Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One

by Short Story Anthology

  But when Zarathustra was alone he spoke thus to his heart: "Could it be possible? This old saint in the forest had not yet heard anything of this, that God is dead!"

  24

  Stack found the mad one wandering in the forest of final moments. He was an old, tired man, and Stack knew with a wave of his hand he could end it for this god in a moment. But what was the reason for it? It was even too late for revenge. It had been too late from the start. So he let the old one go his way, wandering in the forest mumbling to himself, I WON'T LET YOU DO IT, in the voice of a cranky child; mumbling pathetically, OH, PLEASE, I DON'T WANT TO GO TO BED YET. I'M NOT YET DONE PLAYING.

  And Stack came back to Snake, who had served his function and protected Stack until Stack had learned that he was more powerful than the God he'd worshipped all through the history of men. He came back to Snake and their hands touched and the bond of friendship was sealed at last, at the end.

  Then they worked together and Nathan Stack used the needle with a wave of his hands, and the Earth could not sigh with relief as its endless pain was ended. . but it did sigh, and it settled in upon itself, and the molten core went out, and the winds died, and from high above them Stack heard the fulfillment of Snake's final act; he heard the descent of the Deathbird.

  "What was your name?" Stack asked his friend.

  Dira.

  And the Deathbird settled down across the tired shape of the Earth, and it spread its wings wide, and brought them over and down, and enfolded the Earth as a mother enfolds her weary child. Dira settled down on the amethyst floor of the dark-shrouded palace, and closed his single eye with gratitude. To sleep at last, at the end.

  All this, as Nathan Stack stood watching. He was the last, at the end, and because he had come to own-if, even for a few moments-that which could have been his from the start, had he but known, he did not sleep but stood and watched. Knowing at last, at the end, that he had loved and done no wrong.

  25

  The Deathbird closed its wings over the Earth until at last, at the end, there was only the great bird crouched over the dead cinder. Then the Deathbird raised its head to the star-filled sky and repeated the sigh of loss the Earth had felt at the end. Then its eyes closed, it tucked its head carefully under its wing, and all was night.

  Far away, the stars waited for the cry of the Deathbird to reach them so final moments could be observed at last, at the end, for the race of men.

  26

  THIS IS FOR MARK TWAIN

  DANIEL PEARLMAN

  1935-2013

  Dan Pearlman, born and raised in New York City, got his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Columbia University and soon became established as an Ezra Pound specialist, publishing The Barb of Time: On the Unity of Ezra Pound's Cantos with Oxford University Press in 1969. One of the highlights of his academic career, in fact, was traveling across Italy with Pound in 1968. He soon moved to Spain, where he wrote a couple of novels (1971-1974). Afterwards he returned to academic life (scholarship, and a couple of English Department chairmanships: University of Idaho, URI). Retired as of June 2005, Pearlman has been a professor of English at the University of Rhode Island since 1980 with teaching specialties in creative writing and modern British and American poetry. On a more mundane level, his brief composition handbook Guide to Rapid Revision has survived numerous changes in academic fashion—and the demise of several of its publishers—and is now in its eighth edition, currently with Longman.

  In 1982, shedding his last chairmanship, he began to dedicate his creative energies to his first love, writing fiction. In 1987, his stories and novellas began appearing in various literary and genre magazines and anthologies ( Amazing Stories; New England Review; Florida Review; The Silver Web; Quarterly West; Semiotext(e) SF; Synergy [HBJ]; Simulations [Citadel]; The Year's Best Fantastic Fiction, 1996; Imaginings [Pocket Books, 2003], et al.). In 1995 he founded CLF, the Council for the Literature of the Fantastic. In 1999, after producing five print newsletters hosting an international array of contributors, CLF continued as on online magazine only and is now on indefinite hiatus.

  With a penchant toward irony and satire, as a writer he leans toward the literary "fantastic," especially toward magic realism. He published his first book of fiction in 1995, The Final Dream & Other Fictions (Permeable Press: a dozen mostly previously published stories), followed in 1997 by a novel, Black Flames (White Pine Press), an excursion into the Spanish Civil War through the warped recollections of a troubled old ex-soldier—his only book to have completely sold out.

