Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One

by Short Story Anthology

Leor’s voice, from within the machine, said, “This is Adam, the first of all men.”

  And so the gods and the heroes came back to us on that brilliant afternoon in the middle twelves, while all the world watched in joy and fascination.

  Adam walked across the stage and spoke to Chairman Peng, who solemnly saluted him and explained what was taking place. Adam’s hand was outspread over his loins. “Why am I naked?” Adam asked. “It is wrong to be naked.”

  I pointed out to him that he had been naked when he first came into the world, and that we were merely showing respect for authenticity by summoning him back that way.

  “But I have eaten the apple,” Adam said. “Why do you bring me back conscious of shame, and give me nothing to conceal my shame? Is this proper? Is this consistent? If you want a naked Adam, bring forth an Adam who has not yet eaten the apple. But—”

  Leor’s voice broke in: “This is Eve, the mother of us all.”

  Eve stepped forth, naked also, though her long silken hair hid the curve of her breasts. Unashamed, she smiled and held out a hand to Adam, who rushed to her, crying, “Cover yourself! Cover yourself!”

  Surveying the thousands of onlookers, Eve said coolly, “Why should I, Adam? These people are naked too, and this must be Eden again.”

  “This is not Eden,” said Adam. “This is the world of our children’s children’s children’s children.”

  “I like this world,” Eve said. “Relax.”

  Leor announced the arrival of Pan the Goat-footed.

  Now, Adam and Eve both were surrounded by the dark aura of essential humanity. I was surprised at this, since I doubted that there had ever been a First Man and a First Woman on whom legends could be based; yet I assumed that this must be some symbolic representation of the concept of man’s evolution. But Pan, the half-human monster, also wore the aura. Had there been such a being in the real world?

  I did not understand it then. But later I came to see that if there had never been a goat-footed man, there nevertheless had been men who behaved as Pan behaved, and out of them that lusty god had been created. As for the Pan who came out of Leor’s machine, he did not remain long on the stage. He plunged forward into the audience, laughing and waving his arms and kicking his cloven hooves in the air. “Great Pan lives!” he cried. “Great Pan lives!” He seized in his arms Milian, the year-wife of Divud the Archivist, and carried her away toward a grove of feather-trees.

  “He does me honor,” said Milian’s year-husband Divud.

  Leor continued to toil in his machine.

  He brought forth Hector and Achilles, Orpheus, Perseus, Loki, and Absalom. He brought forth Medea, Cassandra, Odysseus, Oedipus. He brought forth Thoth, the Minotaur, Aeneas, Salome. He brought forth Shiva and Gilgamesh, Viracocha and Pandora, Priapus and Astarte, Diana, Diomedes, Dionysus, Deucalion. The afternoon waned and the sparkling moons sailed into the sky, and still Leor labored. He gave us Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, Helen and Menelaus, Isis and Osiris. He gave us Damballa and Geudenibo and Papa Legba. He gave us Baal. He gave us Samson. He gave us Krishna. He woke Quetzalcoatl, Adonis, Holger Dansk, Kali, Ptah, Thor, Jason, Nimrod, Set.

  The darkness deepened and the creatures of myth jostled and tumbled on the stage, and overflowed onto the plain. They mingled with one another, old enemies exchanging gossip, old friends clasping hands, members of the same pantheon embracing or looking warily upon their rivals. They mixed with us, too, the heroes selecting women, the monsters trying to seem less monstrous, the gods shopping for worshipers.

  Perhaps we had enough. But Leor would not stop. This was his time of glory.

  Out of the machine came Roland and Oliver, Rustum and Sohrab, Cain and Abel, Damon and Pythias, Orestes and Pylades, Jonathan and David. Out of the machine came St. George, St. Vitus, St. Nicholas, St. Christopher, St. Valentine, St. Jude. Out of the machine came the Furies, the Harpies, the Pleiades, the Fates, the Norns. Leor was a romantic, and he knew no moderation.

  All who came forth wore the aura of humanity.

