New Writings in SF 19 - [Anthology]

by Edited By John Carnell

  It was pandemonium. It was puzzling where the people came from. They were all after him. Men, women and children all in their bright holiday clothes. They knew what he’d done and he knew too and that was the worst of it. All the time he could see the Curator’s legs twitch and the bright blood pools on the grey and blue mosaic.

  The bronze door was closing. X ran on his slapping feet and dived through the last two feet. The circle closed and he landed sprawling down the steps at the feet of the Guards there.

  ‘Murder!’ He shouted as he finished rolling. ‘Back there! Right behind me! Killed a man!’ X didn’t know where the words came from but they were there when he needed them and it worked. The Guards paled, it took their minds off X as he slipped through them.

  A killing could happen in the Old Capital but in the Nice Part it was something else, they just weren’t used to it. It stopped them, it was so horrible, so personal up there in the light where they could really see it.

  The Guard Traveller was on the square. X changed direction and bundled into it. The fans were still running, it lifted off easily and accelerated hard down the street. The pigeons scattered and the power screamed. X didn’t know how he did it. The machine seemed to drive itself. He wasn’t thinking of much, it was all just happening and he’d killed his friend. He clutched the Luger to his chest like a talisman, he was shaking all over and all he could see was the blood on the mosaic.

  The Barrier loomed ahead. The Traveller changed to high lift and jumped it like a race horse. Nobody tried to stop them. Nobody even shouted. All the sensors were focused back to the steps where the Guards were being swamped by the escaping people.

  Half a mile down it was totally dark and it was raining. The few lights were almost out and there was nothing unusual about that. The Traveller went down at full speed, the spray lashed out behind as the Generator guided it down the dark alleys. X put his head back on the seat, savoured the safe darkness, held on to his Luger and thought of the dead man. He didn’t care what happened, he let the Traveller take him on deeper into the darkness. On to where the Capital was dank and slimy, to where the steel and structures wore beards of slippery moss, deeper and deeper into the forgotten parts. To where there were no people, to where there was no music, to where the lenses were clouded and their brass parts green with decay, to where it seemed no one had been for a thousand years.

  X accepted what would happen. He didn’t care if he lived, he let the Traveller and chance take him on to where they liked. In the end they took him out of the Capital and at first he didn’t even notice.

  Twenty miles outside the Traveller stopped. The energy exchanger had exhausted slowly, it was not until the first hill slopes that the machine laboured, then lurched and ground to a stop.

  It was dark there too. But not with the velvet intensity of the forgotten parts of the Old Capital. There were stars— but X didn’t see them until the Traveller had stopped and it was too late to go back.

  He sat up with a jerk. He looked up through the cupola and saw the stars shine in the summer sky. Panic hit him and he screamed. His stomach turned as he recognised the wavering beauty of the heavens and realised that he was in the Outside.

  He’d seen the Outside. He knew what was there. He’d looked out from a safe, clean gallery in the Nice Part. He’d seen the red-brown desert, the deep carved water courses, the cracked and eroded surface.

  He knew of the death out there. He’d seen the half revealed bones where they lay to wear away in the dusty winds. He knew it was death to breathe the air, death to walk in that place. That in the Outside everything meant death.

  X sat shivering in the silence and watched the dawn crack across the sky. He sat and counted his days, regretting the Curator, waiting for the bubble of air in the Traveller to wear out.

  The sun rose over distant mountains and X had resigned himself. He sat up, arms folded, still shivering slightly from the cold, reckoning his death the just return for what he had done to his friend.

  * * * *

  Full daylight came reluctantly to that devil’s landscape. Long ages before there had been neutron bombing and bacteria, napalm and defolients, nerve gas spread wide and thick. They said the anthrax had only lasted a hundred years in the soil, but there were other and worse things than that.

  X studied the fantastic shapes, looked at the piled up rocks, the low dunes of mud and dust, caught the sparkle of glass from old broken houses. He heard the wind move on the face of desolation and he could ignore it. He didn’t care much any more, he knew he would soon die.

  On the horizon, on the brow, a slender light glint took his eye. A straight thing, the only regularity in all the twisted world. On poles, on regular shining poles there were lenses and antennae sets. They swivelled slightly, each rocking its exact arc as the Generator kept watch over the Capital and its people. There was nothing else moving, only the sterile wind, but later in the morning there were dust devils moving too.

  It was the Generator that had built the Capital—made the Fuller for all the people to live in. It had been the Generator’s suggestion, perhaps it had been in the days before it gave orders. It had computed the design, made arrangements so that the Fuller became possible, told the men what to do and how to do it. ‘Safe for ever!’ it had said. ‘Safety and content!’ So then they called it the Happiness Generator.

  They must have been mad, thought X. Those great men in those golden days, they must have been mad to even make the attempt, to put themselves so much in the power of the Generator. But the thing had been done and the Generator was given more and more to do, more and still more power. Perhaps, thought X, perhaps the men that decided those things had had a whiff of the gas that made men think they were cats and afraid of mice. Perhaps, in some way, they had been really mad. Perhaps everyone was mad.

