The Year's Best Science Fiction 11 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  The United States said that if the Soviet Union interfered, it would have no choice but to send Marines to Mars to protect the lives of free Martians as well as American tourists who would soon be visiting there.

  The real problem was that nobody knew what kind of government the Martians had.

  All the photographs showed that there was life on Mars, but unfortunately there were no flags in the pictures to indicate where the Martians stood.

  Both the Soviet Union and the United States were at a stalemate until someone came up with a brilliant solution.

  Mars would be divided in half. The northern part would be known as North Viet-Mars and the south would be known as South Viet-Mars.

  The Soviets would be in charge of the North, the U.S. in charge of the South, and free elections would be promised within two years of partition.

  The United States immediately set up a Mars aid program to give the Martians economic and financial assistance when the time came. It also trained military-assistance teams which would land with the aid people and train the Martians in defense against the North.

  The Soviets divided North Viet-Mars into communes and trained political commissars and technicians to go into the country and communize it.

  * * * *

  In the meantime, Communist China, which had not been asked to the conference, started making its own plans for Mars. It announced an Afro-Asian-Mars Conference to take place in Peking, where both the Western “bandits” and the Soviet “deviationists” would be attacked. China said, as soon as it had enough spaceships, it would send one million Chinese volunteers to Mars to save the planet from American and Soviet imperialism.

  Although the French had nothing to do with the space explorations, they insisted Mars should become part of a Third Force under the direction of General de Gaulle.

  Unbeknownst to the great powers on Earth, the Martians were holding a summit meeting of their own on the Mars Bar Canal.

  “Then it is agreed upon,” the Grand Clyde of Mare Cimmerium said. “We shall set up an East Earth and a West Earth. We shall have the East, and Trivium Charontis will have the West.”

  The Trivium Charontis Super Zilch said, “We shall hold elections within two years and let the Earth people decide for themselves what form of government they want.”

  “I cannot state strongly enough,” said the Grand Clyde of Mare Cimmerium, “that if Trivium Charontis does anything to violate the treaty we will be forced to use all the weapons at our disposal.”

  “And I can assure you, Grand Clyde, Trivium Charontis will not stand by and see West Earthlings swallowed up by Mare Cimmerium. If need be, we shall use the clong.”

  The Grand Clyde said, “We shall see which system prevails.”

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  * * * *

  Art Buchwald writes from Washington, these days. But back in 1948, Buchwald, an ex-Marine, was in Paris, working for the Herald-Tribune. Another young American, an ex-bomber pilot, was camping out on the steps of the Palais de Chaillot in the middle of Paris, but technically not in France at all, because the building had just been declared international territory, the domain of the new United Nations. Garry Davis had proclaimed himself a World Citizen and was demanding citizenship papers of the UN.

  To many of us, in those apocalyptic days, Garry Davis was a symbol of—literally—life or death. To most of the American press he was just one more loose nut. As I recall, Buchwald was one of the few newsmen published here who seemed to comprehend the wonderful and terrible myth Davis was acting out.

  We did not win our One World. Not with Davis’ intuitive dramas not with the scientists’ naive sanity. Today we seem farther than ever from the name—yet the game (between Crises) appears virtually in our hands. The world shrinks daily. Global communications and transportation pull us together in shared language, handicrafts, entertainment, cuisine, and personal contact—while the growing pressure of our awed awareness of the immensity of the universe pushes at us from outside, turning us toward each other.

  * * * *

  Looking for biographical material on Brian Aldiss, I found instead my first letter from him, in February, 1959:

  So Oxford fascinates you? What effect do you think “Pike County” has on me? Oxford these days is a beautiful and exciting city—very lively, one facet of it resembling exactly a dour, congested. Midland town, with big cinemas and traffic jams and Morris Motors, making the university side look like its Latin quarter. But the other side of it, the side that contains thirty-one colleges and a wedge of beautiful living and buildings, is even more exciting. And you can see both sides at once. 80,000 people live here....

  Morris Motors? Factories? Cinemas? 80,000 people? This had nothing to do with the Oxford I knew, from three centuries of English literature. Not that it mattered: I could keep my pretty picture. I would never see the reality.

  Last year I saw Oxford. I went to England, for a World Science Fiction Convention. (Brian Aldiss was guest of honor.)

  The convention took me there, but London kept me: I went for two weeks; and stayed two months—and of course went up to Oxford (as in all those British novels) for a weekend. It is everything Brian said, and everything those English novels promised, too. (Nothing had prepared me for the House of 12th-century Wood-Carvings and Stuffed Birds, home of Bonfiglioli and Impulse.)

  Six months later, Aldiss’ publishers brought him here to receive in person one of the first annual SFWA awards. The Aldisses came out to Pike County for a weekend, and I took them for my favorite long drive through the Pocono foothills and back along the Delaware River, on the Hawks’ Nest Drive, into Port Jervis—where the Silver Grill, has an all-jazz, and ail-good, jukebox. (Margaret Aldiss had never played a jukebox.)