  His third book of fiction, The Best-Known Man in the World and Other Misfits (Aardwolf Press, 2001) is a collection of a dozen stories—again, previously published in journals, etc.—that range the gamut of genres from literary realism to the fantastic. His first science-fiction novel,Memini (Prime Books, 2003) explores a future society governed by global amnesiacs [ Publisher's Weekly: "be prepared for a whirlwind ride with no pause for breath"]. His new novel,Weeds in Franco's Garden, is based on his prolonged residence in Spain (1971-74) and is now in the hands of the Serendipity Literary Agency, New York. To date, stories of his have been published in translation in six languages. Some of his stories are accessible online, and probably also some of his out-of-print books.

  In addition to narrative fiction, he has also worked with film scripts. His screen adaptation of his novella The Final Dream was a finalist in the New Century Awards competition for 1999. (Hollywood took a whiff and shied away.) Pearlman’s work has received outstanding reviews in periodicals such as Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and the Washington Post.

  Flies, by Daniel Pearlman

  When men go to war, the only winners in the end are the flies.

  Angelita Flores lay flat on her belly among a heap of decaying corpses. It was all that remained of the village. All the people that her husband Francisco had grown up with continued even in death to form an impregnable wall around her, a cordon sanitaire, made up now of obscenely intertwined limbs and loops of spilled intestine.

  The bodies, feeding flies all day and now far into the night, had slumped across her in such a way as miraculously to shield her from the first barrage of machine-gun fire and then, later, from the bursts that sporadically followed, laid down by the looting soldiers for insurance sake. Sun-shriveled men who would never have dreamt of touching her, who used to take off their caps in greeting the elegant young profesora from the city, now pinioned her from her hips down in a variety of stiff embraces that even her husband would never have attempted.

  Angelita had gotten used to the humming of the flies and to the croak of gases released from collapsing bowels. But now the night began to fill with new noises, sounds that she could not place--the rapid beating of some sort of wings, and the drone and buzz of a horde of creatures that slowly began arriving and settling off to her right at the edge of the hecatomb closest to where she lay.

  At first she thought they must be carrion birds attracted by the smell of blood and feces, but the chirr was too grating and the wingbeat too swift for sounds made by birds. Then she thought they were helicopters, but no lights accompanied their arrival. The full moon alone, it seemed, was all the beacon they needed to guide them to a landing. To see who had come she would have to lift her unencumbered chest above a horizon formed by bodies piled two and three deep. But terror kept her sandwiched to the ground, her right cheek plastered to the sticky, blood-clotted earth. The sun had barely risen when, in five minutes flat, an ordinary village square was transformed into a massive open-air grave.

  Were these the soldiers returning to finish what they had started? she wondered. Were they now going to pour gasoline over the dead as they had done earlier to the houses?

  A horror of dying swept over her--a biological reflex, nothing more. The dread of dying made no more sense to her than that. Death by bullet, death by fire--after all, what difference would it make? Often throughout the long day and night she had wished she could be joined to all the others, beyond pain. Single
d out for some reason by fate, she had been denied the swift extinction that would have united her with Francisco.

  The sounds that emerged from the growing flock of visitors were a strange mix--like the crackling of burning tinder, the croaking of frogs, and the humming of a field full of crickets. Snatches of human speech seemed also to rocket out of the din, then die before she could decode them. As hard as Angelita tried to listen, the pounding of her own still-living blood against her eardrums garbled the sounds these visitors uttered. And then there was that stabbing pain, deafening in its own way as it rose ever more mercilessly from some inaccessible spot down in her twisted left leg. She could not even be sure if she actually was hearing voices or if her own tortured brain was the source of those dimly perceived, strangely accented words.

