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

by Edited By Judith Merril

  Dr. Williams sat cross-legged in front of the machine and laughed, deliriously and uncontrollably. Eyes closed, he immersed himself thankfully in the brassily percussive clamor that now drove back his darkly threatening surroundings, warming himself at the blessed fire of its familiarity. He roared ecstatic encouragement to the ensemble, whooped maniacally at the brief solo passages, and accompanied the final chorus with frenzied palm-slapping of his knees.

  The performance crashed to a close, but Dr. Williams’ cackling laugh still held the sombre clutter of the forest at bay as he switched off the machine with a triumphant forefinger and sprawled back among the debris. He had been spared. It meant only a brief respite, it was true; weeks, a month or two possibly, but with the pick of his life’s researching to sustain him, his final days would be made tolerable, perhaps in a bitter-sweet way even happy. He would smother his loneliness with the greatest performances of the archaic musical form that he loved and which had been his life’s work, seeking out each nuance, each subtle harmonic and rhythmic coloration, so that when the time came, when the batteries were finally exhausted, then he would take his leave smilingly and with a full heart, grateful for the opportunity that Fate had seen fit to—

  Some distance away, the opening bars of Duke Ellington’s Ko Ko grunted springily into being beyond the muffling barrier of the trees.

  Dr. Williams leaped to his feet, a galvanized reflex that toppled him again immediately, as his legs were still crossed. Slightly stunned by his fall, he sprawled amid the wreckage, listening with a mixture of disbelief, puzzlement and sheer terror to the unmistakable (and yet oddly different) Ellingtonian voicing of brass and reeds that blared from the surrounding forest.

  Despite his confusion, a small corner of Dr. Williams’ mind analytically considered the possible causes of this phenomenon. His initial wild guess, that the construction of the local terrain produced some sort of freak echo effect, was hastily rejected. He was no geologist, but he was pretty certain that an echo that took approximately four minutes to become activated was quite beyond credence.

  That seemed to leave two possibilities, the first of which was tenuous to the point of invisibility, the second simply distasteful. Either (1) another castaway such as himself, coincidentally equipped with identical machinery and recordings, had chosen to respond in kind upon hearing Dr. Williams’ announcement of his presence, or (2) he was already crazy.

  The music, he realized, was becoming louder. It was now accompanied by other sounds—the crashing of displaced undergrowth, a muffled thunder that could have been the tread of heavy feet. He felt the ground vibrate beneath him, a gigantic pulse-beat that was, he was suddenly and sickly aware, in rhythmic sympathy with the performance, matching perfectly the churning swing of guitar, bass and drums.

  Giddily, he pushed himself to his feet. Whatever it was, delusion or nightmare reality, he had to get away.

  He bundled the machine back into its container, and glared wildly around him. An opening the size of a manhole cover showed blackly at the foot of the nearby cliff. Without pausing to consider that it might be inhabited, Dr. Williams lurchingly covered the fifty yards that separated him from it and dived inside.

  It was a small, round cave, little bigger than a telephone booth, and mercifully empty. He huddled as far back from the entrance as he could, clutching the machine protectively in front of him, and peered squintingly out into the clearing.

  Beyond the wreckage of the ship, he saw the greenery part. To the accompaniment of shouting trumpets and thrusting saxophones, a figure emerged into the open. It was approximately the size of a full-grown elephant, bright cerise, and the upper part of its unpleasantly lumpy body was surrounded by a sinuously weaving pattern of tendrils that ended in fringed, cup-like openings. It was apparently headless, but two eyes, nostrils and a generous mouth were visible behind the threshing fronds. Four squat legs supported its enormous bulk, each the diameter of a fair sized tree.

  It was rather, Dr. Williams sweatingly concluded, like a cross between an outsized potato sack and an octopus, but whatever it was one thing was abundantly and deafeningly certain. It was the source of the music that now rang about the clearing in unshielded, cacophonous triumph, uproarious accompaniment to the creature’s ground-shaking gait.

  It trotted cumbrously round the wreckage, blaring as it went. As it passed Dr. Williams’ hiding place, it tendered a creditable imitation of the initial statement by double-bass, muscular strumming that came to an abrupt and sinister halt as it passed out of his sight.

  He shrank into a near-fetal position as one of the cuplike objects thrust its way through the entrance. It hesitated in front of him, then pounced, an exuberant movement that strangely reminded the almost fainting Dr. Williams of a small dog that he had once owned.

  The cup explored him, the individual serrations on its edge prodding and stroking like independent, curious fingers. Another entered the cave and joined in the inspection. Their touch was warm, dry, and not unpleasant, and they gave off a mildly lemon-like odor.

  After what seemed an eternity, they retreated. Dr. Williams steeled himself for the next move, fervently wishing that he’d cut his throat when he had the opportunity. None of this, of course, was real. He must still be on the ship, delirious—possibly even dying—from the effects of the crash. Perhaps they hadn’t crashed at all. Perhaps this was simply some atrocious nightmare engendered by his fear of travel and its imagined consequences. The ingredients, after all, were all there; his lone survival, the grotesquely impossible musical performance and its equally ludicrous perpetrator that now lurked outside his place of shelter, his . . .

