The only problem that remained was to find out exactly how terrans had become infected, and the records cleared that up. Clement got it from a primate’s bite. Amy and Glenda got it from Clement. The Flents may well never have had it. Did that mean that Clement had bitten those girls? Amy said no, and experiments proved that the activating factor passed readily from any mucous tissue to any other. A bite would do it, but so would a kiss. Which didn’t explain our one crew-member who “contracted” the condition. Nor did it explain what kind of a survival characteristic it is that can get transmitted around like a virus infection, even to species.
Within that same six weeks of quarantine, we even got an answer to that. By a stretch of the imagination, you might call the thing a virus. At least, it was a filterable organism which, like the tobacco mosaic or the slime mold, had an organizing factor. You might call it a life form, or a complex biochemical action, basically un-alive. You could call it symbiote. Symbiotes often go out of their way to see to it that the hosts survive.
After entering a body, these creatures multiplied until they could organize, and then went to work on the host. Connective tissue and muscle fiber was where they did most of their work. They separated muscle fibers all over the peritoneal walls and diaphragm, giving a layer to the entrails and the rest to the exterior. They duplicated organic functions with their efficient, primitive little surrogate organs and glands. They hooked the illium to the stomach wall and to the rectum, and in a dozen places to their new organic structures. Then they apparently stood by.
When an emergency came every muscle in the abdomen and throat cooperated in a single, synchronized spasm, and the entrails, sheathed in muscle fiber and dotted with nerve ganglia, compressed into a long tube and was forced out like a bullet. Instantly the revised and edited abdomen got to work, perforating the new stomach outlet, sealing the old, and starting the complex of simple surrogates to work. And as long as enough new building material was received fast enough, an enormously accelerated rebuilding job started, blue-printed God knows how from God knows what kind of a cellular memory, until in less than two months the original abdominal contents, plus revision, were duplicated, and all was ready for the next emergency.
Then we found that in spite of its incredible and complex hold on its own life and those of its hosts, it had no defense at all against one of humanity’s oldest therapeutic tools, the RF fever cabinet. A high frequency induced fever of 108 sustained for seven minutes killed it off as if it had never existed, and we found that the “revised” gut was in every way as good as the original, if not better (because damaged organs were replaced with healthy ones if there was enough of them left to show original structure) – and that by keeping a culture of the Mullygantz “virus” we had the ultimate, drastic treatment for forty-odd types of abdominal cancer – including two types for which we’d had no answer at all!
So it was we lost the planet, and gained it back with a bonus. We could cause this thing and cure it and diagnose it and use it, and the new world was open again. And that part of the story, as you probably know, came out all over the newsfax and ‘casters, which is why I’m getting a big hello from taxi drivers and doormen . . .
“But the ‘fax said you wouldn’t be leaving the base until tomorrow noon!” Sue said after I had spouted all this to her and at long last got it all off my chest in one great big piece.
“Sure. They got that straight from me. I heard rumors of a parade and speeches and God knows what else, and I wanted to get home to my walkin’ talkin’ wettin’ doll that blows bubbles.”
“You’re silly.”
“C’mere.”
The doorbell hummed.
“I’ll get it,” I said, “and throw ’em out. It’s probably a reporter.”
But Sue was already on her feet. “Let me, let me. You just stay there and finish our drink.” And before I could stop her she flung into the house and up the long corridor to the foyer.
I chuckled, drank my ale and got up to see who was horning in. I had my shoes off so I guess I was pretty quiet. Though I didn’t need to be. Purcell was roaring away in his best old salt fashion, “Let’s have us another quickie, Susie, before the Space Scout gets through with his red carpet treatment tomorrow – miss me, honey?” . . . while Sue was imploringly trying to cover his mouth with her hands.
Maybe I ran; I don’t know. Anyway, I was there, right behind her. I didn’t say anything. Purcell looked at me and went white. “Skipper . . .”
