The Magazine of fantasy and science fiction : a 30-year retrospective

by Edward L Ferman

  "Why did it rain?" he asked sternly, every inch an Old One while the cold downpour dripped off the ends of my hair and he stood dry inside his Shield.

  "I don't know," I sobbed, blinking my streaming eyes against his sternness. "Valancy did it. . . with lightning ... it was cold . . . she talked. . . ." Then I broke down completely, plumping down on the rough floor boards and, in spite of my age, howling right along with the other kids.

  It was a silent, solemn group that gathered in the school house that evening. I sat at my desk with my hands folded stiffly in front of me, half scared of my own People. This was the first official meeting of the Old Ones I'd ever attended. They all sat in desks, too, except the Oldest who sat in Valancy's chair. Valancy sat stony-faced in the twin's desk, but her nervous fingers shredded one kleenex after another as she waited.

  The Oldest rapped the side of the desk with his cane and turned his sightless eyes from one to another of us.

  "We're all here," he said, "to inquire "

  "Oh, stop it!" Valancy jumped up from her seat. "Can't you fire me without all this rigmarole? I'm used to it. Just say go and I'll go!" She stood trembling.

  "Sit down, Miss Carmody," said the Oldest. And Valancy sat down meekly.

  "Where were you born?" asked the Oldest quietly.

  "What does it matter?" flared Valancy. Then resignedly, "It's in my application. Vista Mar, California."

  "And your parents?"

  "I don't know."

  There was a stir in the room.

  "Why not?"

  "Oh, this is so unnecessary!" cried Valancy. "But if you have to know, both my parents were foundlings. They were found wandering in the streets after a big explosion and fire in Vista Mar. An old couple who lost everything in the fire took them in. When they grew up, they married. I was born. They died. Can I go now?"

  A murmur swept the room.

  "Why did you leave your other jobs?" asked Father.

  Before Valancy could answer, the door was flung open and Jemmy stalked defiantly in.

  "Go!" said the Oldest.

  "Please," said Jemmy, deflating suddenly. "Let me stay. It concerns me too."

  The Oldest fingered his cane and then nodded. Jemmy half-smiled with relief and sat down in a back seat.

  "Go on," said the Oldest One to Valancy.

  "All right then," said Valancy. "I lost my first job because I—well— I guess you'd call it levitated—to fix a broken blind in my room. It was stuck and I just. . . went up . . . in the air until I unstuck it. The principal saw me. He couldn't believe it and it scared him so he fired me." She paused expectantly.

  The Old Ones looked at one another and my silly, confused mind began to add up columns that only my lack of common sense had kept from giving totals long ago.

  "And the other one?" The Oldest leaned his cheek on his doubled-up hand as he bent forward.

  "Well," she said hesitantly, "I called my books to me—I mean they were on my desk. . . ."

  "We know what you mean," said the Oldest.

  "You know!" Valancy looked dazed.

  The Oldest stood up.

  "Valancy Carmody, open your mindl"

  Valancy stared at him and then burst into tears.

  "I can't, I can't," she sobbed. "It's been too long. I can't let anyone in. I'm different. I'm alone. Can't you understand? They all died. I'm alien!"

  "You are alien no longer, said the Oldest. "You are home now, Valancy." He motioned to me. "Karen, go in to her."

  So I did. At first the wall was still there; then with a soundless cry, half anguish and half joy, the wall went down and I was with Valancy. I saw all the secrets that had cankered in her since her parents died— the parents who were of The People.

  The had been reared by the old couple who were not only of The People but had been the Oldest of the whole Crossing.

  I tasted with her the hidden frightening things—the need for living as an Outsider, the terrible need for concealing all her differences and suppressing all the extra Gifts of The People, the ever present fear of betraying herself and the awful lostness that came when she thought she was the last of The People.

  And then suddenly she came in to me and my mind was flooded with a far greater presence than I had ever before experienced.

  My eyes flew open and I saw all of the Old Ones staring at Valancy. Even the Oldest had his face turned to her, wonder written as widely on his scarred face as on the others.

