Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One

by Short Story Anthology

  Angelita was determined, then, to cooperate with fate. To survive.

  Meanwhile, His Eminence continued strident against the night: "It is with a sense of great urgency that we lieutenants have for several months now been fanning out over the farthest corners of the earth. We have been arranging special meetings with thousands of chapters just like yours to advise the entire brotherhood of drastic changes in policy, approved at the highest level, that will affect your daily modus operandi."

  Why on earth, Angelita wondered, was there as yet virtually no mention of this field of corpses festering right under their noses? Were all these visiting dignitaries, these champions of human rights, no more than some jaded collection of salaried bureaucrats? Did tragedies such as these serve mainly as occasions for business meetings? At last Angelita found the courage to raise her head above the topmost jeans-clad limb that had been blocking the view. To do so meant slightly shifting the web of bodies sprawled on top of her, a risky maneuver that she decided she had to chance. As she looked to her right, the light of the full moon revealed a horrifying cluster of figures barely ten paces away. A scene so impossible, a grouping so repulsive, that for many seconds she believed that her sick soul had conspired with moondust to deceive her eyes.

  Angelita saw flies.

  Not just more of the flies that crawled all over her even as she gaped--but giant flies. Flies the size of men. Glowing green in the moonlight, they looked so fantastically bloated she could not see how they could ever get off the ground. Most were seated on their shadowy abdomens in close-packed, fidgety assembly. They all faced the speaker, a fly towering over them in height who stood raised on his four back legs as he addressed them. The huddled flies, unable to sit still, shuffled about, scratched their bristly faces with their forelegs, or flapped prismatic wings that struck blue-green sparks from the rays of the moon. Their enormous eyes glinting like galaxies of rubies, they seemed to squirm under the spell cast by the eyes of the speaker, twin diamonds that flashed out over them in ever-shifting constellations of color.

  Great as was Angelita's disgust, she continued squinting before her in numb fascination. Propped up on her right elbow, her right cheek against the pulpy haunch of a woman whose face she fortunately could not see, she stared from left to right, from the restless gathering to the speaker, who stretched his iridescent wings the way a man might raise a finger when making a point.

  "You have done well, my colleagues," the emissary continued, "in engineering war and famine, not to mention the countless smaller catastrophes that you regularly inject into the lives of our tractable hosts."

  "Hear, hear!" gritted the voices of attentive listeners.

  "I look out now over this field of sweet-smelling death, and I take pleasure in your ability to cooperate in such relatively large collective ventures.... No, do not underrate yourselves simply because you work far from some prestigious urban center! Your Leader ranks the ruins you effect in the provinces exactly on a par with the misery wrought by your counterparts in the great metropolises. You have reason to be proud of your record. I gaze upon this splendid feast laid out in my honor, and I marvel at the increased efficiency with which we have learned to manipulate our hosts."

  Feast? Angelita mouthed. Feast?

  "Begging your pardon, O great Balzvuv," a razor-like voice scraped out above the background drone, "I'm glad you appreciate the cook-out we prepared in honor of Your Honor, and since some of us here haven't fed much since the last full moon, I'm thinking I'm expressing the feelings of a lot of the brothers if I make a suggestion that first we fill our barriguitas and then we feast on all the new-fangled policies Your Honor wants to lay on us. After all, Sire, the mind works better when the stomach--"

  "Quiet, Phlogistor! You're the biggest bellied of us all," an indignant voice replied, the voice that had earlier reminded Angelita of one of the region's most prominent land barons. After a short scuffle and a muted exchange of invective, quiet returned and the emissary continued his address as if nothing had happened.

  "But ask yourselves one question, dear brothers. How long can our race afford the galloping rate of progress to which we have attained?"