And in the hall mirror behind Purcell, my wife met my eyes. What she saw in my face I cannot say, but in hers I saw panic terror.
In the small space between Purcell and Sue, something appeared. It knocked Purcell into the mirror, and he slid down in a welter of blood and stinks and broken glass. The recoil slammed Sue into my arms. I put her by so I could watch the tattered, bleeding thing on the floor hop and hop until it settled down on the nearest warm living thing it could sense, which was Purcell’s face.
I let Sue watch it and crossed to the phone and called the commandant. “Gargan,” I said, watching. “Listen, Joe, I found out that Purcell lied about where he went in that first liberty. Also why he lied.” For a few seconds I couldn’t seem to get my breath. “Send the meat wagon and an ambulance, and tell Harry to get ready for another hollowbelly. . . . Yes, I said, one dead. . . . Purcell, dammit. Do I have to draw you a cartoon?” I roared, and hung up.
I said to Sue, who was holding on to her flat midriff, “That Purcell, I guess it did him good to get away with things under my nose. First that helpless catatonic Glenda on the way home, then you. I hope you had a real good time, honey.”
It smelled bad in there so I left. I left and walked all the way back to the Base. It took about ten hours. When I got there I went to the Medical wing for my own fever-box cure and to do some thinking about girls with guts, one way or another. And I began to wait. They’d be opening up Mullygantz II again, and I thought I might look for a girl who’d have the . . . fortitude to go back with me. A girl like Amy.
Or maybe Amy.
THE REGION BETWEEN
Harlan Ellison
It would be difficult to compile an anthology of extreme sf and not include anything by Harlan Ellison. At times Ellison (b. 1934) epitomizes “Mr Extreme”, though never for the fun of it. I can’t think of any other author working in the field who has produced so many challenging, daring and thought-provoking stories. I would argue that from the mid-to-late 1960s Ellison was the pre-eminent writer of short sf, even amidst a field that at the time also had the astonishing talents of Roger Zelazny, Thomas Disch, Ursula Le Guin, Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock, etc. etc. Ellison, who became a Grand Master of the SFWA in 2006, has continued to produce works of considerable power and energy for over fifty years, yet he never sits on his laurels. In the 1960s, when he was winning award after award, he set himself the task of shaking up the field, making it take a long, hard look at itself. The result was the massive anthology Dangerous Visions (1967) which even now, forty years on, is still pretty astonishing. I resisted the urge to reprint anything from it, even though it includes many “extreme” stories.
Curiously, despite Ellison’s immense output, much of it battering down the barriers of sf and fantasy, I didn’t find it hard to decide which story to use. I had read “The Region Between” when it first appeared in Galaxy back in 1970. It had originally been commissioned as one of a set of stories by different authors who all used a common starting point as set out in the story’s prologue, written by Keith Laumer. All five stories can be found in Five Fates (1970).
Ellison’s contribution was a longer work than one usually expects from him, but he nevertheless sustained its bombardment of ideas and feelings throughout. What’s more, Ellison created a story that demanded a different format to allow for full expression. The result was a typesetter’s nightmare but, as you will see, the experience not only makes this story all the more fascinating, it actually takes you into the story itself. This story has be
en specially revised for this printing.
“Left hand,” the thin man said tonelessly. “Wrist up.”
William Bailey peeled back his cuff; the thin man put something cold against it, nodded toward the nearest door.
“Through there, first slab on the right,” he said, and turned away.
“Just a minute,” Bailey started. “I wanted—”
“Let’s get going, buddy,” the thin man said. “That stuff is fast.”
Bailey felt something stab up under his heart. “You mean – you’ve already . . . that’s all there is to it?”
“That’s what you came for, right? Slab one, friend. Let’s go.”
“But – I haven’t been here two minutes—”
“Whatta you expect – organ music? Look, pal,” the thin man shot a glance at the wall clock, “I’m on my break, know what I mean?”