  He bowed his head and made The Sign. "The lost persuasions and designs," he murmured. "She has them all."

  And then I knew that Valancy, Valancy who had wrapped herself so tightly against the world to which any thoughtless act might betray her that she had lived with us all this time without our knowing about her or she about us, was one of us. Not only one of us but such a one as had not been since Grandmother died—and even beyond that. My incoherent thoughts cleared to one.

  Now I would have some one to train me. Now I could become a sorter—but only second to her.

  I turned to share my wonder with Jemmy. He was looking at Valancy as The People must have looked at The Home in the last hour. Then he turned to the door.

  Before I could draw a breath, Valancy was gone from me and from the Old Ones and Jemmy was turning to her outstretched hands.

  Then I bolted for the outdoors and rushed like one possessed down the lane, lifting and running until I staggered up our porch steps and collapsed against Mother, who had heard me coming.

  "Oh, Mother!" I cried. "She's one of us! She's Jemmy's love! She's wonderful!" And I burst into noisy sobs in the warm comfort of Mother's arms.

  So now I don't have to go Outside to become a teacher. We have a permanent one. But I'm going anyway. I want to be as much like Valancy as I can and she has her degree. Besides I can use the discipline of living Outside for a year.

  I have so much to learn and so much training to go through, but Valancy will always be there with me. I won't be set apart alone because of the Gift.

  Maybe I shouldn't mention it, but one reason I want to hurry my training is that we're going to try to locate the other People. None of the boys here please me.

  Me

  Hilbert Schenck,Jr.

  I think that I shall never see

  A calculator made like me.

  A me that likes Martinis dry

  And on the rocks, a little rye.

  A me that looks at girls and such,

  But mostly girls, and very much.

  A me that wears an overcoat

  And likes a risky anecdote.

  A me that taps a foot and grins

  Whenever Dixieland begins.

  They make computers for a fee,

  But only moms can make a me.

  Sundance

  Robert Silverberg

  Robert Silverberg wrote hundreds of stories and novels in the fifties and early sixties. In the late sixties and early seventies he began to write less, but with better results. In 1974, we published a Special Silverberg Issue, featuring "Born with the Dead," which won a Nebula Award. Since then he has written hardly anything at all, until 1979, when his new novel, Lord Valentine's Castle, was completed. "Sundance" appeared in the January 1969 issue.

  Today you liquidated about 50,000 Eaters in Sector A, and now you are spending an uneasy night. You and Herndon flew east at dawn, with the green-gold sunrise at your backs, and sprayed the neural pellets over a thousand hectares along the Forked River. You flew on into the prairie beyond the river, where the Eaters have already been wiped out, and had lunch sprawled on that thick, soft carpet of grass where the first settlement is expected to rise. Herndon picked some juiceflowers, and you enjoyed half an hour of mild hallucinations. Then, as you headed toward the copter to begin an afternoon of further pellet spraying, he said suddenly, "Tom, how would you feel about this if it turned out that the Eaters weren't just animal pests? That they were people say, with a language and rites and a history and all?"

  You thought of how it h
ad been for your own people.

  "They aren't," you said.

  "Suppose they were. Suppose the Eaters—"

  "They aren't. Drop it."

  Herndon has this streak of cruelty in him that leads him to ask such questions. He goes for the vulnerabilities; it amuses him. All night now his casual remark has echoed in your mind. Suppose the Eaters . . . Suppose the Eaters. . . Suppose . . . Suppose. . .

  You sleep for a while, and dream, and in your dreams you swim through rivers of blood.

  Foolishness. A feverish fantasy. You know how important it is to exterminate the Eaters fast, before the settlers get here. They're just animals, and not even harmless animals at that; ecology-wreckers is what they are, devourers of oxygen-liberating plants, and they have to go. A few have been saved for zoological study. The rest must be destroyed. Ritual extirpation of undesirable beings, the old, old story. But let's not complicate our job with moral qualms, you tell yourself. Let's not dream of rivers of blood.

