The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Vol. 2

by George Mann

  “Which is?” Yarrek asked.

  “The time has almost arrived to seed the planets again, to empty the Ark of its precious cargo and allow the races, now hopefully improved, to evolve as they will.”

  “You are playing God,” Yarrek said.

  The creature inclined its head. “If you wish to use that term, then so be it. We are playing God, in order to save and perpetuate these races.” It gestured, and all around the creature, stretching back towards the walls of the cavern, a great crowd of beings appeared, insubstantial as ghosts.

  Yarrek stared, taking in beings of every conceivable size and shape. He saw creatures like crabs, and four-legged beasts like lox, and things that resembled kite-fish floating in the air, and great birds, and bipedal hairless individuals with domed skulls…

  And then he saw, in the silent crowd, tall, furred creatures like his own people, though more elongated of limb, and gray instead of brown…

  The naked pink being went on, “We are the Controllers, my friends, though once we called ourselves humans. Our intention was not to wield the power of God, but to empower others to evolve peacefully, to inhabit planets in harmony with nature and with themselves.”

  “But when will that be?” Yarrek asked, wondering what it might be like to stand on the surface of what the creature called a planet.

  The human gestured to the viewscreen. “The time has almost arrived to seed the cosmos. Perhaps, in a hundred of your cycles, the races of the Ark will be ready and the process can begin.”

  A hundred cycles…? He would be an old man then, Yarrek thought, if he lived to see the wondrous event. Oh, he could not wait to return to the Hub, and tell Yancy of his find, blind Yancy who had always been more far-sighted than himself.

  “Now go,” said the human, “and inform your people of what awaits them.”

  And so saying, the manifestation of the enfeebled creature, and the host of the saved, vanished in an instant.

  Yarrek turned to Zeremy. To his surprise the Prelate was weeping.

  “But you were aware of the truth, sir,” Yarrek said, “and yet you did not tell the world.”

  “When my sons told me of what they had discovered,” the Prelate said, “I thought that it would be they who would tell the world… but of course that was not to be. I had to wait, then, until…”

  Yarrek stared at the old man, awareness slowly dawning. “Until?”

  In reply, Prelate Zeremy laid a loving hand on Yarrek’s shoulder and steered him towards the exit. “Come, my son. Together now we have a duty to tell the world the truth.”

  And Yarrek, bearing a freight of understanding greater than the mere fact of a race saved from itself, made his slow way back through the rock and ice to Sunworld and the task awaiting him there.

  Evil Robot Monkey

  Mary Robinette Kowal

  Sliding his hands over the clay, Sly relished the moisture oozing around his fingers. The clay matted down the hair on the back of his hands, making them look almost human. He turned the potter’s wheel with his prehensile feet as he shaped the vase. Pinching the clay between his fingers, he lifted the wall of the vase, spinning it higher.

  Someone banged on the window of his pen. Sly jumped and then screamed as the vase collapsed under its own weight. He spun and hurled it at the picture window like feces. The clay spattered against the Plexiglas, sliding down the window.

  In the courtyard beyond the glass, a group of school kids leapt back, laughing. One of them swung his arms, aping Sly crudely. Sly bared his teeth, knowing these people would take it as a grin, but he meant it as a threat. He swung down from his stool, crossed his room in three long strides and pressed his dirty hand against the window. Still grinning, he wrote: SSA. Outside, the letters would be reversed.

  The students’ teacher flushed as red as a female in heat and called the children away from the window. She looked back once as she led them out of the courtyard, so Sly grabbed himself and showed her what he would do if she came into his pen.

  Her naked face turned brighter red and she hurried away. When they were gone, Sly rested his head against the glass. The metal in his skull thunked against the window. It wouldn’t be long now before a handler came to talk to him.

  Damn.

  He just wanted to make pottery. He loped back to the wheel and sat down again with his back to the window. Kicking the wheel into movement, Sly dropped a new ball of clay in the center and tried to lose himself.