“I thought I’d at least have time for . . . for . . .”
“Have a heart, chum. You make it under your own power, I don’t have to haul you, see?” The thin man was pushing open the door, urging Bailey through into an odor of chemicals and unlive flesh. In a narrow, curtained alcove, he indicated a padded cot.
“On your back, arms and legs straight out.”
Bailey assumed the position, tensed as the thin man began fitting straps over his ankles.
“Relax. It’s just if we get a little behind and I don’t get back to a client for maybe a couple hours and they stiffen up . . . well, them issue boxes is just the one size, you know what I mean?”
A wave of softness, warmness swept over Bailey as he lay back.
“Hey, you didn’t eat nothing the last twelve hours?” The thin man’s face was a hazy pink blur.
“I awrrr mninim,” Bailey heard himself say.
“OK, sleep tight, paisan . . .” The thin man’s voice boomed and faded. Bailey’s last thought as the endless blackness closed in was of the words cut in the granite over the portal to the Euthanasia Center:
”. . . send me your tired, your poor,
your hopeless, yearning to be free.
To them I raise the lamp beside the brazen door . . .”
I
Death came as merely a hyphen. Life, and the balance of the statement followed instantly. For it was only when Bailey died that he began to live.
Yet he could never have called it “living” ; no one who had ever passed that way could have called it “living.” It was something else. Something quite apart from “death” and something totally unlike “life.”
Stars passed through him as he whirled outward.
Blazing and burning, carrying with them their planetary systems, stars and more stars spun through him as though traveling down invisible wires into the dark behind and around him.
Nothing touched him.
They were as dust motes, rushing silently past in incalculable patterns, as Bailey’s body grew larger, filled space in defiance of the Law that said two bodies could not coexist in the same space at the same instant. Greater than Earth, greater than its solar system, greater than the galaxy that contained it, Bailey’s body swelled and grew and filled the universe from end to end and ballooned back on itself in a slightly flattened circle.
His mind was everywhere.
A string cheese, pulled apart in filaments too thin to be measurable, Bailey’s mind was there and there and there. And there.
It was also in the lens of the Succubus.
Murmuring tracery of golden light, a trembling moment of
crystal sound. A note, rising and trailing away infinitely high, and followed by another, superimposing in birth even as its predecessor died. The voice of a dream, captured on spiderwebs. There, locked in the heart of an amber perfection, Bailey was snared, caught, trapped, made permanent by a force that allowed his Baileyness to roam unimpeded anywhere and everywhere at the instant of death.
Trapped in the lens of the Succubus.
[Waiting: empty. A mindsnake on a desert world, frying under seven suns, poised in the instant of death; its adversary, a fuzzball of cilia-thin fibers, sparking electrically, moving toward the mindsnake that a moment before had been set to strike and kill and eat. The mindsnake, immobile, empty of thought and empty of patterns of light that confounded its victims in the instants before the killing strike. The fuzzball sparked toward the mindsnake, its fibers casting about across the vaporous desert, picking up the mole sounds of things moving beneath the sand, tasting the air and feeling the heat as it pulsed in and away. It was improbable that a mindsnake would spend all that light-time, luring and intriguing, only at the penultimate moment to back off – no, not back off: shut down. Stop. Halt entirely. But if this was not a trap, if this was not some new tactic only recently learned by the ancient mindsnake, then it had to be an opportunity for the fuzzball. It moved closer. The mindsnake lay empty: waiting.]
Trapped in the lens of the Succubus.
[Waiting: empty. A monstrous head, pale blue and veined, supported atop a swan-neck by an intricate latticework yoke-andhalter. The Senator from Nougul, making his final appeal for the life of his world before the Star Court. Suddenly plunged into silence. No sound, no movement, the tall, emaciated body propped on its seven league crutches, only the trembling of balance – having nothing to do with life – reminding the assembled millions that an instant before this husk had contained a pleading eloquence. The fate of a world quivered in a balance no less precarious than that of the Senator. What had happened? The amalgam of wild surmise that grew in the Star Court was scarcely less compelling than had been the original circumstances bringing Nougul to this place, in the care of the words of this Senator. Who now stood, crutched, silent and empty: waiting.]
