The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection
Page 77
* * *
Then the war ended, and suddenly there were no more Martian roles. In fact, suddenly there were no more Martians period. The allies did a pretty fair job of depopulating the old planet. Since then, we’ve been a dying race. We’re feeble, really. Every time the’flu goes round, I have to go to funerals. There was a rash of anti-war movies. There always is after the zapping is over. Remember A Walk in the Dust or Terrestrial Invaders? I didn’t get work in those. All you ever saw of the Martian troops were bodies. There were plenty of newsreel scenes of big-eyed orphans waving their tentacles at the camera in front of the sludging ruins of their nests. Those movies didn’t do any business. The whole solar system was tired of war. They started making musicals. I can’t do what you people call dancing, so those were lean years. I did a bit of investing, and set up my own business. I thought I’d hit on the ideal combination. I opened a Martian bar and a kosher butcher’s shop back-to-back. The Jews got the meat, and the Marties got the drainings. It was a good idea, and we did okay until the riots. I lost everything then, and went back to acting.
I did some dinner theatre. Small roles. I thought my best performance was as Dr Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest, but there weren’t many managements willing to cast me in spite, rather than because, of my race. I tried to get the backing to put on Othello in modern dress with the Moor as a Martian, but no one was interested. When Stanley Kramer bought up Worlds Apart, the hot best-seller about the persecution of Martians on Earth, I put in a bid for the lead, but Stanley had to say no. By then, I was too associated with the stereotype Jimbo Martie. He said audiences wouldn’t take me seriously. Maybe he was right, but I’d have liked to take a shot at it. As you must know, Ptyehshdneh got the part and went on to be the first non-terrestrial to walk off with the Best Actor statuette on Oscar night. I’m not bitter, but I can’t help thinking that my career in the last twenty years would have been very different if Kramer had taken the chance. Ptyeh’ is such a pretty Martie, if you know what I mean. Not much slime on his hide.
Of course, Willie K’ssth came back on television in the early 50s. They made twenty-six half-hour episodes with Tom Conway under the beak and me back as dumb Jimbo. The series is still in syndication on graveyard shift TV. I get fan mail from nostalgia-buff insomniacs and night watchmen all over the country. It’s nice to know people notice you. I saw one of those episodes recently. It was a piece of shit. But at the time it was a job, right? It didn’t last long, and I was more or less on the skids for a couple of years. I was on relief between guest spots. I’m in a classic Sergeant Bilko, where they’re trying to make a movie about the canal Bilko is supposed to have taken in the war. Doberman wins a Dream Date With a Movie Star in a contest and all the platoon try to get the ticket off him. Finally, Bilko gets the ticket and turns up at the Hollywood nightspot, and I turn out to be the Dream Date Star. Phil Silvers has a terrific talent, and it was nice just to be funny for a change. We worked out a good little routine with the drinks and the cocktail umbrellas. I’d like to have done more comedy, but when you’ve got tentacles producers don’t think you can milk a laugh. I popped out of a box on Laugh-In once.
The 60s were rough, I guess. I had a little bit of a drink problem, but you must have heard about that. You’ve done your research, right? Well, skipping the messy parts of the story, I ended up in jail. It was only a couple of cows all told, but I exsanguinated them all right. No excuses. Inside, I got involved in the protest movement. I was in with lots of draft evaders. They gave me some LSD, and I wound up signing a lot of petitions and, outside, going on plenty of marches. Hell, everybody now thinks the War on Mercury was a waste of time, but the planet was gung-ho about it back then. Those little jelly-breathers never did anyone any harm, but you’d creamed one planet and got a taste for it. That’s what I think. I did a bit of organizational work for the Aliens’ League, and spoke on campuses. I was on President Kissinger’s enemies list. I’m still proud of that.