  The pause that followed this rhetorical question filled with an irritable buzzing. Angelita shook her head in disbelief. Involuntary shudders racked her body as she pictured the full horror of a swarm of monster flies descending on the mounds of the dead. It seemed impossible that worse could happen than had already come to pass. Delirious visions of flight passed in rapid, frantic succession through her mind. How soon would the party begin? she wondered. As if her life might depend on it, Angelita paid close attention to the speaker. He alone was in charge of the pace at which the night's events would unfold. She prayed that his penchant for Ciceronian rhetoric and his addiction to verbal embroidery would tie them all up in such a Penelope's web of oratory that she would have ample time to devise a strategy for escape.

  "Think! There are scarcely one hundred of you, and yet this field is stacked with over four hundred succulent corpses. What extravagance, gentlemen! Aside from myself, now, how many of you can do gastronomical justice to more than one full-sized host at a sitting? ... No, I do not at all intend to sound ungrateful! Lavish banquets have, after all, been the traditional mode of welcome extended to messengers sent by the Great One. But is it not a shame to think that most of this exorbitant feast will feed creatures far inferior to ourselves?"

  "Many of the tidbits are very small, Sire, and scrawny from the recent drought," a meek voice blatted respectfully out of the crowd.

  "You miss the point!" replied the emissary. "Try to understand. For several centuries we have been increasing production, at dizzying rates, without any regard for the future. Our hosts have become so adept at mutual slaughter, and we in turn have become so fat and prosperous, that we have failed to ask ourselves if there is a price tag on all this easy living."

  "Begging your pardon, Sire," a voice came out of the assembly, "but Your Eminence seems to think that our success is something we ought to be ashamed of."

  "Again, you fail to permit me to get to my point."

  "All them words and he's still not made his point?" sneered a voice Angelita recognized as Phlogistor's. Despite her pain and mental confusion, distinct personalities had emerged for her out of this skulk of swollen scavengers. Even the emissary himself--long-winded, pompous, affecting the Castilian thethear--sounded uncannily like one of her professors in the Faculdad de letras at the university.

  Practised speaker that he was, blithely ignoring hecklers, the emissary went on with his harangue: "The time has come, good brothers, to adjust our production to our needs. Our Leader bids me to tell you that all those gratuitous acts of instigation, incitation, excitation, and temptation, of which we have up to now been so proud, will lead to our self-destruction if we leave unchecked and unregulated all our naturally expansive tendencies."

  The sounds of insucked breath were succeeded by a hectic babble. Then the emissary raised his wings in a commanding gesture and the throng lapsed again into grudging silence.

  "Qui stat, caveat ne cadat: let him that standeth take heed lest he fall! We must now take lessons from our hosts--yes, the creatures we feed on. We must learn from our hosts the principles of scientific herd-management."

  "Order!" yelled the land-baron voice against a cacophany of protest. Angelita could hear Balzvuv now only in fragments.

  "Although we ourselves taught them the joys of reckless waste and profl ... they have been quicker than we to apprec ... disastrous consequences of such ... unrestrained policy. If our host organisms do not restr ... intertribal massacre, nuclear terrorism ... then soon they shall completely exterminate each other--and then where will we be?"

  Balzvuv flashed his kaleidoscopic eyes at the assembly of wing-flapping mutterers. Angelita listened ... and at the same time tried to wriggle out from under the petrifying, putrifying remains that pinned her legs to the ground. It was extremely difficult to move in such a
way as to dislodge the gruesome ballast in a gradual and inconspicuous manner. Besides, her left leg responded to each inch of advance with twinges of teeth-gritting pain.

  "... succinctly, brothers, we have followed our inborn instincts all too well, and now, if we wish to ... nay, even survive--we must encompass our ends through a total reversal of strategy!"

  "By heaven, Kataklesios, he wants us all to become priests and sell Bibles!" shouted Phlogistor to an accompanying burst of guffaws.

  Angelita found that if she yanked up from the hip and at the same time clenched her teeth, the torment of freeing the left leg became more endurable.

