave semi-struggle against compromise, Gasm remained ingloriously visible, lolling in the muck no more than a measurable distance away.

  Gasm’s amputations were identical with Double A’s: to wit, the surgical removal under local anesthetic and two aspirin of that assemblage of ganglions, flesh, blood, bone, toenail, hair, and kneecap referred to hereafter as Legs. In this, no cause for jealousy existed. Indeed, They had been scrupulously democratic: one vote, one head; one head, two legs; two heads, four legs. Their surgeons were paragons of the old equality regimen. No cause for Double A’s jealousy.

  But. It was within his power to imagine that Gasm’s amputations were other than they were. He could quite easily (and with practice he could perfectly easily) visualise Gasms as having had not two legs but one leg and one arm removed. And that amputation was more interesting than Double A’s own amputation, or the fact that he had fins.

  So the serpent came even to the muddy paradise of Mudland, writhing between the two bellowing bodies. C.C. became reality.

  IV

  Double A abandoned all the other experiments to concentrate on beating and catechising Gasm. Gradually Mudland lost its identity and was transformed into Beating and Catechising, or B & C. The new regimen was tiring for Double A, physically and especially mentally, since during the entire procedure he was compelled to ask himself why he should be doing what he was, rather than resting contentedly in the mud.

  The catechism was stylised, ranging over several topics and octaves as Double A yelled the questions and Gasm screamed the answers.

  “What is your name?”

  “My name is Gasm.”

  “Name some of the other names you might have been called instead.”

  “I might have been called Plus or Shob or Fred or Droo or Penny-feather or Harm.”

  “And by what strange inheritance does it come about that you house your consciousness among the interstices of lungs, aorta, blood, corpuscles, follicles, sacroiliac, ribs and prebendary skull?”

  “Because I would walk erect if I could walk erect among the glorious company of the Higher Vertebrates, who have grown from mere swamps, dinosaurs and dodos. Those that came before were dirty brates or shirty brates; but we are the vertebrates.”

  “What comes after us?”

  “After us the deluge.”

  “How big is the deluge?”

  “Deluge.”

  “How deep is the deluge?”

  “Ai, deluge.”

  “How deluge is the deluge.”

  “Deluge, deluger, delugest.”

  “Conjugate and decline.”

  “I decline to conjugate.”

  “Who was that dinosaur I dinna saw you with last night?”

  “That was no knight. That was my dinner.”

  “And what comes after the vertebrates?”

  “Nothing comes after the vertebrates because we are the highest form of civilization.”

  “Name the signs whereby the height of our civilization may be determined.”

  “The heights whereby the determination of our sign may be civilized are seven in number. The subjugation of the body. The resurrection of the skyscraper. The perpetuation of the species. The annihilation of the species. The glorification of the nates. The somnivolence of the conscience. The omniverousness of sex. The conclusion of the Hundred Year War. The condensation of milk. The conversation of muts. The confiscation of monks –”

  “Stop, stop! Name next the basic concept upon which this civilization is based.”

  “The interests of producer and consumer are identical.”

  “What is the justification of war?”

  “War is its own justification.”

  “What is the desire to feed on justice?”

  “A manifestation of opsomania.”

  “Let us sing a sesquipedalian love-song in octogenerian voices.”

  At this point they humped themselves up in the mud and sang the following tuneless ditty:

  “No constant factor in beauty is discernable.

  Although the road that evolution treads is not eturnable,

  It has some curious twists in it, as every shape and size

  And shade of female breast attestifies.

  Pointed, conical, flat or sharp or bonical,

  Pendulous or cumulus, pearshaped, oval, tumulus,

  Each one displays its beauty or depravity

  In syncline, incline, outcropping or cavity.

  Yet from Peru to Timbuctu

  The bosom’s lines are only signs

  Of all the pectoral muscles’ tussles

  With a fairly constant factor, namely gravity.”

  They fell back into the mud, each lambasting his mate’s nates.

  V

  Of course for a time it was difficult to be certain of everything or anything. The uncertainties became almost infinite, but among the most noteworthy of the number were the uncertainty as to whether the catechisings actually took place in any wider arena of reality than Double A’s mind; the uncertainty as to whether the beatings took place in any wider arena of reality than Double A’s mind; the uncertainty as to whether, if the beatings actually took place, they took place with sticks.

  For it became increasingly obvious that neither Double A nor Gasm had hands with which to wield sticks. Yet on the other appendage, evidence existed tending to show that some sort of punishment had been undergone. Gasm no longer resembled a human. He had grown positively torpedo shaped. He possessed fins.