  The other day I had a letter from Brian:

  . . . We know how you feel about England; we feel that way about the States—well, the 0.0001% of it we saw. We’ll be back. And we do thank you for the time we spent with you, and the lick of American myth we saw through your eyes. . . .

  The globe is getting smaller, as the universe gets bigger.

  (Who Can Replace a Man? Best SF Stories of Brian Aldiss should be just out from Harcourt, Brace, and World.)

  * * * *

  SCARFE’S WORLD

  BRIAN W. ALDISS

  I

  Young Dyak and Utliff with the panting breath stood on the seamed brow of the hill. It was a fine hot day, with a million cicadas thrilling about them like the heat itself. Under the heat haze, the far mountains were scarcely visible, so that the river that wound its way down from them held a leaden grayness until it got close to the foot of their hill.

  At the foot of the hill, it flattened out into swamps, particularly on the far side where marshy land faded eventually into mist. The iguanodons were croaking and quacking by the water’s edge, their familiar lumpy shapes visible. They would not trouble the men.

  “How is it with you Utliff? Are you coming down the hill with me?” Dyak asked.

  He saw by Utliff’s face that there was something wrong with him. The lie of his features had altered. His expression was distorted, changed in a way Dyak did not like; even his bushy beard hung differently this morning. Utliff shrugged his thick shoulders.

  “I will not let you hunt alone, friend,” he said.

  Determined to show his imperviousness to suffering, he started first down the sandy slope, sliding among the bushes as they had often done. He was pretending to be indifferent to an illness to which no man could be indifferent. With a flash of compassion, Dyak saw that Utliff was not long for this life.

  Glancing back, Utliff saw his friend’s expression.

  “One more runner for the pot, Dyak, before I go,” he said, and he turned his eyes away from his friend.

  Living things scuttled out of the bush as they headed toward the river, the furred things that were too fast to catch, and a couple of the reptiles they called runners—little fleet lizards, waist-high, which sped along on their hind legs.


  Utliff had a crude pouch full of stones at his side. He threw hard at the runners as they went, hitting one but not stopping it. Both men laughed. They were in no desperate need for food. There was always plenty; and besides, hunting runners was done more easily from the bottom of the hill, as they knew from experience.

  They pulled up in a cloud of dust at the bottom, still laughing. At this time of day, high noon, there was nothing to fear. In fact there were only the crunchers to fear at any time, and crunchers stayed supine in the shade at this period of heat. The quackers over in the swamp hurt nobody unless they were molested. It was a good life.

  True, there came silent moments of fear, moments—as when one looked at Utliff’s distorted face—when unease crawled like a little animal inside one’s skull. But then one could generally run off and hunt something, and do a little killing and feel good again.

  Dyak disliked thinking. The things that came from the head were bad, those from the body mainly good. With a whoop, he ran through the long grass and hurled himself in a dive over the steep bank and into the river. The river swallowed him, sweetly singing. He came to the surface gasping and shaking the water from his eyes. The water was deep under him, in a channel scoured by the river as it curved along its course, and it flowed warm and pure. It spoke to his body. On the opposite bank, where the quacker herd now plunged in confusion at his appearance, it was staled and too hot.

  Letting out a shriek of delight, Dyak fought the satin currents that wrapped his body and called to his friend. Utliff stood mutely on the miniature cliff, staring across at Dyak.

  “Come on in! You’ll feel better!”

  Before Utliff obediently jumped, Dyak took in the whole panorama. Afterwards, it remained stamped on his mind.

  Behind his friend stood the hillside that none of them had ever climbed, though their dwelling caves tunneled into the lower slopes. He noted that three women from the settlement stood there, clutching each other in the way women always did and laughing. On the heavy air, their sounds were just audible. In the evening, they would come down to the river and bathe and splash each other, laughing because they had forgotten (or because they remembered?) that the dark was coming on. Dyak felt a mild pleasure at their laughter. It meant that their stomachs were full and their heads empty. They were content.

  Behind Utliff to the other side, Dyak saw Semary appear and stand unobtrusively in a position where she could watch the two men from behind a tree. Semary was smiling, although she did not laugh as frequently as the other women. No doubt the noise had attracted her from her own settlement. Though Dyak and Utliff knew little about her, they knew this girl was for some reason something of an outcast from her own people, the three men and three women who lived toward the place where the cruncher had its current den.

  Dyak stopped smiling when he saw her. It hurt him to look at Semary.

  She was less corpulent and bowed than any other women he had seen. On her face was not even an incipient mustache, such as sometimes blossomed on the lips of other women; nor was there hair between her breasts. Though all this was strange, it was the strangeness that attracted. And yet—to be with her hurt. He knew this from the times when Utliff and he had stayed with her; and from that time, he knew too that she was passive, and did not fight and bite and laugh as the other women did when they had hold of you.