  "... must come to understand, Phlogistor, that the Good One in heaven, who made ... to rule over the earth, provided us with free will, which means ... rather than continue as slaves to habit. In short ... sent by our Leader to advise you that, in his infallible opinion, the Good One on ... subjecting our kind to a most severe test of the moral and intellectual qualities ... foresight and cunning ... He endowed us with."

  Out of the rising commotion a skeptical voice barked forth: "Does it not strike Your ... as paradoxical, O great ... that at the height of our global prosperity we should be concerned ... imminent catastrophe?"

  Angelita paid only fitful attention to the rasping speech of the flies. Herself faced with "imminent catastrophe," she learned quickly to cope with higher and higher levels of pain. Stifling well-warranted screams, at last she pulled her left leg out from the clutch of stiffening limbs. A major achievement. Laboriously won. Angelita was so elated at this milestone of progress that she feared, surely, a thousand red eyes were now observing her! So she kept still for an endless-seeming minute, paying feverishly close attention to Balzvuv's impeccable lecture-hall Castilian.

  "... races which have learned to cope with paradox, with which ... Creator is now testing our ultimate worth, are the races destined to survive." (Angelita hoped he would distract them long enough for her to tunnel out from under the log-jam of the dead.) "The human ... whose unparalleled prosperity now threatens, paradoxically, ... biosphere, is making every effort on the ecological front to edge back from the brink of ... You ... aware of our duty to help them protect our common environment. But we have deliberately avoided till now the next logical ... Distasteful though ... we must now assume active responsibility for their conduct on the political front. In short, my ... those violent ... we have always promoted in their political behavior we must now--horribile dictu--actively discourage!"

  Consternation. Accusations of blasphemy, altruism, and treason.

  Angelita pulled her dress back from her leg. The sticky, skimpy material tore away from her moonlit flesh like a bandage. Her left leg, like the rest of her body, was mottled with whorls of black blood. Inching down with her left hand toward the source of the pain at mid-calf, her probing fingers stung the clotted lips of a wound. It was inflamed, and she knew it must already be infested with maggots. It took only hours in this climate for larvae to hatch in an untreated wound. Slowly, out of sight behind the barricade of the dead, she crossed herself. Seeing in her mind's eye Paquito's encouraging smile, she burst out into silent tears, then quickly blinked them away.

  As she struggled now to free her other leg, the voice of Balzvuv, thundering above surges of indignation, ripped through her mind like a saw: "If we do not begin to cut back, good Bellonides, on the level of mortality produced by ... envy, greed, and power-lust we foster in our hosts, they must eventually die out and we ... bereft of the only host we can feed on."

  "I protest!" rumbled a firm, somewhat scholarly voice. "Since the end of the great plagues that up to three centuries ago ... our strongest competitors in human death-production, we've had the field largely to ourselves. In the present century, at long last, the scale of deaths due to the wars we've inspired matches the scale ... due to the plagues of those earlier centuries."

  "The point, Afasion! The point!" spiny mandibles snapped.

  "The point, brothers ... now that we have at last ... power of our bacterial competitors and viral rivals, the great Balzvuv presumes to ask us to desist from the full exploitation of our ... indeed ... to deliberately lower our rate of production!"

  Angelita had no way of guessing how long the "business" part of the meeting would go on. She knew, however, that Balzvuv would not allow himself to be hurried. He would not permit the longed-for "banquet" to begin until he was satisfied that his whole pack of vermin had come to understand, whether they liked it or not, the radical change that had been decreed in their age-old practices. Angelita's state of mind prevented her from following the thread of his argument, but she assumed that the extremity of the new "official position" (wasn't she out of her mind even to imagine she was hearing these things?) would spark a good deal of time-consuming protest among the grumbling, grousing horde.

  Grinding her pelvis into the gummy earth to work her right leg loose from the crush, she now formed the only plan of escape that she thought had even the slightest possibility of succeeding.

  "... true, indeed, Afasion, that since 1700 we have produced one hundred million dead by war alone. Granted also that over ninety percent of those carcasses have come ... this glorious century alone. But follow this trend to its conclusion, dear colleague. Nota bene! ... asymptotic curve! And what, pray, may be the good of such hard-won insight if ... no practical application?"