  It could only be biological, she thought, that mindless voice in her that insisted on her staying alive. It was the voice of the unborn child who, ignorant of what lay beyond, still managed to turn and now and then kick and flail at her womb. The child of her murdered husband, the son Paquito and she had awaited with joy and trembling, the magic boy (or girl? "Or girl, of course," Francisco would smile reassuringly), the bond of blood that would have linked her at last to the generations of Paco's village. In obedience to that pestering voice, for many hours she had argued with herself that she must try to go on living.

  But more and more that urgent little voice began to fill her with a searing sense of shame and self-loathing. To bear her child seemed almost too self-centered a reason to cling to life. But to live to bear witness was not. To bear witness was cause enough to try to survive. She had been spared, Angelita convinced herself, for that one reason alone. She alone out of hundreds of innocent people ... a teacher, one who could speak so that others would listen. In order to survive, she told herself, she must steel her jangled nerves and still the throbbing in her ears.

  Soon, Angelita could hear distinct words and phrases leap out over the hubbub that formed behind her. Guerrilleros! she thought. The possibility filled her with nausea. On reflection, however, even a rescue by the guerrillas, those Liberators of the Countryside who had only a month ago murdered her Francisco, appeared preferable to being doused with gasoline. But how could these be some passing band of guerrillas? ... The voices she heard were exchanges of greetings, as if many of the visitors had arrived singly and were gathering here to meet old friends. Besides, the names they used to address each other--for names they must have been--were not at all Spanish, even though the words of greeting were. The names she heard clearly--like Malpighia, Balzvuv, Abaddon--had a distinctly foreign sound to them.

  Foreigners.... Amnesty International! flashed through Angelita's mind. Or Americas Watch, or the Red Cross! she thought. They had somehow got word of the massacre and sent a commission to investigate. Representatives from a broad spectrum of nations. Arriving, every one of them, by some strange craft built by the Norteamericanos. Angelita felt some feeble stirrings of hope. As soon as she could be sure she was not hallucinating, she would cry out and let them know that there was a survivor.

  They would wish to hear from her own parched lips what had happened, but the story disclosed by the moon needed little augmentation. The guerrillas--no, the soldiers, rather--the government soldiers came at dawn, when the villagers were still in bed, and ordered everyone by bullhorn to dress quickly and gather out in the square. The operation was intended "to neutralize the influence of the guerrillas," the loudspeaker boomed. And when they had all crowded into the large open square, the promised neutralization began. Angelita's fragmented impression was that as the first rays of sun cut through the mist on the distant hills, over a dozen tanks charged in from every direction, snapping spines and crushing faces under their treads. Those not plowed under by the tanks were mulched by machine-guns as they screamed and lurched about in frantic efforts at escape.

  As Angelita recalled in flashes all that had happened, a metallic voice rang out above the noise at her back: "Take your places! Come to attention! We will attend to business first. Business first! Stay away from the dead! Our Leader pays us a very special compliment tonight. He sends us a most distinguished emissary who has a vital message for us--for us all. You will therefore show His Eminence that we are not, Phlogistor, a bunch of country bumpkins"--and here a thud and a high-pitched yelp interrupted the speaker--"but as sophisticated and disciplined a regional chapter as any in Latin America."

  Angelita lay increasingly bewildered, aware not so much of what was said as of the speaker's accent--a local one like that of one of the district's half-educated latifundistas, or landowners, yet a good deal raspier than normal.

  Angelita hoped that she had not been mistaken. Who else could these men be but members of a mixed local and international investigatory commission? As such they would largely hold themselves above petty bias, and stand deaf to the propaganda mills of either murderous party. They would report to the world at large the fate of an innocent village caught in the alternating grip of two warring factions, self-proclaimed "benefactors" whose uninvited concern for the people's welfare had led to the present scene of total annihilation.

  She would tell the commissioners how the guerrillas first descended to make an "emergency appropriation" of grain supplies and how, before leaving, they treated several sick children with shots of penicillin as a token of fraternal solicitude in the never-ceasing struggle against the common enemy. She would then describe how the government, alerted that the villagers had invited medical help from the common enemy, sent soldiers to shoot those unfortunate children who had been incurably inoculated with rebel points of view.