  The Eaters don't even have blood, none that could flow in rivers, anyway. What they have is, well, a kind of lymph that permeates every tissue and transmits nourishment along the interfaces. Waste products go out the same way, osmotically. In terms of process, it's structurally analogous to your own kind of circulatory system, except there's no network of blood vessels hooked to a master pump. The life-stuff just oozes through their bodies, as though they were amoebas or sponges or some other low-phylum form. Yet they're definitely high-phylum in nervous system, digestive setup, limb-and-organ template, etc. Odd, you think. The thing about aliens is that they're alien, you tell yourself, not for the first time.

  The beauty of their biology for you and your companions is that it lets you exterminate them so neatly.

  You fly over the grazing grounds and drop the neural pellets. The Eaters find and ingest them. Within an hour the poison has reached all sectors of the body. Life ceases; a rapid breakdown of cellular matter follows, the Eater literally falling apart molecule by molecule the instant that nutrition is cut off, the lymph-like stuff works like acid; a universal lysis occurs; flesh and even the bones, which are cartilaginous, dissolve. In two hours, a puddle on the ground. In four, nothing at all left. Considering how many millions of Eaters you've scheduled for extermination here, it's sweet of the bodies to be self-disposing. Otherwise what a charnel house this world would become^

  Suppose the Eaters . . .

  Damn Herndon. You almost feel like getting a memory-editing in the morning. Scrape his stupid speculations out of your head. If you dared. If you dared.

  In the morning he does not dare. Memory-editing frightens him; he will try to shake free of his new-found guilt without it. The Eaters, he explains to himself, are mindless herbivores, the unfortunate victims of human expansionism, but not really deserving of passionate defense. Their extermination is not tragic; it's just too bad. If Earthmen are to have this world, the Eaters must relinquish it. There's a difference, he tells himself, between the elimination of the Plains Indians from the American prairie in the nineteenth century and the destruction of the bison on that same prairie. One feels a little wistful about the slaughter of the thundering herds; one regrets the butchering of milUons of the noble brown woolly beasts, yes. But one feels outrage, not mere wistful regret, at what was done to the Sioux. There's a difference. Reserve your passions for the proper cause.

  He walks from his bubble at the edge of the camp toward the center of things. The flagstone path is moist and glistening. The morning fog has not yet lifted, and every tree is bowed, the long, notched leaves heavy with droplets of water. He pauses, crouching, to observe a spider-analog spinning its asymmetrical web. As he watches, a small amphibian, delicately shaded turquoise, glides as inconspicuously as possible over the mossy ground. Not inconspicuously enough; he gently lifts the little creature and puts it on the back of his hand. The gills flutter in anguish, and the amphibian's sides quiver. Slowly, cunningly, its color changes until it matches the coppery tone of the hand. The camouflage is excellent. He lowers his hand and the amphibian scurries into a puddle. He walks on. ^

  He is forty years old, shorter than most of the other members of the expedition, with wide shoulders, a heavy chest, dark glossy hair, a blunt, spreading nose. He is a biologist. This is his third career, for he has failed as an anthropologist and as a developer of real estate. His name is Tom Two Ribbons. He has been married twice but has had no children. His great-grandfather died of alcoholism; his grandfather was addicted to hallucinogens; his father had compulsively visited cheap memory-editing parlors. Tom Two Ribbons is conscious that he is failing a family tradition, but he has not yet found his own mode of self-destruction.

  In the main building he discovers Herndon, Julia, Ellen, Schwartz, Chang, Michaelson, and Nichols. They are eating breakfast; the others are already at work. Ellen rises and comes to him and kisses him. Her short soft yellow hair tickles his cheeks. "I love you," she whispers. She has spent the night in Michaelson's bubble. "I love you," he tells her, and draws a quick vertical line of affection between her small pale breasts. He winks at Michaelson, who nods, touches the tips of two fingers to his lips, and blows them a kiss. We are all good friends here, Tom Two Ribbons thinks.

  "Who drops pellets today?" he asks.

  "Mike and Chang," says Julia. "Sector C."

  Schwartz says, "Eleven more days and we ought to have the whole peninsula clear. Then we can move inland."

  "If our pellet supply holds up," Chang points out.

  Herndon says, "Did you sleep well, Tom?"