  In the corner of his vision, the door to his room snicked open. Sly let the wheel spin to a halt, crumpling the latest vase.

  Vern poked his head through. He signed, “You okay?”

  Sly shook his head emphatically and pointed at the window.

  “Sorry.” Vern’s hands danced. “We should have warned you that they were coming.”

  “You should have told them that I was not an animal.”

  Vern looked down in submission. “I did. They’re kids.”

  “And I’m a chimp. I know.” Sly buried his fingers in the clay to silence his thoughts.

  “It was Delilah. She thought you wouldn’t mind because the other chimps didn’t.”

  Sly scowled and yanked his hands free. “I’m not like the other chimps.” He pointed to the implant in his head. “Maybe Delilah should have one of these. Seems like she needs help thinking.”

  “I’m sorry.” Vern knelt in front of Sly, closer than anyone else would come when he wasn’t sedated. It would be so easy to reach out and snap his neck. “It was a lousy thing to do.”

  Sly pushed the clay around on the wheel. Vern was better than the others. He seemed to understand the hellish limbo where Sly lived - too smart to be with other chimps, but too much of an animal to be with humans. Vern was the one who had brought Sly the potter’s wheel which, by the Earth and Trees, Sly loved. Sly looked up and raised his eyebrows. “So what did they think of my show?”

  Vern covered his mouth, masking his smile. The man had manners. “The teacher was upset about the ‘evil robot monkey.’”

  Sly threw his head back and hooted. Served her right.

  “But Delilah thinks you should be disciplined.” Vern, still so close that Sly could reach out and break him, stayed very still. “She wants me to take the clay away since you used it for an anger display.”

  Sly’s lips drew back in a grimace built of anger and fear. Rage threatened to blind him, but he held on, clutching the wheel. If he lost it with Vern - rational thought danced out of his reach. Panting, he spun the wheel, trying to push his anger into the clay.

  The wheel spun. Clay slid between his fingers. Soft. Firm and smooth. The smell of earth lived in his nostrils. He held the world in his hands. Turning, turning, the walls rose around a kernel of anger, subsuming it.

  His heart slowed with the wheel and Sly blinked, becoming aware again as if he were slipping out of sleep. The vase on the wheel still seemed to dance with life. Its walls held the shape of the world within them. He passed a finger across the rim.

  Vern’s eyes were moist. “Do you want me to put that in the kiln for you?”

  Sly nodded.

  “I have to take the clay. You understand that, don’t you.”

  Sly nodded again, staring at his vase. It was beautiful.

  Vern scowled. “The woman makes me want to hurl feces.”

  Sly snorted at the image, then sobered. “How long before I get it back?”

  Vern picked up the bucket of clay next to the wheel. “I don’t know.” He stopped at the door and looked past Sly to the window. “I’m not cleaning your mess. Do you understand me?”

  For a moment, rage crawled on his spine, but Vern did not meet his eyes and kept staring at the window. Sly turned.

  The vase he had thrown lay on the floor in a pile of clay.

  Clay.

  “I understand.” He waited until the door closed, then loped over and scooped the clay up. It was not much, but it was enough for now.

  Sly sat down at his wheel and b
egan to turn.

  Shining Armor

  Dominic Green

  It was close to dawn. The sun was a sliver of brilliance just visible over the mass of canyons on the western horizon. There was no reason why the direction in which the sun rose should not be arbitrarily defined as East; the only reason why the sun rose in the West on this planet was that, if looked at from the same galactic direction as Earth, it span retrograde. Even at this number of light years’ distance, men still had an apron-string connecting them to their homeworld.

  The old man was still doing his exercises.

  The boy didn’t know why the exercises had to take so long. They didn’t look hard to do, although when he tried to copy them, the old man laughed as if he were doing them in the most ridiculous manner possible. The old man used a sword while he did the exercises, but not even a real one - it had no edge and was made of aluminium, which could not even be made to take one. He held the sword-stick ridiculously, not even using his whole hand most of the time; usually he held it with only his middle finger and forefinger, some of the time with only the little and ring fingers. Both of his hands, in fact, were held in a peculiar crab claw, with the fingers separated.