  She would tell further how her husband, out of his interest in agronomy, had seeded his acreage with a new, high-quality-protein maize; how the peasants floated rumors about "seed of the devil" and would have run him out of the village if he had not been a hometown boy; and how the guerrillas, smelling a government plot to genetically alter the political outlook of the people, accused Francisco of technotreachery, laid waste to the entire resultant crop, and then responded to his mildly voiced objections with an ideologically corrective bullet through the brain--but not without building, as a token of fraternal regard, a community soccer court on a portion of the despoiled acreage, so that the government, hearing that the village had defiantly agreed to become a public-works showcase for the enemy, this morning resorted to emergency surgery to prevent infection of the entire body politic.

  "Welcome, O great Balzvuv," continued the same gravel-throated speaker, "to our humble province. We are unworthy to receive Your Eminence, but we have got up what we could to make you feel most welcome, given our limited resources. Although the present carnage may not much impress Your Eminence, we beg you to understand that given our sparse and scattered host population--"

  "Enough, Anafidos! Do not presume the lieutenants of the Great One too high and mighty to mingle with their troops out in the provinces. How else is esprit de corps to be maintained throughout a worldwide organization such as ours if not through constant communication between Headquarters and even the remotest principalities?"

  "Your Excellency is too kind," replied Anafidos. "And now, Sire, it is my great pleasure to introduce my council of ministers: Afasion, who oversees all cultural affairs, including education and propaganda; Kataklesios, in charge of religious affairs; Bellonides, chief of military operations, to whom we are particularly indebted for making possible tonight's--"

  "A pleasure, I'm sure!" Balzvuv interrupted. "But we have all met before. After the collapse of the dam that buried Los Portales some forty years ago. Remember? I see before me your excellent Minister of Economics, whom I had the honor of congratulating back then, with a personal commendation from our Leader, for a job superbly engineered. But for now, gentlemen, business presses. For the moment, let us defer the social niceties...."

  Blinking at the flies in her face, Angelita struggled against the weight of the dead on her back. She slipped her arms beneath her breast for levera
ge and slowly lifted her head out of the gore. The pain in her leg stung even more sharply as she moved, but she persisted in raising the upper half of her body. The arrogance she detected in His Eminence's voice sounded shamefully familiar to Angelita, a grotesquely overblown, mocking reminder of her own silent revulsion when Francisco first introduced her to the people of his village. This village that had never completely accepted her--and that perhaps she herself could never have fully accepted. Pangs of guilt over her ambivalence now stung her far worse than the flies.

  Newly married, she had come out here less than a year ago, leaving home in the capital with mixed feelings. She had given up a good job in publishing to follow an idealistic husband. Francisco had vowed to use his scientific training to relieve the misery of the peasants of his village. The benefits he would bring would in no time spread from village to village, province to province ... Paco and she had been students at the university together. "What good is an expensive education," he used to say, "that has no practical application?" Sometimes she would think he was taunting her for the lack of immediate utility of her concentration in the humanities, but Paco loved literature at least as much as he loved the sciences.

  Angelita bit her sand-caked lower lip. Perhaps, she thought, if her common sense had not yielded to love, they would both be alive right now, bound up safely, in an apartment back in the city, in the familiar tangle and dense sweet odor of each other's living limbs.

  Paquito had left a part of his dream, anyway, in her care, in the uncomfortable nest of her flattened, twisted body. In her womb, in a sea of fear, paddled a blind and battered orphan, now the sole inheritor of Paco's vision of a bright and boundless future. It was the glow of that innocent vision that had caused her to fall in love with him in the first place. Those ideas of his! At first they would provoke her sarcasm; next they had excited her desire; finally they had ignited in her a depth of crazy passion for Francisco--of the sort she used to make fun of when fellow budding feminists would admit falling victim to such incredible emotional catastrophes.