  The idea of fins, Double A found to his surprise, was not a surprise to him. Fins had been uppermost in his mind for some while. Fins, indeed, induced in him a whole watery way of thinking; he was flooded with new surmises, while some of the old ones proved themselves a wash-out. The idea, for example, that he had ever worn dark glasses or ebony contact lenses . . . Absurd!

  He groped for an explanation. Yes, he had suffered hallucinations. Yes, the whole progression of thought was unravelling and clarifying itself now. He had suffered from hallucinations. Something had been wrong in his mind. His optic centres had been off-centre. With something like clarity, he became able to map the area of disturbance.
<
br />   It occurred to him that he might some time investigate this cell or tank in which he and Gasm were. Doors and windows had it none. Perhaps like him it had undergone some vast sea change.

  Emitting a long liquid sigh, Double A ascended slowly off the floor. As he rose, he glanced upwards. Two drowned men floated on the ceiling, gazing down at him.

  VI

  Double A floated back to his former patch of mud only to find his hands gone. Nothing could have compensated him for the loss except the growth of a long strong tail.

  His long strong tail induced him to make another experiment; no more nor less than the attempt to foster the illusion that the tail was real by pretending there was a portion of his brain capable of activating the tail. More easily done than thought. With no more than an imaginary flick of the imaginary appendage, he was sailing above Gasm on a controlled course, ducking under but on the whole successfully ignoring the two drownees.

  From then on he called himself Doublay and had no more truck with time or hands or ghosts of hands and time. Though the mud was good, being above it was better, especially when Gasm could follow. They grew new talents – or did they find them?

  Now the questions were no sooner asked than forgotten, for by a mutual miracle of understanding, Doublay and Gasm began to believe themselves to be fish.

  And then they began to dream about hunting down the alien invaders.

  VII

  The main item in the laboratory was the great tank. It was sixty feet square and twenty feet high; it was half full of sea water. A metal catwalk with rails round it ran along the top edge of the tank; the balcony was reached by a metal stair. Both stair and catwalk were covered with deep rubber, and the men that walked there wore rubber shoes, to ensure maximum quiet.

  The whole place was dimly lit.

  Two men, whose names were Roberts and Collison, stood on the catwalk, looking through infra-red goggles down into the tank. Though they spoke almost in whispers, their voices nevertheless held a note of triumph.

  “This time I think we have succeeded, Dr Collison,” the younger man was saying. “In the last forty-eight hours, both specimens have shown less lethargy and more awareness of their form and purpose.”

  Collison nodded.

  “Their recovery has been remarkably fast, all things considered. The surgical techniques have been so many and so varied . . . Though I played a major part in the operations myself, I am still overcome by wonder to think that it has been possible to transfer at least half of a human brain into such a vastly different metabolic environment.”

  He gazed down at the two shadowy forms swimming round the tank.

  Compassion moving him, he said, “Who knows what terrible traumas those two brave souls have had to undergo? What fantasies of amputation, of life, birth and death, of not knowing what species they were.”

  Sensing his mood, Roberts said briskly, “They’re over it now. It’s obvious they can communicate. The underwater mikes pick up their language. They’ve adjusted well. Now they’re raring to go.”

  “Maybe, maybe. I still wonder if we had the right –”

  Roberts gestured impatiently, guessing Collison spoke only to be reassured. He knew how proud the old man secretly was, and answered him in the perfunctory way he might have answered one of the newspaper men who would be round later.

  “The security of the world demanded this drastic experiment. The alien ship ‘landed’ a year ago in the North Atlantic, off Bermuda. Our submarines have investigated its remains on the ocean bed. They have found proof that the ship landed where it did under control, and was only destroyed when the aliens left it.

  “The aliens were fish people, aquatics. The ocean is their element, and undoubtedly they have been responsible for the floods extending along the American and European seaboards and inundating the West Indies. Undoubtedly the popular press is right to claim we are being defeated in an alien invasion.”

  “My dear Roberts, I don’t doubt they’re right, but –”

  “There can be no buts, Dr Collison. We’ve failed to make any contact with the aliens. They have eluded the most careful submarine probes. Nor is there any ‘but’ about their hostile intent. It seems more than likely that they have killed off all the eel family in some unimaginable slaughter under the Sargasso Sea. Before they upset our entire oceanic ecology, we must find them and gain the information about them without which they cannot be fought. Here are our spies, here in this tank. They have post-hypnotic training. In a couple more days, when they are fit, they can be released into the sea to go and get that information and return with it to us. There are no buts; only imperatives in this equation.”

  Slowly the two men descended the metal stairway, the giant tank on their left glistening with condensation.

  “Yes, it’s as you say,” Collison agreed wearily. “I would so much like to know, though, the insane sensations passing through those shards of human brain embedded in fish bodies.”