  Finally there were signs that the old man was coming to the end of the set, stabbing around to right and left with his stick. The boy now had something to do. He scurried out among the rusting steel shells, carrying the basket of fruit. It was, of course, spoiled fruit, fruit the old man would not have been able to sell at market. There would have been no point in wasting saleable produce.

  The boy arranged a marrow to the west, a pineapple to the east, a durian to the north, and a big juicy watermelon to the south. Each piece of fruit sat on its own square of rice paper. He was careful to leave the empty basket in a spot where it would not interfere with the old man’s movements. Then, just as his elder and better was turning into his final movement, facing into the sun as it blazed up into the sky, the boy ran to the long, half-buried shelf the old man called the dead hulk’s “glacis plate” and unwrapped the Real Sword.

  The Real Sword was taller than he was. He had been instructed to unwrap it carefully. The old man had illustrated why by dropping a playing card onto the blade. The card had stuck fast, its weight driving the blade a good half centimeter into it.

  The old man bowed to the sun - why? Did it ever bow back? - walked over to the sword, nodded stiffly to the boy, and picked up the weapon. He executed a few practice cuts and parries, jumping backwards and forwards across the sand. This was more exciting - he was moving quickly now, with a sword of spring steel.

  Then he became almost motionless; the sword whipped up into a position of readiness up above his head. As always, he was directly between all four pieces of fruit. Sometimes there were five pieces of fruit, sometimes six or seven.

  The sword moved up and down, one, two, three, four times, the old man lashing out at all quarters, turning on his heel on the sand. There were four soft tearing sounds, but no sparks or sounds of metal hitting metal.

  The old man stood upright, ready to slide the sword back into a nonexistent scabbard. He had lost the scabbard somehow years ago. Nobody seemed to know how, and nobody could convince him to shell out the money for a new one.

  He walked over to inspect the fruit. All four now lay in two pieces, making eight pieces. In all four cases, the cut had been deep enough to completely halve the fruit right down to the rind. In not one case had the rice paper underneath been touched. In some, the old man’s activities had cut the rot clean out of the fruit. The boy gathered up the good pieces, which would now be breakfast.

  The rotten pieces he slung away into the desert.

  When they walked back toward the village, the General Alarm was sounding. This, the boy knew, could be very bad, as no alarm practice was scheduled for today.

  General Alarm could mean that another boy like him had fallen down a melt-hole like a damned fool and the whole village was out looking for his corpsicle. Or it could mean that a flash flood was on the way and every homeowner had to rush out and bolt the streamliner onto the north end of his habitat, then rush back in and dog all the hatches. It might mean a flare had been reported, and everyone except Mad Farmer Bob who carried on digging his ditches in all weathers despite skin cancer and radiation alopoecia had to go underground till the All Clear.

  But it was clear, when they reached the outskirts of the village, that this was none of these things. There was a personal conveyor in the Civic Square, its green lights flashing to indicate it had been set to automatic guidance. Someone had used a towing cable to secure three long, irregular, wet red shapes to the back of it, shapes the grown-ups would not let him see. But he had a horrible idea what they were, or what they had once been. Dragging your enemy behind a conveyor was a badabing-badaboum thing to do, and normally the boys in the village would have run and jostled to see such a marvellous sight. But when the men who had been dragged, probably alive, were Mr. d’Souza, big friendly Mr. d’Souza who had three hairy Irish wolfhounds; and Mr. Bamigboye, who told rude jokes about naked ladies; and even Mr. Chundi, who told kids to get off his property - then things did not seem so exciting.