  X knew the story. He had to admit that the Generator and its Fuller had saved the race from extinction. The Other Side hadn’t had a Generator as good as the Capital. They hadn’t built a Fuller and they’d all been killed.

  They said the Others had started the Trouble, but for some reason X wasn’t sure he believed that. One story was that the Generator had computed when the Others would strike and then hit them the day before. There had been a reply, of course, but it was soon over and anyway most of the people were in the Fuller. The poisons had come down like rain, soaked the soil and there was nowhere else to go except the Capital.

  After that the old men had realised how dangerous the Generator was. That was when they’d made the President to be its keeper. He was supposed to have power over it, but X didn’t believe that either.

  He sat still in the Traveller, looking at the desert, knowing that he would soon die. He dismantled the Luger, hoping perhaps to find out its essence, to find that quality that made it so wonderful for him. He spread the pieces on his lap, counted them, explored their beauty. He thought of the Curator, wondered if the pistol was really worth his death.

  He looked down the barrel, saw the rifling bands shine spiral back at him. He saw the dashboard through it, the communicator panel from the Generator, then used the barrel as if it was a telescope to study the slender lens poles on the ridge. It grew hotter as the sun rose. X reassembled the pistol, unfastened his jerkin. He sweated and looked out at the baking rocks. Slowly the heat became unbearable.

  Finally it was his bladder that drove him out. He knew he would die anyway if he stayed and he chose to go out and stand up, not to die sitting in a stink of urine. He stuck the Luger in his waistband, took one last deep breath and opened the door.

  Glass fragments cracked under X as he stood and swayed. He was surprised when he did not die at once. He decided the surviving contact poisons must act more slowly. His legs were stiff and his head began to pound as he struggled to hold his breath—he turned for one last look at the Fuller. In the Nice Part he saw spectrums where the sun shone through. There were trees, people in bright clothes were brilliant dots there. Safe, thought X, they were safe and t
hey would live and he wouldn’t.

  But there was an end to it. The horizon began to spin. X’s breath exploded out. In utter terror he stood and fought, perhaps he lasted a full minute before he had to breathe. He gasped in, then stood waiting for his lungs to sear, for the agony to begin.

  Nothing happened. The Fuller towered over him, dominated half the sky. Perhaps he could make it back. He was breathing freely now and still nothing happened. Perhaps he could last a day, or even a week, perhaps with treatment he might live. A little moment of hope came, but really he knew he was doomed. Then, suddenly, he hated the Fuller and all he wanted was to be alone with himself to think what things meant to him.

  At least he’d die out of the Fuller. They wouldn’t recirculate his flesh to grow algae. He would assert himself. He’d take his Luger and walk away, get away as far as he could. Walk! He’d leave there running, walking was too slow! Perhaps, with luck, he could get out of its sight. In the end it was a matter of pride. X turned and began to jog towards the hills.

  All the way he passed ruins. Buildings and bones, a great rusty field of dust that had once been a road. Endless rivers of rubble and lines of cars were half buried there. They had what was left of seats in them, some had bones too. The lines reached all the way to the Fuller. X hurried past, the only sound was his breathing and the sough of wind in the thin jagged metal. Not everybody had made it to the Fuller, only the chosen had been allowed entry on that last day.

  * * * *

  It was evening before he got near the hill crest. He drove himself up there, staggering with fatigue. His vision was a red haze. The sun had set and it was cooler and night was coming and he was sure that he was dying. He stumbled and fell to his knees. The sand was warm and he found he could go no further. He slept face down, moaning and making running movements with his legs as he dreamed of the Curator and half felt the Luger digging into his ribs.

  In the warm breezes of morning X’s eyes opened and met sand. His mouth was gritty and he ached all over. He lifted his head, sand crumbled off his cheek and down his neck as he sat up. His body was so painful he was sure that he was alive.

  He looked back and the Fuller was still there. Twenty miles away, thirty perhaps, still big on the horizon, blue and shadowed against the rising sun. He sighed, stood up. There was still a distance to go, it seemed he still had time to cross the hills and get out of sight.

  On the crest X stood amazed. There should have been only clay and dust and bedrock, everybody knew the world was dead except the Capital.

  For a moment he thought it was some sort of hallucination—where there should have been desert there was grass. A waving sea shining back blue-green under the cloudless sky. It was like a blow in the guts. Like a blind man he set off down the slope to bathe his feet in that green ocean.

  Swallows and larks swooped and fluttered along the slope. The wind felt free there. Slowly it dawned on X that he was not about to die.

  Life began suddenly like a knife edge just over the crest away from the Capital. Just there, ten feet into the grass, something made X stop and look up at the slender posts as they curved away in their long perspective. A buzzard came circling slowly down the wind. As it crossed the line a lens looked up and a bar of white light connected it for a moment with the bird. The buzzard puffed smoke and flapped twice before it fell. X stepped on quickly. He guessed the Generator killed anything that moved towards the Capital. There were animal bones all along the line.

