Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 3

by Jim Baen's Universe! staff

  Sarsour snarled and waited with drawn blade. He pushed Lina back even as she cried for him to stop.

  There was no place for larger monsters to hide, for the courtyard was bare save for greenery-choked lumps that might have been benches and some rusted helms and weapons beside the pool and the fountain which rose from it.

  I had seen grander things. The fountain was but an old, man-high cylinder of stone surrounded by a plain pool beside the far wall. Dark liquid trickling from its height had stained the stone along its path an ugly greenish-black.

  A fetid odor reached my nostrils and grew stronger as we closed on the water.

  "Fadil!" Sarsour roared. "I told you to keep them back!"

  "You said to make sure you reached the fountain first," I heard Fadil answer from behind me.

  Sarsour spat. "You shave meaning like a miser with his coins."

  "Hold," Dabir told me. His breath came swiftly. We stopped two spear lengths from the captain. If he advanced but a step I meant to ignore my master.

  "Did you drink the water?" Dabir asked Lina. I had seldom hear his voice so heavy with fear.

  "I did," she said weakly. "It was foul."

  "We both drank!" Sarsour said. "If it tasted like honey, immortals would stride everywhere. Fadil, Tarik, these two meant to keep it secret."

  "What?" Dabir's voice suddenly rang with hope, the first I had heard from him in days. "Lina," he demanded, "who drank first?"

  Sarsour cut off the girl's answer. "You are a fine actor! Look, Fadil—do you not see his eyes roll as he lies?"

  "You are a braying ass," I said.

  "Nay, I am more clever than you think. Do you not see how they blocked us at every hand? How they delayed their coming? How they scoffed at the tale? How they kept knowledge of perils from us? They would keep this secret only for the caliph!"

  "You mistake me, Captain," Dabir said. "And I gather now that you drank first."

  "I did. It can be our secret," Sarsour implored the men behind us "We can sell the water for the wealth of kingdoms!"

  A sad smile spread across Dabir's face. "And what did you plan for the governor's daughter?"

  "She shall be the first of my wives."

  Enough madness had passed his lips. I charged him. He swung up his blade in time to parry. Sparks flew.

  "Asim, no!" Dabir called.

  I turned Sarsour as we fought so that I might see both Fadil and Tarik, but they watched from either side of my master, arms folded.

  Lina had circled around to Dabir, who sheltered her protectively with one arm. "Asim!" she cried. "Do not kill him!"

  But I do not take orders from children. Do I hesitate to slay a frothing dog?

  Sarsour was mighty and skilled and we spun across the courtyard, trading blows. Our shadows, stretched by the sinking sun, loomed across the stone.

  The captain's lips were bared in a grimace. He beat me back, then readied another swing as his mouth twisted wide. He blinked, and the blade lowered. He looked down at his side. I might have killed him then, but something stayed my hand. I sensed a ruse.

  It was no act. Sarsour collapsed to the stones. His sword rang dully as it landed near his thigh. I wondered if I had struck him and not noticed. He pushed himself up on one hand, groaned.

  "Get up!" I called.

  Sarsour's eyes rolled like a drunkard's. His lips drew back from his teeth. His brow furrowed. He screamed.

  "Did you strike him?" Fadil called.

  I stepped back, shaking my head.

  Sarsour shrieked to the clouds, again and again, his calls rising in pitch. His form twisted and writhed and slid in on itself in a blur . . . and suddenly there was another blood-red bug crawling on the stone.

  Behind me came the unmistakable sound of retching—one of the soldiers. I was too shocked by the transformation to look back and see which.

  Lina screamed. I was still trying to wrest meaning from my eyes, but she had already done so and reached a terrifying conclusion.

  "Dabir!" She cried. "It was the water! It's going to happen to me!"

  At last I turned from the insect that had been Sarsour, now prodding empty clothes with its mandibles. The girl wept on my master's shoulder.

  "It's going to happen to me . . ."

  "Shh." He stroked her hair. "It will not happen to you. You are safe."

  I stepped closer to them as the girl pulled away to stare inquisitively at my master's face.

  "I did not believe the tale at first," Dabir said, "but then when we spotted the landmarks, and the great insects . . ."

  "What is this about, master?" I asked.

  "Have you heard of the land of Hattusha[1], Asim? Once it was mighty and warred with the great powers of the ancient world. These mountains were its home. And this was a temple where certain of its priests worshipped an efreet who cursed, and blessed, a fountain. Two would drink. One would achieve immortality, the other a life prolonged. Yet you know as well as I the way words are twisted by the mighty."

  "I don't understand," Lina said.

  "The one granted immortality would be transformed. As Sarsour has been. Hundreds, thousands, of prisoners were cursed thus so that their captors—those who drank immediately after—would thrive. One day the people of the hills rose up, destroyed the temple, slew the priests, and toppled Hattusha. They even stopped the fountain so that no others would be tempted by its terrible power. Yet over the years the cursed water has begun to trickle forth once more."