  Mr. d’Souza, Mr. Bamigboye, and Mr. Chundi were Town Councillors, and they had gone up to the Big City to argue with the authorities about the mining site. Although there was nothing there now but a few spray-painted rocks and prospectors’ transponders, the boy knew that some Big City men had found rocks they called Radioactives upriver. But the boy’s father said the Big City men were too lazy to dig the rocks out of the ground using shovels and the Honest Sweat Of Their Brow. Instead, they planned to build a sifting plant downstream of the village, and set off bombs also made of Radioactives in the regolith upstream. A handsome stream of Radioactives would flow downriver to the sifting plant, but the village’s water would be poisoned. The villagers had all been offered what were described as “generous offers” to leave by the Big City men, but the Town Councillors had voted to stay. The Big City men had been rumored to be hiring a top Persuasion Consultancy to deal with the situation. Now it seemed that the rumors had come true.

  “We ought to take a few guns into town and sort out those City folk,” said old father Magnusson, who thought everyone didn’t know he ordered sex pheromones and illegal subliminal messaging software through the mail from Big City, but Aunt Raisa knew. Now no woman in town would visit him or call him on the videophone.

  “How many guns do we have? And small-bore ones, too, for seeing off interlopers, not armor-piercing stuff. The combine bosses will be protected by men in armor, ten feet tall, with magnetic accelerators that shoot off a million rounds through you POW-POW-POW before you pop your first round off! You are maximally insane.” This was old mother Tho. Despite her insulting mode of communication, many of the older and wiser heads in the square nodded their agreement.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Mother Murdo. “Magnetic accelerators are illegal.”

  “Anything illegal is legal if nobody is prepared to enforce the law. Have you not been up to the City recently? The mining combines have been making their own militaria for months. After they had to start making their own machine tools and coining their own money, weapons were the logical next step.”

  “But we are still citizens of the Commonwealth of Man,” said Father Magnusson, drawing himself up to his full one hundred and thirty-five centimeters, “and an attack on us would be an attack on the Commonwealth itself.”

  “Pshaw! The Commonwealth doesn’t even bother to send out ships to collect taxes any longer,” said Mother Tho. “And when the taxman doesn’t call, you know the government is in disrepair.”

  There were slow nods of appreciation from the crowd, most of whom were secretly glad that the tribute ships had not visited for so many years, but all of whom were alarmed at the prospect that those ships might have funded services whose unavailability might now kill the village.

  “Well, in any case,” said Father Magnusson, “if they dare
to come up here and attempt their person-dragging activities, the State will repel them instantly.”

  Mother Tho was unimpressed. “We must be pragmatic,” she said. “The Guardian has not moved for sixty Good Old Original Standard Years. Not since the last Barbarian incursion.”

  Father Magnusson smacked his lips stolidly. “But I remember when it last moved; it operated most satisfactorily on that occasion. The Barbarians’ ships filled the skies like locusts, but our Guardian was equal to them.”

  Mother Tho looked up into the sky, where the silhouette of the Guardian took a huge bite out of the sunrise. “Father, you are only one of perhaps two or three people still alive who remember the Guardian moving. And it is a machine. Machines rust, corrode, and biodegrade.”

  “The Guardian was built to last forever.”

  “But a Guardian also needs an operator. And where is ours?”

  The old man put a hand upon the boy’s shoulder and moved away among the buildings before the conversation grew more heated.

  “There are foreigners in the village,” said the boy’s mother, folding clothes with infinite precision. “Men from the mining company. They are asking for Khan by name, and you know why, old man.”

  The old man tucked the sword away in a crevice by the side of the atmosphere detoxifier. “Khan can look after himself.”

  “They had guns, by all accounts, and you know he can’t.” The boy’s mother ran the iron over a fresh set of clothes. “Khan is fat and slow and has long since ceased to be any use in a fight. It isn’t fair for him to be put through this.” She looked up at the old man. “Something must be done.”

  The old man looked away. “They have heard the name Khan, heard that this Khan is the man who is our Guardian’s operator. They perhaps mean harm. I will radio Khan and tell him to stay out fixing watercourses and not return home until these men have gone. They will be listening, of course. This will inform them that their task is pointless, and then maybe they will leave.”