  Ko Ko pumped its way into existence again, this time containing a distinctly alien added quality. Instead of its customary animal-like elation, it sounded positively plaintive.

  Dr. Williams listened for a brief awestruck period, then smeared the sweat from his eyes with a wobbling hand and tried to think.

  Accepting purely for the sake of argument that the situation was real, what for pity’s sake was the creature that now sat outside the cave making noises like the long-dead Duke Ellington band in full cry? He laboriously reviewed its actions, trying to build up some sort of composite picture that would give him a clue as to its nature and purpose.

  The conclusions that he eventually drew, while outside the fifth straight rendition of Ko Ko thundered towards its conclusion, were absurd but inescapable. Somehow, in some multidexterous way that was quite beyond his imagining, it was capable of memorizing or recording what it heard and then repeating it in minute detail, even to the extent of approximately simulating the individual timbres necessary to achieve the final collective sound. This was sheer lunacy, of course, but Dr. Williams doggedly faced up to the fact that on the present evidence there was no other possible explanation. Secondly, it was either quite young or relatively stupid. Its attitude was clearly that of a dog or small child that wanted to play, the unmistakably plaintive note now having taken on a whining quality that grated unpleasantly on his already highly strung nerves.

  His experience of both dogs and children had been limited of late years, a situation largely dictated by his wife who had no interest in either, but he knew that both had a tendency to sulk when denied their immediate interest. Discipline, of course, was the correct treatment, but he couldn’t see how he was going to apply any under the existing circumstances. All things considered, cooperation seemed the better part of valor, a decision aided by the fact that absence of anything that could be remotely construed as aggressive intent had at last permitted Dr. Williams’ curiosity to at least partially overcome his fear.

  He opened the container, placed the machine on the floor of the cave, selected and fitted another spool, and pressed the on button again. Potato Head Blues by the Louis Armstrong Hot Seven clattered from the speaker, well-nigh deafening him until he made hasty adjustments to the controls. Beyond the cave entrance, he could detect signs of excited movement. A tentacle tip appeared, jigging
solemnly, shortly to be joined by others.

  Dr. Williams took a deep breath, said yet another silent but fervent prayer, and crawled outside with the machine blaring under one arm.

  The greeting that he received, he had no doubt, was friendly. Tendrils patted, smoothed and tickled him from all angles, sometimes clumsily, but all with a marked absence of animosity. Dr. Williams clung grimly to the still performing machine and bore the buffeting with as much equanimity as he could muster, flinching only occasionally.

  The music chirruped to a close, provoking obvious consternation and an abrupt halt to the amiably excited pawing. This recommenced, briefly, as the caustic virtuosity of Charlie Parker’s saxophone scurried from the speaker, then ceased altogether as the creature carefully lowered itself to a squatting position, its tendrils now moving in gently bobbing patterns that made Dr. Williams think light-headedly of dancing flowers. Gingerly, and wearing a fatuously polite smile, he joined it on the ground, offering thanks for the apparently safe opportunity to do so before his legs gave way of their own accord.

  The spool took some twenty minutes to run its course. During that time they were regaled by the thickly textured sonorities of Coleman Hawkins, a brace of roaring pieces from the Woody Herman and Count Basie bands, an Art Tatum solo and several sourly elated numbers by an Eddie Condon group. Apart from a cautiously twitching foot Dr. Williams sat motionless, eyeing his incredible companion and its movements with wary fascination. Occasionally and startlingly the creature would counterpoint the current ensemble or solo with a phrase of its own, intrusions that initially did little to aid the subsidence of Dr. Williams’ state of tension, but which he eventually came to await with eager anticipation. These embellishments took a variety of forms, each displaying an astonishing degree of sympathy with the performance.

  The final number on the spool commenced, a dryly dragging performance of the blues. With a certain stiff embarrassment, Dr. Williams got to his feet, returned to his former place of refuge, and procured the component parts of his clarinet. He assembled it with hands that now shook only slightly, religiously moistened the reed, then returned to sit in his former position.

  He joined in cautiously at first, adding a muttered, almost apologetic embroidery to the trombone solo, inserting his phrases carefully between and around its familiar ruminations. Other instruments joined in for the final collective chorus, and Dr. Williams went with them, piping plaintive comments that were interspersed with the occasional squeak brought about by nervousness and lack of practice and listening with one eagerly attentive ear to the now more frequent and brassily stated interjections supplied by the extraordinary figure before him.

  The performance sank to a muted close. There was a brief, solemn silence, and then the creature began to make music of its own, single-voiced and softly at first, but swelling gradually to a richly textured fortissimo; jagged, dissonant sounds that caused the hairs at the nape of Dr. Williams’ neck to lift ecstatically and his foot to match its insistent pulse.

  It was some minutes before he fully realized what was happening. The music contained passages that he found vaguely familiar, but recognition, when it came, still startled him. A chromatic passage that was nothing more nor less than pure Tatum or Hawkins would be followed immediately by the creature’s own variations, spine-tingling patterns that meshed perfectly with the rambling yet oddly coherent structure of the music.