  "So she will live," I said.

  "Yes."

  "And you," I said, thinking aloud—"all along you were planning to drink first. To save her. That explains—"

  Dabir frowned, but it was the girl who spoke over me.

  "You meant to drink first?"

  "I meant to save you."

  Her eyes were bright as she looked upon him, and I saw more than gratitude in the look she fixed upon my master.

  One thing remained to be done. I strode after the scurrying bug that had been Sarsour and lifted my heel above it.

  "Let him be!" Dabir said.

  Bewildered, I lowered my foot to the ground.

  "Leave him to his immortality," Dabir declared.

  What more is to be said? We used our own strength to topple the column and worked into the night to stop the pool and fill it with stones. Lina we escorted back to a grateful governor. We had saved his daughter but he had lost his little girl, for she was forever after haunted by the trip to the fountain and the way it had ended or forever altered lives. Her beauty flowered, and later that year she married a wealthy man who was said ever after to treat her like a gift from paradise.

  Yet long years later she confided to me that from that moment beside the fountain she had never entirely stopped loving Dabir.

  * * *

  [1] The kingdom of the Hittites.

  Why Carol Won't Sit Next To Me At Science Fiction Movies

  Written by Mike Resnick

  Carol has a high threshold for embarrassment. You can't be married to me for 45 years and not have one. But recently she has announced that she will no longer sit next to me at science fiction movies, that indeed she will sit on the far side of the theater and do her very best to pretend that she doesn't know me.

  She's right. I'm just not much fun to be around at science fiction movies. I don't know quite how this came about. I used to love them when I was growing up. I forgave them their lack of special effects and their B-movie casts and budgets. Okay, so Them paid no attention to the square-cube law; except for that, it was as well-handled as one could possibly want. And maybe The Thing wasn't quite what John Campbell had in mind when he wrote "Who Goes There?", but it was treated like science fiction rather than horror (the same cannot be said for the big-budget remake), and the overall ambience was rational. As for Forbidden Planet, nothing I've seen in the last 50 years has stirred my sense of wonder quite as much as Walter Pidgeon's guided tour of the wonders of the Krell. A decade and a half later Stanley Kubrick made a trio
of wildly differing but excellent science fiction movies—Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange—each of which treated the field with respect.

  Then, just about the time I stopped dabbling at it and became a full-time science fiction writer, Hollywood started turning out one intellectually insulting science fiction movie after another. I mean, these things were almost dumber than network television shows. And I started muttering—louder and louder with each movie, Carol assures me—things like "No editor paying 3 cents a word for the most debased science fiction magazine in the world would let me get away with that!" Before long audiences would pay more attention to my rantings than to the movies.

  I keep hearing that science fiction movies are getting better, that now that George Lucas has shown what could be done on the big screen we no longer have anything to be ashamed of when comparing ourselves to other genres.

  That makes me mutter even louder.

  So let me get it off my chest, which is a figure of speech, because actually the stupidity of science fiction movies is much more likely to eat a hole in my stomach lining.

  And let me add a pair of stipulations:

  First, I'm only interested in movies that aspired to be arch-bishop, which is to say, movies with major budgets and major talent, efforts that really and truly meant to be good movies. I will not consider such epics as Space Sluts in the Slammer (yes, it really exists), as it seems not unreasonable to assume it was never meant to be a contender for the year-end awards.

  Second, when I speak of stupidities, I'm not talking about the nit-picking that goes on in outraged letter columns or esoteric fanzines. If the math or science are wrong only in areas that scientists, mathematicians, or obsessive science fiction fans would find fault with, I'll ignore it. If George Lucas doesn't know what a parsec is, or Gene Roddenberry and his successors think you can hear a ship whiz by in space, I'm willing to forgive and forget.

  So what's left?

  Well, let's start with Star Wars. First, has no one except me noticed that it's not pro-democracy but pro-royalty? I mean, all this fighting to depose the Emperor isn't done to give the man on the street (or the planet) a vote; it's to put Princess Leia on the throne and let her rule the galaxy instead of him, which is an improvement only in matter of degree. And it drives me crazy that in 1991 we could put a smart bomb down a chimney, and that in 2002 we could hit a target at 450 miles, but that computerized handguns and other weaponry can't hit a Skywalker or a Solo at 25 paces.

  Return of the Jedi? Doesn't it bother anyone else that Adolf Hitler—excuse me; Darth Vader—the slaughterer of a couple of hundred million innocent men and women, becomes a Good Guy solely because he's Luke's father? (Or maybe I should say, solely because we know he's Luke's father. After all, he was Luke's father in the first two films, but we didn't know it and hence he was a villain.)

  And what could be sillier than that final scene, where Luke looks up and sees Yoda and the shades of Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi smiling at him. That was too much even for Carol, whose first comment on leaving the theater was, "Poor Luke! Wherever he goes from now on, he's a table for four."

  Then along came E.T., which, for a few years at least, was the highest-grossing film of all time, until replaced by an even dumber one.

  You think it wasn't that intellectually insulting? Let's consider the plot of that billion-dollar grosser, shall we?

  1. If E.T. can fly/teleport, why doesn't he do so at the beginning of the film, when he's about to be left behind? (Answer: because this is what James Blish used to call an idiot plot, which is to say if everyone doesn't act like an idiot you've got no story.)

  2. Remember the scene where E. T. gets drunk? Sure you do. Now think of the next scene. What mother of teenaged children walks through a kitchen littered with empty beer cans and doesn't notice them? (Answer: in all the world, probably only this one.) This is the blunder that started me muttering loud enough to disturb other moviegoers for the first time.

  3. While we're on the subject of the mother and the kitchen, what is a woman with an unexceptional day job doing living in an $900,000 house in one of the posher parts of the Los Angeles area? (Even I don't have an answer to that.)

  4. Why does E.T. die? (Answer: so he can come back to life.)

  5. Why does E.T. un-die? (Still awaiting an answer, even a silly one, for this.)

  6. When E.T. finally calls home, the lights in the room don't even flicker. I'm no scientist, but I'd have figured the power required to reach a ship traveling away from us at light speeds would have shorted out the whole city.

  Cheap shots, Resnick (I hear you say); you're purposely avoiding the films that were aimed at an adult audience, films like Blade Runner and Signs, for example.

  All right. Let's take Blade Runner (which borrowed its title from an old Alan E. Nourse novel and has neither a blade nor a runner in the whole damned movie). Great future Los Angeles; it really put you there. Nice enough acting jobs, even if Harrison Ford was a little wooden. Wonderful sets, costumes, effects.

  But the premise is dumber than dirt. We are told up front that the androids are going to expire in two weeks—so why in the world is Harrison Ford risking his life to hunt them down when he could just go fishing for 14 days and then pick up their lifeless bodies?

  But that premise looks positively brilliant compared to the critically-acclaimed Mel Gibson movie Signs, which grossed about half a billion dollars worldwide a few short years ago.

  Consider: would you travel 50 trillion miles or so for a little snack? That's what the aliens did. If they're here for any other reason except to eat people, the film never says so.

  Okay, let's leave aside how much they're paying in terms of time and energy to come all this way just to eat us for lunch. What is the one thing we know will kill them? Water (which also killed the Wicked Witch of the West, a comparison that was not lost on some perceptive viewers). And what are human beings composed of? More than 90% water.

  So the aliens come all this way to poison themselves (and then forget to die until someone hits them with a baseball bat, which Hollywood thinks is almost as devastating a weapon against aliens of indeterminate physical abilities as a glowing sword.)

  By now I didn't just mutter in the theater, I yelled at the screenwriters (who, being 3,000 miles away, probably didn't hear me.) But I figured my vocalizing would soon come to an end. After all, we all knew that the sequel to The Matrix would show the world what real science fiction was like; it was the most awaited movie since Lucas' all-but-unwatchable sequels to the original Star Wars trilogy.

  So along comes The Matrix Retarded . . . uh, sorry, make that Reloaded. You've got this hero, Neo, with godlike powers. He can fly as fast and far as Superman. He can stop a hail of bullets or even bombs in mid-flight just by holding up his hand. He's really quite remarkable, even if he never changes expression.

  So does he fly out of harm's way when a hundred Agent Smiths attack him? Of course not. Does he hold up his hand and freeze them in mid-charge? Of course not. Can Neo be hurt? No. Can Agent Smith be hurt? No. So why do they constantly indulge in all these easily avoidable, redundant, and incredibly stupid fights?

  Later the creator of the Matrix explains that the first Matrix was perfect. It only had three or four flaws, which is why he built five more versions of it. Uh . . . excuse me, but that's not that way my dictionary defines "perfect."

  You want more foolishness? The whole world runs on computers, which means the whole world is powered by electricity to a far greater extent than America is at this moment. So why is the underground city lit only by burning torches?

  I hit J above high C explaining to the screen what the least competent science fiction editor in the world would say to the writer who tried to pawn The Matrix Reloaded off on him.

  Now, you'd figure Stephen Spielberg could make a good science fiction movie, wouldn't you? I mean, he's the most powerful director in Hollywood's history. Surely if he wanted to spend a few million d
ollars correcting flaws in the film before releasing it to the public, no one would dare say him nay.

  So he makes Minority Report, and to insure the box office receipts he gets Tom Cruise to star in it and announces that it's based on a Philip K. Dick story. (Dick is currently Hollywood's favorite flavor of "sci-fi" writer, this in spite of the fact that nothing adapted from his work bears more than a passing resemblance to it.)

  And what do we get for all this clout?