I had a few film roles while all this was going in. Nothing spectacular, but I kept my face on the screen. I was the priest in The Miracle of Mare Nostrum, Elvis’ partner in the spear-fishing business in She Ain’t Human, and Doris Day’s old boyfriend in With Six You Get Eggroll. The films were mostly pieces of shit. I’m unbilled in a couple of Sinatra-Martin movies because I knocked around with the Rat Pack for a couple of summers before I got politics. I get a tentacle down Angie Dickinson’s decolleté in Ocean’s 11. I know you’re going to ask me about Orbit Jocks. I was just naive. Again, no excuses. When I shot my scenes, I thought it was a documentary. They had a whole fake script and everything. I took the job because of the trip to Mars. I’d never been before, and I wanted to discover my roots. I stood in front of landmarks reading out stuff about history. Then the producers sliced in all the hardcore stuff later. I don’t know if you’ve seen the film, but the Martian in all the sex scenes is not me. It’s hard to tell with a steel cowl, but he’s got all his tentacles.
* * *
I’m not retired. I won’t retire until they plough me under. But I’m being more selective. I’ll take a picture if I can pal around with any of the other old-timers. I was in something called Vampire Coyotes last year, with Leslie Howard, Jean Harlow and Sidney Greenstreet. I don’t mind working on low-budget horror movies. It’s more like the old days. The big studios these days are just cranking out bland television crap. I was asked to be a guest villian on Columbo, but I turned it down and they got Robert Culp instead. I went to a science fiction film convention last year. Forrest J. Ackerman interviewed me on stage. He’s a great guy. When I finally turn tentacles-up, I’m having it in my will that I be stuffed and put in his basement with the Creature From the Black Lagoon and all that other neat stuff. Lon would have gone for that too, but humans are prejudiced against auto-icons. It’s a pity. I hope Forry can make do with just Lon’s liver. It was the heart and soul of the man, anyway.
After this, I’ve got a three-picture deal with Al. That’s not as big a thing as it sounds, since he’ll shoot them simultaneously. Blood of the Brain Eaters, Jessie’s Girls and Martian Exorcist. Then, I might go to the Philippines and make this movie they want me to do with Nancy Kwan. Okay, so it’ll be a piece of shit …
If I had it all over again, do you know what? I’d do everything different. For a start, I’d take dancing lessons …
LUCIUS SHEPARD
The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter
Lucius Shepard is one of the most popular new writers to enter SF in a decade or more. Shepard won the John W. Campbell Award in 1985 as the year’s Best New Writer, and no year since has gone by without him adorning the final ballot for one major award or another, and often for several. In 1987, he won the Nebula Award for his landmark novella “R & R” and in 1988 he picked up a World Fantasy Award for his monumental short-story collection The Jaguar Hunter. His first novel was the acclaimed Green Eyes; his second the bestselling Life During Wartime; he is at work on two more. Born in Lynchburg, Virginia, he now lives somewhere in the wilds of Nantucket.
Here he takes us to a land dominated by the immobile but still-living body of an immense, mountain-huge dragon, enchanted into stillness in some sorcerous battle in the unimaginably distant past, so long ago that forests and villages have sprung up on the dragon’s mountainous flanks … and then takes us inside the great dragon to explore a whole new world of enchantment and brutality, terror and wonder, strange dangers and stranger beauties.