  "No," says Tom. He sits down and taps out his breakfast requisition. In the west, the fog is beginning to burn off the mountains. Something throbs in the back of his neck. He has been on this world nine weeks now, and in that time it has undergone its only change of season, shading from dry weather to foggy. The mists will remain for many months. Before the plains parch again, the Eaters will be gone and the settlers will begin to arrive. His food slides down the chute and he seizes it. Ellen sits beside him. She is a little more than half his age; this is her first voyage; she is their keeper of records, but she is also skilled at editing. "You look troubled," Ellen tells him. "Can I help you?"

  "No. Thank you."

  "I hate it when you get gloomy."

  "It's a racial trait," says Tom Two Ribbons.

  "I doubt that very much."

  "The truth is that maybe my personality reconstruct is wearing thin. The trauma level was so close to the surface. I'm just a walking veneer, you know."

  Ellen laughs prettily. She wears only a sprayon halfwrap. Her skin looks damp; she and Michaelson have had a swim at dawn. Tom Two Ribbons is thinking of asking her to marry him, when this job is over. He has not been married since the collapse of the real estate business. The therapist suggested divorce as part of the reconstruct. He sometimes wonders where Terry has gone and whom she lives with now. Ellen says, "You seem pretty stable to me, Tom."

  "Thank you," he says. She is young. She does not know.

  "If it's just a passing gloom I can edit it out in one quick snip."

  "Thank you," he says. "No."

  "I forgot. You don't like editing."

  "My father—"

  "Yes?"

  "In fifty years he pared himself down to a thread," Tom Two Ribbons says. "He had his ancestors edited away, his whole heritage, his religion, his wife, his sons, finally his name. Then he sat and smiled all day. Thank you, no editing."

  "Where are you working today?" Ellen asks.

  "In the compound, running tests."

  "Want company? I'm off all morning."

  "Thank you, no," he says, too quickly. She looks hurt. He tries to remedy his unintended cruelty by touching her arm lightly and saying, "Maybe this afternoon, all right? I need to commune a while. Yes?"

  "Yes," she says, and smiles, and shapes a kiss with her lips.

  After breakfast he goes to the compound. It covers a thousand hectares east of the base; they have bordered it
with neural-field projectors at intervals of eighty meters, and this is a sufficient fence to keep the captive population of two hundred Eaters from straying. When all the others have been exterminated, this study group will remain. At the southwest corner of the compound stands a lab bubble from which the experiments are run: metabolic, psychological, physiological, ecological. A stream crosses the compound diagonally. There is a low ridge of grassy hills at its eastern edge. Five distinct copses of tightly clustered knifeblade trees are separated by patches of dense savanna. Sheltered beneath the grass are the oxygen-plants, almost completely hidden except for the photosynthetic spikes that jut to heights of three or four meters at regular intervals, and for the lemon-colored respiratory bodies, chest high, that make the grassland sweet and dizzying with exhaled gases. Through the fields move the Eaters in a straggling herd, nibbling delicately at the respiratory bodies.

  Tom Two Ribbons spies the herd beside the stream and goes toward it. He stumbles over an oxgen-plant hidden in the grass but deftly recovers his balance and, seizing the puckered orifice of the respiratory body, inhales deeply. His despair lifts. He approaches the Eaters. They are spherical, bulky, slow-moving creatures, covered by masses of coarse orange fur. Saucer-like eyes protrude above narrow rubbery lips. Their legs are thin and scaly, like a chicken's, and their arms are short and held close to their bodies. They regard him with bland lack of curiosity. "Good morning, brothers!" is the way he greets them this time, and he wonders why.

  I noticed something strange today. Perhaps I simply sniffed too much oxygen in the fields; maybe I was succumbing to a suggestion Herndon planted; or possibly it's the family masochism cropping out. But while I was observing the Eaters in the compound, it seemed to me, for the first time, that they were behaving intelligently, that they were functioning in a ritualized way.

  I followed them around for three hours. During that time they uncovered half a dozen outcroppings of oxygen-plants. In each case they went through a stylized pattern of action before starting to munch. They: