Asimov's SF, July 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  When he leaves China he visits the court of a monarch nearly as great, the fabled Christian king Prester John, about whom a whole cluster of remarkable tales accreted. (I wrote a long book about Prester John years ago; there is no room to tell that story here.) Prester John rules seventy-two provinces, each with a king of its own who is under subjection to him. In the sea adjacent to his country are “great rocks of the stone that is called adamant, the which of its own kind draws to him iron; and for these should pass no ships that had nails of iron,” because the magnetism pulls them forth. Prester John's country also has “a great sea all of gravel and sand, and no drop of water therein, that ebbs and flows as the great sea does in other countries,” a river “full of precious stones, and no drop of water,” a place where men have horns and have no language, but grunt like pigs, another where birds are capable of human speech, and one where trees sprout at sunrise and “grow till midday, bearing fruit, but no man dare take of that fruit, for it is a thing of faerie. And after midday they decrease and enter into the earth, so at the going down of the sun they appear no more.”

  Mandeville finds an isle of giant naked cannibals, thirty feet high, and beyond it an isle of cannibals sixty feet high, and one where maidens kept venomous serpents in their vaginas to defend their chastity, and one nearby where women have the power to slay men with an angry look, and beyond that one where women mourn when their children are born and rejoice when they die. He sees the spotted “gyrfaunt,” which seems to be a giraffe, “and his neck is twenty cubits long,” and the fierce “cocodrille” (crocodile), which has no tongue, and snails so big that three or four men could live within their shells, and he visits the isle of Pytan, “where the folk neither till nor sow no land, and are nourished by the scent of wild apples.” Beyond, past a wilderness of dragons and unicorns and lions and elephants both white and blue, lies “Tapro-bane"—Ceylon —where ants the size of hounds dig gold from the ground, and beyond that is Thule, “the furthest isle of the world inhabited with men,” beyond which is nothing but a wilderness filled with “dragons and other wild beasts, cruel and fell.” Here he ended his journey.

  It is a fabulous tale in more senses than one. One wild story tumbles over another for two hundred spellbinding pages. For centuries it was accepted as gospel, until more trustworthy explorers ventured into those parts three centuries later and, more's the pity, were unable to find Mandeville's marvels. Shakespeare had read the book; he refers to Prester John and the Great Khan in Much Ado About Nothing, and has Othello speak “of the Cannibals that each other eat . . . and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.” I have only begun to touch on its wonders here. But anyone who loves a good fantasy will find rich rewards in Sir John Mandeville's book of travels, which has captivated audiences for five hundred years. A very good modern edition of it can be found in the Penguin Classics series, translated by C.W.R.D. Mosely. I recommend it most heartily.

  Copyright © 2011 Robert Silverberg

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Novelette: DAY 29

  by Chris Beckett

  Chris Beckett resides in Cambridge, United Kingdom, with his wife Maggie, two dogs, and a cat. His three grown-up children now live away from home, one of them currently in Malawi. The author's short story collection The Turing Test, published by Elastic Press and still in print, won the Edge Hill Short Fiction Award in 2009. His new novel Dark Eden, which takes up the story of the Asimov's tale of the same name (March 2006), is coming out from Corvus this summer. Chris's dark and unsettling new tale may make us all rue . . .

  “Nearly Day 40!” exclaimed the Station Leader, heading for the cheap plastic armchairs she used for informal chats. “Well, well. It hardly seems yesterday that you first joined us.”

  Stephen did his best to ignore the farting sound that the chairs made as they seated themselves. It troubled him that she didn't care about this affront to her dignity, but she probably thought such considerations beneath her. She was an Agency officer of the old school.

  “And then pastures new for you,” Leader Wilson went on. “We'll soon all be nothing but a distant memory.”

  Stephen leaned forward. His large, pink, painfully open face reddened, as it always did when he was the slightest bit angry or agitated or ashamed.

  “Yes, my Day 40 is just two weeks away, but I was wondering if it would possible for me to continue working after that? To be honest I'd prefer to work right through to Day 1. It just seems silly to sit and twiddle my thumbs for forty days before my departure when I could be making myself useful.”

  Leader Wilson laughed.

  “God knows there's more than enough to do, Stephen. But I can't take up your offer. It's a very strict Agency rule, as you know. No one is allowed to work in the forty day countdown to transmission.”

  “It's a bloody stupid rule,” Stephen snapped, his face now very red indeed, his scalp smoldering round the roots of his spiky yellow hair. “Surely it's obvious that transmission couldn't possibly act retrospectively to affect the quality of work done before the event.”

  “Of course not.” Leader Wilson was perceptibly irritated. “But that isn't the issue, as you must know as well as I do. It's about your accountability for your actions. Suppose you were to make a serious error of judgment. How could you be called to account for it, if you had absolutely no memory whatsoever of your decision-making process?”

  “But I'm a data analyst, for Christ's sake!” Stephen burst out. “I process numbers! All my work is routinely checked, and none of it involves any direct contact with colonists. There really is no one I could possibly hurt or offend in those forty days, and therefore no chance whatsoever that I will compromise the Agency.”

  His boss shrugged.

  “I admit the rule does seem a little overzealous for non-operational staff like yourself, though you're the first one who's ever actually complained about having to take a five-week vacation. But a rule is a rule, Stephen, and I don't have the right to change it, or even the inclination to try, not least because your fellow-analysts would howl with rage if I did. I'm afraid you're just going to have to stop work on Day 40 and resign yourself to having fun for those last few weeks before you go, however onerous that may be for you.”

  She stood up. Stephen reluctantly also rose to his feet. The chairs made that stupid farting sound again.

  “You could get better chairs than these for ten dollars each,” he muttered.

  It was an odd comment. The Station Leader frowned and peered up into his face. (He was a very big man; she was very small.)

  “Are you all right, Stephen? In yourself, I mean?”

  “Yeah, of course,” Stephen grunted.

  Then, realizing it wasn't in his interests to leave an impression of emotional maladjustment, he managed a sort of smile.

  “I'm fine. Sorry. I know you don't make the rules. It's just, you know, there's so much I could be doing.”

  Mollified, the Station Leader smiled sympathetically as she showed him to the door.

  “You know it's really not a bad thing to recharge your batteries. Your work will benefit from it. Try and enjoy your last days here.”

  The door closed behind him.

  Outside the corridor window, a gardener was working along the perimeter fence with an herbicidal spray. Beyond was the Lutanian forest, that strange forest with no green in it, only pink and yellow and grey. The Station was full of its sweet but slightly sickly smell. It was like fermented caramel.

  * * * *

  “Hey Steve,” said his colleague Helen Fu, as he returned to his office. “A bunch of us are going to go over to New Settlement for a few beers. Fancy joining us?”

  “No. No thank you. Not tonight.”

  “Oh come on Steve. You hardly ever come out these days! And you'll soon be leaving us!”

  “Really, no. But I appreciate you asking.”

  He began to close down his workstation.

  “Don't be a killjoy, Steve,�
�� persisted Helen. “Come and have some fun for once!”

  Stephen didn't like to be put under pressure.

  “What do you mean fun?” he barked, as if he were an animal that had been goaded one time too often. “We all stopped having anything to say to each other ages ago. Didn't you notice? All we do now is get drunker and drunker and louder and louder to try and cover up that fact. Excuse me if that doesn't strike me as fun.”

  * * * *

  Agitated, resentful, and (though he didn't so readily admit this to himself) ashamed by his own outburst, Stephen chose to walk the three miles through the forest back to his lodgings rather than take the bus. He was one of those very bright people who are quickly irritated by the slowness of those round them, and tend not to notice the many ways in which other people are actually wiser than they are. But at some level he did notice. At some level he knew there was something out there that other people understood and he just didn't quite get.

  Fifty yards along the road, he was overtaken by the bus. A few of his colleagues looked out at him. Then the bus picked up speed, turned a corner and was gone. Inside it, they would of course still be discussing Stephen and his rudeness. But why should he care? He told himself he was much happier alone. And in some ways it was true.

  He was alone, in any case, whether he liked it or not. He was profoundly alone. The Station was soon out of sight and, if it wasn't for the metalled road itself, he could have been back in the old Lutania: not just Lutania as it had been fifteen years back before the arrival of the Agency and the Transmission Station, but Lutania as it had been three centuries ago, before the first human colonists arrived, when the forest and its denizens belonged only to themselves. For even now the human encroachment hadn't gone very deep. These trees around him, these strange Lutanian trees that came in three different colors but never in green, stretched away for thousands of miles, interrupted only by the occasional road or tiny settlement.

  It was a silent, somber, and utterly alien place. The pale tree trunks rose without branches for twenty feet before putting forth their pendulous pods and their giant leaves, pink or grey or yellow. There was no intermediate layer of vegetation to fill up the shadowy space beneath the canopy. The only breaks in the gloom were the intermittent ponds that were a feature of the entire forest: little patches of clarity and sunlight half-hidden by the trees.

  And nothing moved. Most of the time nothing moved at all out there in the day except for the occasional twitching of a pod and the odd balloon-like floater drifting through the trees between the canopy and the forest floor, its feathery tendrils rustling as it knocked into trunks and bounced off again. The leaves drank in the sunlight. The ponds shone in the distance, as if they were windows into an altogether brighter place. The forest floor, covered in pinkish moss, lay like a newly vacuumed carpet in an empty room. Even the caramel air was still.

  Then suddenly, so suddenly that he gasped out loud, Stephen came across three indigenes.

  * * * *

  Goblins, the colonists called them, though the Agency tried to discourage the term. They were squatting round a large white pebble, just ahead of him and only a few yards off the road to his left. They nodded and bowed as they took it in turns to touch and prod their lump of stone.

  One of them stood up. Half the height of a man and grey-skinned, it did indeed look very like a goblin in a children's story book, with its thin pointed face, its black button eyes and its V-shaped mouth, which could be seen as smiling teasingly, or could be seen as devoid of any meaning at all. And of course it was naked. Its large member dangled down like a length of hose, ridged with thick black veins.

  They were always male, like all Lutanian creatures, each one of which mated with its corresponding tree.

  “Oh crap,” muttered Stephen.

  His palms were sweating, his heart pounding. For the past four or five months, he hadn't seen one of the things close-up, let alone a group of them, only the occasional glimpse of an isolated individual, deep in the forest, wandering around by itself. He'd started to get used to the idea that the indigenes, like other Lutanian creatures, preferred to keep out of the way of human beings. It was the way he preferred it, too.

  “Just leave me alone, can't you?”

  They couldn't hear him, of course. (They communicated by microwave, so the Agency biologists had discovered, their tree-females acting as relay stations.)

  “Just play with your bloody stone, why can't you, and leave me be? I'm not interfering with you.”

  The goblin watched him. Its two companions watched him. Six shiny black button eyes. And all three were silent, didn't even glance at one another, just smiled and smiled at him with those odd thin faces that could either be seen as full of cunning, or as empty of anything at all.

  Stephen knew perfectly well that, this close, there was no way he was going to be able to avoid it, the thing about indigenes that people most feared. In fact he'd hardly even finished framing the thought when the voice spoke inside his head.

  “Hiding away.”

  It was his own voice, but not his own thought or his own inflection, as if his very thought-stream had turned out not really to be him, but only an instrument, a tool, that could as well be picked up and played with by others as by him.

  “Hiding away,” it said.

  It had happened before, just three times before during the whole of his three-year tour of duty, that he'd come up this close to goblins and heard that voice.

  “Can't get in,” is what he had heard the first time.

  “Ha ha. No home,” the second.

  He wasn't alone that second time. He'd visibly started with the shock of it, and the three young Agency people who were with him had laughed and demanded to know what the voice had said. (He'd been mortified. It hadn't struck him, then or since, that his companions were trying to distract themselves from inner voices of their own. He wasn't intuitive like that.)

  There had been one other time, too, when he'd seen an indigene watching him intently from far off in the forest. He wouldn't even have noticed the creature if it hadn't been picked out by the sunlight around a pond. And the voice had been so quiet that, if he hadn't seen anything, he might well have been able to persuade himself that he'd just imagined it.

  “Too scared to leave the path,” it had said.

  And for some reason, that had been the goblin encounter that had disturbed him most, the one that came back to him in dreams.

  But I'm awake now, Stephen reminded himself, and he rubbed his hands over that raw pink face of his as he looked firmly ahead and walked on past the strange trio and their precious lump of stone.

  * * * *

  You could tell when the settlement of Lisoba was near from the green plants that had begun to creep out from it onto the forest floor, clashing with the pink indigenous moss. The clearing itself, with its densely packed vegetable plots, was startlingly, shockingly green after the shadowy forest. Emerging from the trees and seeing Lisoba spotlit by the low evening sun, Stephen felt as if he were looking at a picture in a stained glass window. The little wooden houses, the rows of beans and maize seemed too bright, too simple, too perfect to be real.

  “Good evening, Mr. Kohl,” called the blacksmith Jorge Cervantes in his big bass voice, standing up from his tomato plants.

  “Good evening, Mr. Cervantes. How's your day been?”

  “Hello Mr. Agency Man,” called Mad Gretel, who the villagers said was possessed by spirits.

  “Hi there, Gretel.”

  Stephen was easier with the tenth-generation Lutanian settlers who lived in Lisoba than he was with his own Agency people at the Station. They didn't ask so much of him and, above all, they didn't expect him to be anything like them. His foreign origin gave him permission to be different and separate without causing offense.

  He continued into the village, greeted from time to time by other villagers.

  Lisoba was only twenty houses, plus a satellite dish and a prefabricated Community Center
that the Agency had put in so that it could talk to the people of Lisoba whenever it needed to, ask them things (for the Agency always longed to know), and provide them with lectures on subjects like family planning and nutrition and the world revealed by science. At the far side of the village, Stephen's landlady, Jennifer Notuna, had the largest house. A widow for some years, she topped up her income by renting out four rooms, the largest one to Stephen, the other three to Lutanian laborers working on an Agency housing project in the nearby town of New Settlement. (Less wealthy than Stephen, they slept two or three to a room.)

  Jennifer and her assistant Lucia were hanging out sheets when Stephen returned. Jennifer was in her fifties, Lucia half her age, but they were both from the same Lutanian mold: big, brown, solid women, with tough faces, and loud firm voices.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Notuna. Good evening, Lucia.”

  “Hey, Mr. Kohl. You hungry? Chicken and corn for dinner tonight.”

  Stephen smiled. After his encounter with the indigenes, it was good to be back with people who were completely at home here in Lutania. (The Lutanian response to any reference to indigenes was invariably an irritated and dismissive snort. In some remote areas beyond the Agency's reach, goblins were sometimes still shot as vermin.)

  “Mrs. Notuna,” said Stephen suddenly, “when you've got a moment, I wonder if I could have a word?”

  His pink, curiously naked face reddened.

  “Yes, okay, Mr. Kohl. Is everything all right? A problem with the rent money maybe?”