  But wonders pall. The Earthfolk of the middle twelves were easily distracted and easily bored. The cornucopia of miracles was far from exhausted, but on the fringes of the audience I saw people taking to the sky and heading for home. We who were close to Leor had to remain, of course, though we were surfeited by these fantasies and baffled by their abundance.

  An old white-bearded man wrapped in a heavy aura left the machine. He carried a slender metal tube. “This is Galileo,” said Leor.

  “Who is he?” the Procurator of Pluto asked me, for Leor, growing weary, had ceased to describe his conjured ghosts.

  I had to request the information from an output in the Hall of Man. “A latter-day god of science,” I told the Procurator, “who is credited with discovering the stars. Believed to have been an historical personage before his deification, which occurred after his martyrdom by religious conservatives.”

  Now that the mood was on him, Leor summoned more of these gods of science, Newton and Einstein and Hippocrates and Copernicus and Oppenheimer and Freud. We had met some of them before, in the days when we were bringing real people out of lost time, but now they had new guises, for they had passed through the mythmakers’ hands. They bore emblems of their special functions, and they went among us offering to heal, to teach, to explain. They were nothing like the real Newton and Einstein and Freud we had seen. They stood three times the height of men, and lightnings played around their brows.

  Then came a tall, bearded man with a bloodied head. “Abraham Lincoln,” said Leor.

  “The ancient god of emancipation,” I told the Procurator, after some research.

  Then came a handsome young man with a dazzling smile and also a bloodied head. “John Kennedy,” said Leor.

  “The ancient god of youth and springtime,” I told the Procurator. “A symbol of the change of seasons, of the defeat of winter by summer.”

  “That was Osiris,” said the Procurator. “Why are there two?”

  “There were many more,” I said. “Baldur, Tammuz, Mithra, Attis.”

  “Why did they need so many?” he asked.

  Leor said, “Now I will stop.”

  The gods and heroes were among us. A season of revelry began.

  Medea went off with Jason, and Agamemnon was reconciled with Clytemnestra, and Theseus and the Minotaur took up lodgings together. Others preferred the company of men. I spoke a while with John Kennedy, the last of the myths to come from the machine. Like Adam, the first, he was troubled at being here.

  “I was no myth,” he insisted. “I lived. I was real. I entered primaries and made speeches.”

  “You became a myth,” I said. “You lived and died and in your dying you were transfigured.”

  He chuckled. “Into Osiris? Into Baldur?”

  “It seems appropriate.”

  “To you, maybe. They stopped believing in Baldur a thousand years before I was born.”

  “To me,” I said, “you and Osiris and Baldur are contemporaries. You are of the ancient world. You are thousands of years removed from us.”

  “And I’m the last myth you let out of the machine?”

  “You are.”

  “Why? Did men stop making myths after the twentieth century?”

  “You would have to ask Leor. But I think you are right: your time was the end of the age of mythmaking. After your time we could no longer believe such things as myths. We did not need myths. When we passed out of the era of troubles, we entered a kind of paradise where every one of us lived a myth of his own, and then why should we have to raise some men to great heights among us?”

  He looked at me strangely. “Do you really believe that? That you live in paradise? That men have become gods?”

  “Spend some time in our world,” I said, “and see for yourself.”

  He went out into the world, but what his conclusions were I never knew, for I did not speak to him again. Often I encountered roving gods and heroes, though. They were everywhere. Th
ey quarreled and looted and ran amok, some of them, but we were not very upset by that, since it was how we expected archetypes out of the dawn to act. And some were gentle. I had a brief love affair with Persephone. I listened, enchanted, to the singing of Orpheus. Krishna danced for me.

  Dionysus revived the lost art of making liquors, and taught us to drink and be drunk.

  Loki made magics of flame for us.

  Taliesin crooned incomprehensible, wondrous ballads to us.

  Achilles hurled his javelin for us.

  It was a season of wonder, but the wonder ebbed. The mythfolk began to bore us. There were too many of them, and they were too loud, too active, too demanding. They wanted us to love them, listen to them, bow to them, write poems about them. They asked questions—some of them, anyway—that pried into the inner workings of our world, and embarrassed us, for we scarcely knew the answers. They grew vicious, and schemed against each other, sometimes causing perils for us.