  Strange thoughts came to X as he travelled the grass. Ideas stirred in his well-taught brain, all the time the Luger nagged in his ribs, worried him with its presence. Clouds began to build in the east.

  Night came and he was sitting high on an age-smoothed granite mass, an island in the darkening green, looking back at the Capital and its glow against the sky. The air was sulphurous, heavy and warm, thunder mumbled in the hills and X’s head ached.

  Lightning crackled under the massive clouds, an age passed, X watched the storm come nearer. It seemed to touch the Capital, the lightning spidered down across the great Fuller, hit all along the hills.

  Rain blotted out the Capital and its glow as if it had never been. X felt the Luger tingle in his hands. He looked down at it and the muzzle glowed with a strange phosphorescence. Giant thunder came and the Luger was pointing at the Capital and he suddenly understood. He was going to shoot the Happiness Generator!

  Blast it like a thunderbolt! Cool rain came, cleared the air and X’s headache was gone. That Luger, it was made for something, it had a purpose. It had a function and that was the clue to its meaning.

  X felt the weight of it. Felt the power of the thing come jarring up his arm as surely as if he’d fired it. It was clear. He’d always meant to shoot the Generator, he was always meant to shoot it—that was why he’d loved the Luger.

  Now he understood, it was reasonable. Somehow he hadn’t been able to recognise the purpose inside the Fuller. He knew now, he knew why he’d stolen it, he knew the real reason—he knew now why he’d killed the Curator.

  He was going to pump a handful of bullets deep into the guts of the great machine. Find its vital parts and send shots to burst and ricochet through the banks and memory coils, each round taking its two or three hundred metre tunnel of destruction through there. He was going to set the world free, release the people to make their own way in the green and living world.

  Now it only remained to find nine rounds of 9-mm ammunition. There’d have been none made for generations, but somehow he was sure there’d be some somewhere. There had to be. He knew he’d have to find some. It wouldn’t take many, just a handful in the right place.

  Not enough to kill the machine entirely, just enough to take out its higher parts, the structures that made it so powerful, the ego unit that it had made itself. Just the top ten per cent, like one of those lobotomies it did to people, just enough to take away its ambition, its aggression. Then it would be what it really was. A tool, beautiful like the Luger, a stupid efficient servant, uncreative and safe. A thing to serve men, their creature to organise their days and do their small things.

  X sat on his great rock and watched the Capital reappear as the storm passed. The rain had soaked him, his clothes had begun to fall to pieces but it was an hour before he felt cold and had to move. He was weak and hungry, exhausted, he felt as if he might die anyway.

  X turned from the Capital and clambered down the bald granite. In the grass he looked again and the Fuller itself had disappeared. He began to stumble through the grass, he had to find food quickly. He knew what a great thing he had to do, he was sane now and knew how weak he was. He slowly became aware of a light ahead of him. Not blue-white like the Fuller, but a small orange square against the green darkness.

  He had no idea how long he had walked. He staggered into a shallow winding valley, thick with trees and misty into the distance. He followed a small path, tripped on roots, blundered against bushes as he watched the orange light appear and disappear through the dripping trees.

  Near the house there was the sound of water and a dog began to bark. X made sure the Luger was hidden and stood waiting while a man came out with a lantern. He held the dog by the loose skin of its neck and raised the lantern with his other hand. The dog was very big, a sort of Alsatian, and it threatened X with murder.

  X tried to say he meant to hurt no one. He stood very still while the dog sniffed him over between its barks and growls. The man held his light close and all X could see were the moths that danced around it.

  ‘You’re drunk...’ The man laughed at X as if he was really amused. It was a nice sound. ‘The dog won’t hurt you, unless I tell it!’ His voice changed, filled with concern when he saw X’s condition. ‘You look bad. You look too weak to hurt...” X didn’t know whether to be glad or not and he didn’t care as he pitched forward into the man’s arms.

  ‘He could sleep in the shed. Bring him in first.’ A woman came out of the shadows. She held a shot gun and she stayed just inside t
he circle of light. She took no chances and there was the dog, and that worried X much more than the gun.

  The man got an arm under X’s shoulders and helped him towards the house. They paddled across the shallow stream and into the brighter light which came from the door. Inside the dog started its clamour but when the man put X into a chair it fell silent.

  They bathed X’s cuts and bruises, wrapped him in blankets and the man gave him whiskey from a pottery cup. The woman brought cheese and coffee and when X saw her stand by the light to cut bread she was beautiful. About thirty-five, slim but stronger looking than any man X had ever seen in the Capital. Her voice was lovely too, low and like violins. Her skin was brown and her voice was as soft as her skin.

  ‘You’ve been hungry.’ The man watched X eat, poured more whiskey into his coffee. ‘You’ll understand about the guns?’ X saw the man had a sub-machinegun handy. ‘My Sten gun, I mean. It’s lonely out here ... people are always hungry...’

  X nodded, his mouth too full of cheese to speak. The man laughed again. He had red lips behind his black beard and X was surprised to realise that they weren’t painted.