  The being with her and the passivity hurt in his head.

  As he looked at these things and thought these things hearing the heat calls of the cicadas and soaking in the heavy green of the world, Utliff jumped into the river.

  It was far from being his usual flashing crashing dive. When his head appeared above the surface, he was crying for help.

  “Dyak, Dy! Help me, I’m a goner!”

  Alarmed, Dyak was with him in three strokes, although still half expecting this might be a ruse that would earn him a ducking as soon as he reached his friend. But Utliff’s body was limp and heavy. He closed his eyes and opened his mouth and groaned.

  Grasping him firmly under the arm with one hand, Dyak slid beneath him until they were both on their backs, and kicked out for the nearest tree, a gnarled old broken pine that overhung the water so conveniently that they often used it to climb out on. Struggling only feebly, Utliff groaned again, and choked as water slopped into his mouth. With his free hand, Dyak reached up and seized a projecting limb of the tree.

  He hauled himself far enough out of the water so that he could wrap his left leg around the tree trunk for leverage. It was still a terrible job to hook Utliff out of the water. As he leaned over, head almost in the river, panting and tugging, another pair of hands reached out to help him. Semary had run along the tree trunk and was beside him. With a grunt of thanks, he was able to let her support Utliff in the water while he released his friend and took a better purchase on him. Holding the tree trunk tightly between his knees, he hauled Utliff up beside him.

  He and Semary rested the body along the trunk for a moment and then dragged it to the bank between them.

  Utliff was dead.

  Just for a moment, he shuddered violently. His eyes came open and his knees jerked up. Then he slumped back.

  Almost at once, he began the horrible process of disintegration.

  The limbs writhed as their muscles curled up. The flesh fell away. The flesh took on a greenish tinge. There came a frightening foetid smell as the insides revealed themselves; from them came a popping bubbling sound such as was never heard in the bowels of the living. In fear, Dyak and Semary rose and crept away, hand in hand. Utliff was not their kind any more. He had ceased to be Utliff.

  They moved away from the river bank, hiding themselves among low trees and eventually sitting side by side on a large smooth boulder. Dyak was still dripping water, but the warmth of the rock helped to dry him and stop his shivering. Semary began to pluck leaves from an overhanging tree and stick them on his damp chest. She smiled as she did so, so sweetly that he was forced to smile back though it hurt him.

  He put his arm about her and rubbed his nose in her armpit. She chuckled, and they slid down until their backs were against the boulder. Dyak began to peel the damp leaves off his chest and stick them on to her body. In his head, he was conscious of an affection for Semary. More than an affection. He had felt this thing with women of his own group, and he had felt it for Semary before this. The disturbance was at once pleasant and immeasurably sad. He did not know how to drive it away.

  Semary too seemed full of the same feeling. Suddenly she said to him, “People wear out.” It was as if she wanted to hide the subject in her head.

  As always when they spoke, Dyak was aware of a great gulf that could not be bridged by words. Words were so much feebler than the things they were meant to represent. He answered, feeling the inadequacy of what he said, “All people are made to wear out.”

  “How do you mean? How are people made?”

  “They are made to wear out. They come down new from the hills. Being new does not last. . . Their faces get strange. Then they wear out, like Utliff.”

  With an effort, the girl said, “Did you come from the hills long after Utliff?”

  “Many, many days. And you, dear Semary?”

  “Only a few days ago did I come from the hills. I came ... I came from by the smooth thing—that black barrier by the hill.”

  He did not know what barrier she meant. Under his skin, he felt a sort of strangeness, fear and excitement and other things for which he had no name. Her eyes stared, as if both of them were near to something they had not dared to allow inside their heads.

  “Tell me,” he said, “tell me what it was like, the coming into being.”

  Her lashes fell over her eyes. “I was on the hillside,” she said. “By the smooth black barrier.”

  To kill the long silence, he took her by the waist and settled into a horizontal position. So they lay, with their faces close together, sharing the same breath, as they had done before, and as Utliff had done with her in the days befo
re he wore out.

  He felt there was something else he should do. But in his head no prompting occurred, and his body seemed inhabited only by dreams without a name, dreams either hopelessly happy or hopelessly sad. Semary’s eyes were closed. But something told him that strange though she was, she felt the same turmoil as he.

  Utliff had felt it too. When they had both lain against Semary before, Dyak had been so startled by the things in his head, he had talked about it to Utliff. He was afraid that he alone felt that strange uncertain sweetness; but Utliff admitted that he had been filled with the same things, head and body. When they tried lying close to the women of their own group, the feeling had persisted. Keen to experiment, they had lain close to each other, but then the feeling had not been there, and instead they had only laughed.