  If she played dead, she would surely wind up in the bowels of one of those creatures, her warm blood marking her as the choicest morsel in the plaza. The better plan was to crawl slowly away, weaving a path through the twisting lanes that chance had sown between the clusters of the dead. If she could retreat along a course roughly parallel to the huddle of flies, she could circle out well past them and creep into the full-grown cornfield that began about twenty meters to the rear of Balzvuv.

  "... handwriting is on the wall for all to see who are not willfully blind. If our rate of production goes on as irresponsibly as at present," droned Balzvuv, "in a few short years a grand extinction ... that will leave us ... to feed on but our own mutual recriminations. Given our alimentary limitations, hominivorous creatures as we are..."

  If, thought Angelita, she managed to get as far as the edge of the field of slaughter, she would then have to cross ten meters out in the open before reaching the sanctuary of the cornstalks. And from there ... it was thirty kilometers to the nearest small town with a hospital. If she could crawl or limp along, it might take her a day and a half. But who knew how far gangrene could creep by then? ... One goal at a time, she told herself. Right now she must not think beyond that field of corn.

  "Brothers," intoned Balzvuv, "our ancient microbial rivals were almost as short-sighted as we ... when they gluttonously devoured up to half our common global food supply in a succession of magnificent plagues that ... our boundless admiration and envy."

  Angelita started to haul herself back over the lowest layer of the dead, clawing blindly for purchase at sagging breast or cold crotch without letting herself think of the dead now as anything more than a series of impediments, insensate objects merely mimicking human form. She pulled herself over each hurdle on her right side, her useless left leg dragging free, yet throbbing with pain high up into her thigh as she moved. She heard, sporadically, the increasingly irritable exhortations of Balzvuv. The cocksure, unyielding, challenging rhythms of his speech assured her that the vermin had not ceased reeling from the ideological shock he had administered. If they still stood glaring in anger and frustration at Balzvuv, then they must not yet have detected--even with the enormous peripheral vision that flies must have--her own little snail-like, tortured efforts at escape....

  "... sluggards must learn, therefore, from bacilli and from viruses--to parasitize ... in such a way that our hosts continue to multiply at a rate guaranteeing us a perpetual source of ... is what most of the plague microbes did--and is now what even the AIDS virus is learning to do--by mutating to far less devastating ... Perhaps they went too far in maintaini
ng so low a current profile. I don't know ... devious and shrewd. But what a shame it is, my brothers, ... go to school to our one-time deadliest rivals, and now even to our hosts, whose love of mutual slaughter does not exclude an awakened ecological conscience! Pride notwithstanding, however..."

  Angelita dragged herself through the tortuous avenues of the dead, their paving-stones made of snapped arms, broken legs, cloven skulls. As she advanced, she tried to convince herself that this moonlit face here was not that of old Pedro Molinas who wanted to learn how to read, and that that perfect oval whose eyes now questioned the stars had nothing to do with the bright little Juanita who already at age twelve subversively dreamed of high school. Their individuality was an illusion. They were nothing but food for flies.

  Angelita suddenly realized, as though it were the most obvious thought in the world, that she had no business paddling through a lake of spilled blood, no business scrambling over mounds of butchered flesh. She had no business straining like this merely to keep alive. Angelita knew, very simply, what she kept on managing to forget. She knew that she did not want to live ... but she thought instantly of the dutyshe owed to that burgeoning life, that tiny citizen-to-be that sprouted inside her. She thought of the duty she owed to a slaughtered, well-meaning husband, a man for whom she would have instantly bartered her soul, to nurture that incipient little citizen. She thought, too, of the duty to give birth that she owed just as much to this suspicious village of the enveloping dead that had suffered her alien presence because of her husband, and that had suffered, fatally suffered, her strange-thinking husband back among them--bad seed who had planted only death.