  Dr. Williams became dimly aware that at some point in the proceedings he had joined in again, contributing strangely angular phrases that he would never normally have been capable of conceiving, let alone attempting to perform. He ducked and bobbed and weaved with the music, instinctively following the tantalizing zigzag of modulations, somehow seeking out the right note, the apt harmonic aside.

  At long last, it faded and died. Dr. Williams twiddled a startlingly intervalled and totally fitting coda, then sat in deep reverie, inexpressibly content. The skies might fall, he could be stricken with some dread and unheard of disease that was beyond his curing, he might even suddenly find himself viewed in a rather more edible light by the odd and now silent and motionless figure that sat not eight feet away from him, but nothing could destroy the happiness that he felt at that moment. In the past he had added his not altogether unaccomplished embellishments to countless recorded performances, but absence of willing fellow participants had always ensured that these were solitary intrusions onto already familiar ground. Now, for the very first time, the crutch of foreknowledge had been removed, leaving him dependent entirely on his own imagination, his own abilities.

  And it hadn’t been half bad, Dr. Williams thought. He felt a muffled surge of vanity, then let it come jauntily through in all its unabashed swagger. No, by God, it hadn’t been half bad.

  He glanced briefly at the creature, placed his clarinet back in his mouth, tapped his foot briskly four times, then blew.

  Some little time after that, the strains of an exuberant and quite unique performance of Tea for Two played by an extraordinary collection of instruments that included bassoon-like croakings and something that sounded vaguely like a plunger-muted sousaphone racketed raspingly through the slowly darkening forest.

  Despite his occasional recourse to prayer in times of stress, Dr. Williams was not a religious man and correspondingly had little faith in miracles, but he couldn’t help feeling that his finding himself in his present surroundings constituted something closely akin to such a happening. But whatever the cause, he existed in a place of earth and rock and water, bountifully equipped with fruit and vegetables that cautious experiment soon proved tastily edible, abundant shelter, a total absence of any other life-form larger than a rabbit, and its immediate region otherwise populated solely by himself and the brightly hued being that had become his constant companion and sharer of endless musical excursions that soon left him with a lip like iron and an instrumental technique that he had never dreamed could possibly be his.

  There were minor inconveniences, it was true. Insects were frequently present in both variety and abundance, but while they were an undoubted nuisance, he was, oddly, never bitten. Also, it rained—not often, but torrentially when it did happen. Dr. Williams found these things moderately unpleasant, but readily acknowledged that they were a remarkably small price to pay when viewing the picture in toto.

  During the early days of his relationship with the creature, understandably excited by what seemed to him to be the perfectly reasonable possibility of establishing verbal contact, he attempted simple conversational training, but it soon became apparent that his efforts in this direction were to be in vain. It obligingly aped his carefully enunciated phrases—always, disconcertingly, mimicking his own light baritone—but there it ended. It was plain that this activity was simply regarded as some inexplicable diversion on his own part which it was willing to humor, and Dr. Williams was forced to the reluctant conclusion that its own mode of communication took some entirely different course to that of his own species. Possibly it was telepathic, an achievement that still remained little more than a dream in the minds of men. But his disappointment was short-lived. Musically, they daily reached a degree of rapport that spoke effortlessly of universal feelings and reactions, an emotional link that invoked his own immediate responses and from which he derived enormous comfort.

  If there was a happier man anywhere in the universe, Dr. Williams would have laughed with uproarious disbelief on being informed of his existence. He still found it beyond him to fully accept that his present circumstances were anything other than a dream, but since he was a thinking man and therefore one who had frequently pondered on the true nature of reality, he was not unduly perturbed. Perhaps this was reality and the man-made clutter of plastic, steel and concrete that he had suddenly and astonishingly come to loathe was the dream, a nightmare peopled with uncaring, uncomprehending individuals with whom he had never really communicated and whose idly uniform acceptance of the multi-sensory exercises that now constituted their staple enter
tainment he scorned with the fervor of the true purist. Occasionally he thought about his wife, and shuddered. Was it possible that such a person really existed, that such a bizarre liaison had been formed! At such times he would hastily assemble his clarinet, and then immerse himself in a positive fury of invention that successfully, if only temporarily, dispelled such horrifying shadows.

  The pattern of his new existence was soon formed. During the days they would wander through the placid confines of the forest, Dr. Williams engaged in desultory exploration, his companion plainly content to let itself be led by its new-found friend. Occasionally, they came across evidence of a civilization, oddly deserted machinery that lay rusting and overgrown in the green shadows, always without any hint of its nature or clue to its ownership. At such times the creature would lurk at a distance, its customary exuberance stilled, only returning when they moved on and the corroded enigma was well behind them. Once they came to a village, a bleakly regimented block of unpractically pyramidal buildings that squatted silent and deserted among the encroaching fronds. Dr. Williams entered one, and found its walls and floor liberally decorated with huge and rusting shackles. They departed, hastily, his companion tooting its obvious relief and his own ethnological suspicions further confirmed by what he had seen.