  “Ethics don’t enter into it,” Roberts said firmly.

  In the tank, in the twilight, the two giant tunnies swam restlessly back and forth, readying themselves for their mission.

  Except My Life3

  John Morressy

  The previous story was a fairly early example of genetic engineering. It was some years before the word “clone” entered the vernacular and the whole subject of cloning continues to be hotly debated. Assuming the inevitable John Morressy (1930-2006) – who was probably better known for his fantasy stories about the magician Kedrigern, though he had been writing sf for thirty years – considers a future where clones are everywhere.

  Since the agency opened for business, I’ve worked out a mutually satisfactory division of labor among myself. I3 manage the office, I1,2 do the legwork, and I4 take care of the deep thinking. So far, the system works.

  It’s not entirely the result of good organization. Cracking a couple of spectacular cases has helped a lot. Word got around that if you’re having trouble with a clone or with the entertainment business – and especially with both combined – the Lucky Clover Detective Agency, Joe Kilborn sole owner and proprietor, is the place to go for help.

  So I3 wasn’t surprised when Serena Siddons appeared in the office, pointed a finger at my3 chest, and said, “I want you, Kilborn.”

  “A lot of people do, ma’am,” I3 said, rising. “It’s been busy around here lately.”

  “I need you more than they do, and I can pay.”

  I3 gave her a businesslike smile and waved her to a chair. When she had seated herself, she tossed back her great mane of silver hair and fixed her emerald eyes on me3, then took a slow look around the office. I3 said, “You have me at a disadvantage, ma’am. I don’t believe I know –”

  “Don’t play dumb, laddie. Everybody in this city knows me.”

  She was absolutely right, but I3 make it a practice to be unimpressed by clients, even when I3’m impressed. Most of the people who walk into the office have enough ego to fill Central Park. Even so, this particular client would have impressed Napoleon.

  “Would you by any chance be Serena Siddons?”

  She flashed a smile as frosty as a January moonrise. “At a rough estimate, laddie, there are twenty thousand people in this city who would be Serena Siddons, if they could. I am.”

  I3 had never seen her in person before. Serena Siddons was a legend, and she worked at keeping the legend alive and public. But she worked at it in very different circles from the ones I1,2,3 moved in. She had been in the theater – “on Broadway” is what people called it then, and sometimes, just to confuse things, “off-Broadway” or even “off-off-Broadway” – back in the days of the old Times Square, when year after year, thirty or forty theaters regularly offered live drama and musicals. When live drama in this country went the way of black-and-white films and two-dimensional television, she organized an international touring company. After twenty-five years of touring, she took two years off to write her autobiography, then became a scre
enwriter and eventually director and producer of her own vehicles. Why she was here I3 couldn’t imagine, but it was a pretty safe bet that theater had something to do with it.

  “I’m pleased to meet you,” I3 said. “What is it you’d like me to do?”

  “I have an investment, Kilborn. I want it protected.”

  “What’s the investment, ma’am?”

  “You’ve heard of Three For The Show, I assume?”

  “An acting group, isn’t he?”

  “The three finest actors I’ve ever seen, Kilborn. The best in the business today by far. Maybe the best ever.”

  “A clone, isn’t he, ma’am?”

  “Yes. Surely that doesn’t bother you, Kilborn,” she said, narrowing those chilly green eyes.

  “Not a bit, ma’am. I’m just looking for the facts.”

  “I’ll give you all the facts you want. You’ve heard of Count Proteus, too, I suppose?”

  I3 had to think for a minute. “He’s an impressionist, isn’t he?”

  “You’re a master of understatement, Kilborn. Count Proteus doesn’t do impressions, he becomes other people. He can be man, woman, child. He can be tall or short, fat or thin, anything he wants. He’s the best.”

  “If you say so, ma’am. But what do they have to do with you and me?”

  For the first time, she looked as though she approved of what was going on. “You keep to the point, Kilborn. That’s good. And here’s the connection. I’ve signed Three For The Show and Count Proteus to do Hamlet live, on stage, before an audience.” She gave me a cold smile. “You’ve heard of Hamlet, I take it?”

  “It’s a play, isn’t it, ma’am?”

  “It’s the play, Kilborn. There hasn’t been a live Hamlet in this city since I played Ophelia thirty-six years ago, and we’re going to put on the performance that will stand as definitive for as long as there are two people to act and one to applaud. I’m talking theater history, Kilborn.”

  “Yes, ma’am. And what’s my part in it?”

  “I’m also talking about a two billion dollar property which will be worth ten billion before we’re through. Maybe twenty. Maybe fifty. I want you to keep an eye on Proteus and Three until every frame is in the can.”