Trapped in the lens of the Succubus.
[Waiting: empty. The Warlock of Whirrl, a power of darkness and evil. A force for chaos and destruction. Poised above his runic symbols, his bits of offal, his animal bones, his stringy things without names, quicksudden gone to silence. Eyes devoid of the pulverized starlight that was his sight. Mouth abruptly slack, in a face that had never known slackness. The ewe lamb lay still tied to the obsidian block, the graven knife with its odious glyphs rampant, still held in the numb hand of the Warlock. And the ceremony was halted. The forces of darkness had come in gathering, had come to their calls, and now they roiled like milk vapor in the air, unable to go, unable to do, loath to abide. While the Warlock of Whirrl, gone from his mind, stood frozen and empty: waiting.]
Trapped in the lens of the Succubus.
[Waiting: empty. A man on Promontory, fifth planet out from the star Proxima Centauri, halted in mid-step. On his way to a bank of controls and a certain button, hidden beneath three security plates. This man, this inestimably valuable kingpin in the machinery of a war, struck dumb, struck blind, in a kind of death – not even waiting for another moment of time. Pulled out of himself by the gravity of non-being, an empty husk, a shell, a dormant thing. Poised on the edges of their continents, two massed armies waited for that button to be pushed. And would never be pushed, while this man, this empty and silent man, stood rooted in the sealed underworld bunker where precaution had placed him. Now inaccessible, now inviolate, now untouchable, this man and this war stalemated frozen. While the world around him struggled to move itself a fraction of a thought toward the future, and found itself incapable, hamstrung, empty: waiting.]
Trapped in the lens of the Succubus.
And . . .
[Waiting: empty. A subaltern, name of Pinkh, lying on his bunk, contemplating his fiftieth assault mission. Suddenly gone. Drained, lifeless, neither dead nor alive. Staring upward at the bulkhead ceiling of his quarters. Cloudless burnished metal. He, dreamless, staring upward. While beyond his ship raged the Montag-Thil war. Sector 888 of the Galactic Index. Somewhere between the dark star Montag and the Nebula Cluster in Thil Galaxy. Pinkh, limbo-lost and unfeeling, needing the infusion of a soul, the filling up of a life-force. Pinkh, needed in this war more than any other man, though the Thils
did not know it . . . until the moment his essence was stolen. Now, Pinkh, lying there one shy of a fifty-score of assault missions. But unable to aid his world. Unable, undead, unalive, empty: waiting.]
While Bailey . . .
Floated in a region between. Hummed in a nothingness as great as everywhere. Without substance. Without corporeality. Pure thought, pure energy, pure Bailey. Swaying motionlessly, curtailed, yet susceptive. Trapped in the lens of the Succubus.
I 1/2
More precious than gold, more sought-after than uranium, more scarce than yinyang blossom, more needed than salkvac, rarer than diamonds, more valuable than force-beads, more negotiable than the vampyr extract, dearer than 2038 vintage Chateau Luxor, more prized than the secret of nanoneural surgery, more lusted-after than the twin-vagina’d trollops of Kanga . . .
Souls.
Thefts had begun in earnest five hundred years before. Random thefts. Stolen from the most improbable receptacles. From beasts and men and creatures who had never been thought to possess “souls.” Who was stealing them was never known. Far out somewhere, in reaches of space (or not-space) (or the interstices between space and not-space) that had no names, had no dimensions, whose light had never even reached the outmost thin edge of known space, there lived or existed or were creatures or things or entities or forces – someone – who needed the life-force of the creepers and walkers and lungers and swimmers and fliers who inhabited the known universe. Souls vanished, and the empty husks remained.
The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction Page 42