THE SCALEHUNTER’S BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTER
Lucius Shepard
1
Not long after the Christlight of the world’s first morning faded, when birds still flew to heaven and back, and even the wickedest things shone like saints, so pure was their portion of evil, there was a village by the name of Hangtown that clung to the back of the dragon Griaule, a vast mile-long beast who had been struck immobile yet not lifeless by a wizard’s spell, and who ruled over the Carbonales Valley, controlling in every detail the lives of the
inhabitants, making known his will by the ineffable radiations emanating from the cold tonnage of his brain. From shoulder to tail, the greater part of Griaule was covered with earth and trees and grass, from some perspectives appearing to be an element of the landscape, another hill among those that ringed the valley; except for sections cleared by the scalehunters, only a portion of his right side to the haunch, and his massive neck and head remained visible, and the head had sunk to the ground, its massive jaws halfway open, itself nearly as high as the crests of the surrounding hills. Situated almost eight hundred feet above the valley floor and directly behind the fronto-parietal plate, which overhung the place like a mossy cliff, the village consisted of several dozen shacks with shingled roofs and walls of weathered planking, and bordered a lake fed by a stream that ran down onto Griaule’s back from an adjoining hill; it was hemmed in against the shore by thickets of chokecherry, stands of stunted oak and hawthornes, and but for the haunted feeling that pervaded the air, a vibrant stillness similar to the atmosphere of an old ruin, to someone standing beside the lake it would seem he was looking out upon an ordinary country settlement, one a touch less neatly ordered than most, littered as it was with the bones and entrails of skizzers and flakes and other parasites that infested the dragon, but nonetheless ordinary in the lassitude that governed it, and the shabby dress and hostile attitudes of its citizenry.
Many of the inhabitants of the village were scalehunters, men and women who scavenged under Griaule’s earth-encrusted wings and elsewhere on his body, searching for scales that were cracked and broken, chipping off fragments and selling these in Port Chantay, where they were valued for their medicinal virtues. They were well paid for their efforts, but were treated as pariahs by the people of the valley, who rarely ventured onto the dragon, and their lives were short and fraught with unhappy incident, a circumstance they attributed to the effects of Griaule’s displeasure at their presence. Indeed, his displeasure was a constant preoccupation, and they spent much of their earnings on charms that they believed would ward off its evil influence. Some wore bits of scale around their necks, hoping that this homage would communicate to Griaule the high regard in which they held him, and perhaps the most extreme incidence of this way of thinking was embodied by the nature given by the widower Riall to his daughter Catherine. On the day of her birth, also the day of his wife’s death, he dug down beneath the floor of his shack until he reached Griaule’s back, laying bare a patch of golden scale some six feet long and five feet wide, and from that day forth for the next eighteen years he forced her to sleep upon the scale, hoping that the dragon’s essence would seep into her and so she would be protected against his wrath. Catherine complained at first about this isolation, but she came to enjoy the dreams that visited her, dreams of flying, of otherworldly climes (according to legend, dragons were native to another universe to which they traveled by flying into the sun); lying there sometimes, looking up through the plank-shored tunnel her father had dug, she would feel that she was not resting on a solid surface but was receding from the earth, falling into a golden distance.
Riall may or may not have achieved his desired end; but it was evident to the people of Hangtown that propinquity to the scale had left its mark on Catherine, for while Riall was short and swarthy (as his wife had also been), physically unprepossessing in every respect, his daughter had grown into a beautiful young woman, long-limbed and slim, with fine golden hair and lovely skin and a face of unsurpassed delicacy, seeming a lapidary creation with its voluptuous mouth and sharp cheekbones and large eloquent eyes, whose irises were so dark that they could be distinguished from the pupils only under the strongest of lights. Not alone in her beauty did she appear cut from different cloth from her parents; neither did she share their gloomy spirit and cautious approach to life. From earliest childhood she went without fear to every quarter of the dragon’s surface, even into the darkness under the wing joints where few scalehunters dared go; she believed she had been immunized against ordinary dangers by her father’s tactics, and she felt there was a bond between herself and the dragon, that her dreams and good looks were emblems of both a magical relationship and consequential destiny, and this feeling of invulnerability—along with the confidence instilled by her beauty—gave rise to a certain egocentricity and shallowness of character. She was often disdainful, careless in the handling of lovers’ hearts, and though she did not stoop to duplicity—she had no need of that—she took pleasure in stealing the men whom other women loved. And yet she considered herself a good woman. Not a saint, mind you. But she honored her father and kept the house clean and did her share of work, and though she had her faults, she had taken steps—half-steps, rather—to correct them. Like most people, she had no clear moral determinant, depending upon taboos and specific circumstances to modify her behavior, and the “good,” the principled, was to her a kind of intellectual afterlife to which she planned some day to aspire, but only after she had exhausted the potentials of pleasure and thus gained the experience necessary for the achievement of such an aspiration. She was prone to bouts of moodiness, as were all within the sphere of Griaule’s influence, but generally displayed a sunny disposition and optimistic cast of thought. This is not to say, however, that she was a Pollyanna, an innocent. Through her life in Hangtown she was familiar with treachery, grief, and murder, and at eighteen she had already been with a wide variety of lovers. Her easy sexuality was typical of Hangtown’s populace, yet because of her beauty and the jealousy it had engendered, she had acquired the reputation of being exceptionally wanton. She was amused, even somewhat pleased, by her reputation, but the rumors surrounding her grew more scurrilous, more deviant from the truth, and eventually there came a day when they were brought home to her with a savagery that she could never have presupposed.