  Leor had provided us with a splendid diversion. But we all agreed it was time for the myths to go home. We had had them with us for fifty years, and that was quite enough.

  We rounded them up, and started to put them back into the machine. The heroes were the easiest to catch, for all their strength. We hired Loki to trick them into returning to the Hall of Man. “Mighty tasks await you there,” he told them, and they hurried thence to show their valor. Loki led them into the machine and scurried out, and Leor sent them away, Heracles, Achilles, Hector, Perseus, Cuchulainn, and the rest of that energetic breed.

  After that many of the demonic ones came, and said they were as bored with us as we were with them, and went back into the machine of their free will. Thus departed Kali, Legba, Set, and many more.

  Some we had to trap and take by force. Odysseus disguised himself as Breel, the secretary to Chairman Peng, and would have fooled us forever if the real Breel, returning from a holiday in Jupiter, had not exposed the hoax. And then Odysseus struggled. Loki gave us problems. Oedipus launched blazing curses when we came for him. Daedalus clung touchingly to Leor and begged, “Let me stay, brother! Let me stay!” and had to be thrust within.

  Year after year the task of finding and capturing them continued, and one day we knew we had them all. The last to go was Cassandra, who had been living alone in a distant island, clad in rags.

  “Why did you send for us?” she asked. “And, having sent, why do you ship us away?”

  “The game is over,” I said to her. “We will turn now to other sports.”

  “You should have kept us,” Cassandra said. “People who have no myths of their own would do well to borrow those of others, and not just as sport. Who will comfort your souls in the dark times ahead? Who will guide your spirits when the suffering begins? Who will explain the woe that will befall you? Woe! Woe!”

  “The woes of Earth,” I said gently, “lie in Earth’s past. We need no myths.”

  Cassandra smiled and stepped into the machine. And was gone.

  And then the age of fire and turmoil opened, for when the myths went home, the invaders came, bursting from the sky. And our towers toppled and our moons fell. And the cold-eyed strangers went among us, doing as they wished.

  And those of us who survived cried out to the old gods, the vanished heroes.

  Loki, come!

  Achilles, defend us!

  Shiva, release us!

  Heracles! Thor! Gawain!

  But the gods are silent, and the heroes do not come. The machine that glittered in the Hall of Man is broken. Leor its maker is gone from this world. Jackals run through our gardens, and our masters stride in our streets, and we are made slaves. And we are alone beneath the frightful sky. And we are alone.

  The Man Who Never Forgot, by Robert Silverberg

  He saw the girl waiting in line outside a big Los Angeles movie house, on a mildly foggy Tuesday morning. She was slim and pale, barely five-three, with stringy flaxen hair, and she was alone. He remembered her, of course.

  He knew it would be a mistake, but he crossed the street anyway and walked up along the theater line to where she stood.

  "Hello," he said.

  She turned, stared at him blankly, flicked the tip of her tongue out for an instant over her lips. "I don't believe I—"

  "Tom Niles," he said. "Pasadena, New Year's Day, 1955. You sat next to me. Ohio State-20, Southern Cal-7. You don't remember?"

  "A football game? But I hardly ever—I mean-I'm sorry, but—"

  Someone else in the line moved forward toward him with a tight hard scowl on his face. Niles knew when he was beaten. He smiled apologetically and said, "I'm sorry, miss. I guess I made a mistake. I took you for someone I knew—a Miss Bette Torrance. Excuse me."

  And he strode rapidly away. He had not gone more than ten feet when he heard the little surprised gasp and the "But I am Bette Torrance!"—but he kept going.