Beyond Griaule’s frontal spike, which rose from a point between his eyes, a great whorled horn curving back toward Hangtown, the slope of the skull flattened out into the top of his snout, and it was here that Catherine came one foggy morning, dressed in loose trousers and a tunic, equipped with scaling hooks and ropes and chisels, intending to chip off a sizeable piece of cracked scale she had noticed near the dragon’s lip, a spot directly above one of the fangs. She worked at the piece for several hours, suspended by linkages of rope over Griaule’s lower jaw. His half-open mouth was filled with a garden of evil-looking plants, the calloused surface of his forked tongue showing here and there between the leaves like nodes of red coral; his fangs were inscribed with intricate patterns of lichen, wreathed by streamers of fog and circled by raptors who now and then would plummet into the bushes to skewer some unfortunate lizard or vole. Epiphytes bloomed from splits in the ivory, depending long strings of interwoven red and purple blossoms. It was a compelling sight, and from time to time Catherine would stop working and lower herself in her harness until she was no more than fifty feet above the tops of the bushes and look off into the caliginous depths of Griaule’s throat, wondering at the nature of the shadowy creatures that flitted there.
The sun burned off the fog, and Catherine, sweaty, weary of chipping, hauled herself up to the top of the snout and stretched out on the scales, resting on an elbow, nibbling at a honey pear and gazing out over the valley with its spiny green hills and hammocks of thistle palms and the faraway white buildings of Teocinte, where that very night she planned to dance and make love. The air became so warm that she stripped off her tunic and lay back, bare to the waist, eyes closed, daydreaming in the clean springtime heat. She had been drifting between sleep and waking for the better part of an hour, when a scraping noise brought her alert. She reached for her tunic and started to sit up; but before she could turn to see who or what had made the sound, something fell heavily across her ribs, taking her wind, leaving her gasping and disoriented. A hand groped her breast, and she smelled winey breath.
“Go easy, now,” said a man’s voice, thickened with urgency. “I don’t want nothing half of Hangtown ain’t had already.”
“I told you we’d have our time,” he said, fumbling with the tie of her trousers.
She began to fight desperately, clawing at his eyes, catching a handful of his long black hair and yanking. She threw herself onto her stomach, clutching at the edge of a scale, trying to worm out from beneath him; but he butted her in the temple, sending white lights shooting through her skull. Once her head had cleared, she found that he had flipped her onto her back, had pulled her trousers down past her hips and penetrated her with his fingers; he was working them in and out, his breath coming hoarse and rapid. She felt raw inside, and she let out a sharp, throat-tearing scream. She thrashed about, tearing at his shirt, his hair, screaming again and again, and when he clamped his free hand to her mouth, she bit it.
“You bitch! You … goddamn.…” He slammed the back of her head against the scale, climbed atop her, straddling her chest and pinning her shoulders with his knees. He slapped her, wrapped his hand in her hair, and leaned close, spittle flying to her face as he spoke. “You listen up, pig! I don’t much care if you’re awake … one way or the other, I’m gonna have my fun.” He rammed her head into the scale again. “You hear me? Hear me?” He straightened, slapped her harder. “Hell, I’m having fun right now.”