  I should know better after twenty-eight years, he thought bitterly. But I forget the most basic fact—that even though I remember people, they don't necessarily remember me …

  He walked wearily to the corner, turned right, and started down a new street, one whose shops were totally unfamiliar to him and which, therefore, he had never seen before. His mind, stimulated to its normal pitch of activity by the incident outside the theater, spewed up a host of tangential memories like the good machine it was:

  Jan. 1, 1955, Rose Bowl, Pasadena, California, Seat G126; warm day, high humidity, arrived in stadium 12:03 P.M., PST. Came alone. Girl in next seat wearing blue cotton dress, white oxfords, carrying Southern Cal pennant. Talked to her. Name Bette Torrance, senior at Southern Cal, government major. Had a date for the game but he came down with flu symptoms night before, insisted she see game anyway. Seat on other side of her empty. Bought her a hot dog, 20¢ (no mustard)—

  There was more, much more. Niles forced it back down. There was the virtually stenographic report of their conversation all that day:

  ("… I hope we win. I saw the last Bowl game we won, two years ago …"

  "… Yes, that was 1953. Southern Cal-7, Wisconsin-0 … and two straight wins in 1944-45 over Washington and Tennessee …"

  "… Gosh, you know a lot about football! What did you do, memorize the record book?")

  And the old memories. The jeering yell of freckled Joe Merritt that warm April day in 1937: Who are you, Einstein? And Buddy Call saying acidly on November 8, 1939: Here comes Tommy Niles, the human adding machine. Get him! And then the bright stinging pain of a snowball landing just below his left clavicle, the pain that he could summon up as easily as any of the other pain-memories he carried with him. He winced and closed his eyes suddenly, as if struck by the icy pellet here on a Los Angeles street on a foggy Tuesday morning.

  They didn't call him the human adding machine any more. Now it was the human tape recorder; the derisive terms had to keep pace with the passing decades. Only Niles himself remained unchanging, The Boy With The Brain Like a Sponge grown up into The Man With The Brain Like a Sponge, still cursed with the same terrible gift.

  His data-cluttered mind ached. He saw a diminutive yellow sports car parked on the far side of the street, recognized it by its make and model and color and license number as the car belonging to Leslie F. Marshall, twenty-six, blond hair, blue eyes, television actor with the following credits—

  Wincing, Niles applied the cutoff circuit and blotted out the upwelling data. He had met Marshall once, six months ago, at a party given by a mutual friend—an erstwhile mutual friend; Niles found it difficult to keep friends for long. He had spoken with the actor for perhaps ten minutes, and had added that much more baggage to his mind.

  It was time to move on, Niles decided. He had been in Los Angeles ten months. The burden of accumulated memories was getting too heavy; he was greeting too many people who had long since forgotten him (curse my John Q. Average build, 5'9", 163 pounds, brownish hair, brownish eyes, no unduly prominent physical features, no distinguishing scars except those inside). H
e contemplated returning to San Francisco, and decided against it. He had been there only a year ago; Pasadena, two years ago. The time had come, he realized, for another eastward jaunt.

  Back and forth across the face of America goes Thomas Richard Niles, der fliegende Holländer, the Wandering Jew, the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Human Tape Recorder. He smiled at a newsboy who had sold him a copy of theExaminer on May 13 past, got the usual blank stare in return, and headed for the nearest bus terminal.

  For Niles the long journey had begun on October 11, 1929, in the small Ohio town of Lowry Bridge. He was third of three children, born of seemingly normal parents: Henry Niles (b. 1896), Mary Niles (b. 1899). His older brother and sister had shown no extraordinary manifestations. Tom had.

  It began as soon as he was old enough to form words; a neighbor woman on the front porch peered into the house where he was playing and remarked to his mother, "Look how big he's getting, Mary!"

  He was less than a year old. He had replied, in virtually the same tone of voice, "Look how bighe's getting, Mary!" It caused a sensation, even though it was only mimicry, not even speech.

  He spent his first twelve years in Lowry Bridge, Ohio. In later years, he often wondered how he had been able to last there so long.

  He began school at the age of four, because there was no keeping him back; his classmates were five and six, vastly superior to him in physical coordination, vastly inferior in everything else. He could read. He could even write, after a fashion, though his babyish muscles tired easily from holding the pen. And he could remember.

  He remembered everything. He remembered his parents' quarrels and repeated the exact words of them to anyone who cared to listen, until his father whipped him and threatened to kill him if he ever did that again. He remembered that, too. He remembered the lies his brother and sister told and took great pains to set the record straight. He learned eventually not to do that, either. He remembered things people had said and corrected them when they later deviated from their earlier statements.