Sci Fiction Classics Volume 2

by Vol 2 (v1. 3) (epub)

  "The what? Where did you get a name like that? The map's a blank here, and the country should be."

  "Then the map is defective. Man, it's the sweetest valley in the world! It will lead us all the way up. How could the map forget it? How could we all forget it for so long?"

  "Smith! What's wrong? You're pie-eyed."

  "Everything's right, I tell you. I was reborn just a minute ago. It's a coming home."

  "Smith! We're riding through green grass."

  "I love it. I could crop it like a horse."

  "That cliff, Smith! It shouldn't be that close! It's part of the mir—"

  "Why, sir, that is Lolo Trusul."

  "But it's not real! It's not on any topography map!"

  "Map, sir? I'm a poor kalo man who wouldn't know about things like that."

  "Smith! You're a qualified cartographer!"

  "Does seem that I followed a trade with a name like that. But the cliff is real enough. I climbed it in my boyhood—in my other boyhood. And that yonder, sir, is Drapengoro Rez—the Grassy Mountain. And the high plateau ahead of us which we begin to climb is Diz Boro Grai—the Land of the Great Horses."

  Rockwell stopped the terrain buggy and leaped off. Smith followed him in a happy daze.

  "Smith, you're wide-eyed crazy!" Rockwell gasped. "And what am I? We're terribly lost somehow. Smith, look at the log chart and the bearings recorder!"

  "Log chart, sir? I'm a poor kalo man who wouldn't know—"

  "Damn you, Smith, you made these instruments. If they're correct we're seven hundred feet too high and have been climbing for ten miles into a highland that's supposed to be part of a mirage. These cliffs can't be here. We can't be here. Smith!"

  But Seruno Smith had ambled off like a crazy man.

  "Smith, where are you trotting off to? Can't you hear me?"

  "You call to me, sir?" asked Smith. "And by such a name?"

  "Are the two of us as crazy as the country?" Rockwell moaned. "I've worked with you for three years. Isn't your name Smith?"

  "Why, yes, sir, I guess it might be englished as Horse-Smith or Black-Smith. But my name is Pettalangro and I'm going home."

  And the man who had been Smith started on foot up to the Land of the Great Horses.

  "Smith, I'm getting on the buggy and I'm going back," Rockwell shouted. "I'm scared liverless of this country that changes. When a mirage turns solid it's time to quit. Come along now! We'll be back in Bikaner by tomorrow morning. There's a doctor there, and a whiskey bar. We need one of them."

  "Thank you, sir, but I must go up to my home," Smith sang out. "It was kind of you to give me a ride along the way."

  "I'm leaving you, Smith. One crazy man is better than two."

  "Ashava, Sarishan," Smith called a parting.

  "Smith, unriddle me one last thing," Rockwell called, trying to find a piece of sanity to hold to. "What is the name of the seventh sister?"

  "Deep Romany," Smith sang, and he was gone up into the high plateau that had always been a mirage.

  In an upper room on Olive Street in St. Louis, Missouri, a half-and-half couple were talking half-and-half.

  "The rez has riser'd," the man said. "I can sung it like brishindo. Let's jal."

  "All right," the wife said, "if you're awa."

  "Hell, I bet I can riker plenty bano on the beda we got here. I'll have kakko come kinna it aro."

  "With a little bachi we can be jal'd by areat," said the wife.

  "Nashiva, woman, nashiva!"

  "All right," the wife said, and she began to pack their suitcases.

  In Camargo in the Chihuahua State of Mexico, a shade-tree mechanic sold his business for a hundred pesos and told his wife to pack up—they were leaving.

  "To leave now when business is so good?" she asked.

  "I only got one car to fix and I can't fix that," the man said.

  "But if you keep it long enough, he will pay you to put it together again even if it isn't fixed. That's what he did last time. And you've a horse to shoe."

  "I'm afraid of that horse. It has come back, though. Let's go."

  "Are you sure we will be able to find it?"

  "Of course I'm not sure. We will go in our wagon and our sick horse will pull it."

  "Why will we go in the wagon, when we have a car, of sorts?"

  "I don't know why. But we will go in the wagon, and we will nail the old giant horseshoe up on the lintel board."

  A carny in Nebraska lifted his head and smelled the air.

  "It's come back," he said. "I always knew we'd know. Any other Romanies here?"

  "I got a little rart in me," said one of his fellows. "This narvelengero dives is only a two-bit carnival anyhow. We'll tell the boss to shove it up his chev and we'll be gone."

  In Tulsa, a used-car dealer named Gypsy Red announced the hottest sale on the row:

  "Everything for nothing! I'm leaving. Pick up the papers and drive them off. Nine new heaps and thirty good ones. All free."

  "You think we're crazy?" the people asked. "There's a catch."

  Red put the papers for all the cars on the ground and put a brick on top of them. He got in the worst car on the lot and drove it off forever.

  "All free," he sang out as he drove off. "Pick up the papers and drive the cars away."

  They're still there. You think people are crazy to fall for something like that that probably has a catch to it?

  In Galveston a barmaid named Margaret was asking merchant seamen how best to get passage to Karachi.

  "Why Karachi?" one of them asked her.

  "I thought it would be the nearest big port," she said. "It's come back, you know."

  "I kind of felt this morning it had come back," he said. "I'm a chal myself. Sure, we'll find something going that way."

  In thousands of places fawney-men and dukkerin-women, kakki-baskros and hegedusies, clowns and commission men, Counts of Condom and Dukes of Little Egypt parvel'd in their chips and got ready to roll.

  Men and families made sudden decisions in every country. Athinganoi gathered in the hills above Salonika in Greece and were joined by brothers from Serbia and Albania and the Rhodope Hills of Bulgaria. Zingari of north Italy gathered around Pavia and began to roll toward Genoa to take ship. Boemios of Portugal came down to Porto and Lisbon. Gitanos of Andalusia and all southern Spain came to Sanl&uactue;car and Málaga. Zigeuner from Thuringia and Hanover thronged to Hamburg to find ocean passage. Gioboga and their mixed-blood Shelta cousins from every cnoc and coill of Ireland found boats at Dublin and Limerick and Bantry.

  From deeper Europe, Tsigani began to travel overland eastward. The people were going from two hundred ports of every continent and over a thousand highroads—many of them long forgotten.

  Balauros, Kalo, Manusch, Melelo, Tsigani, Moro, Romani, Flamenco, Sinto, Cicara, the many-named people was traveling in its thousands. The Romani Rai was moving.

  Two million Gypsies of the world were going home.

  At the institute, Gregory Smirnov was talking to his friends and associates.

  "You remember the thesis I presented several years ago," he said, "that, a little over a thousand years ago, Outer Visitors came down to Earth and took a sliver of our Earth away with them. All of you found the proposition comical, but I arrived at my conclusion by isostatic and eustatic analysis carried out minutely. There is no doubt that it happened."

  "One of our slivers is missing," said Aloysius Shiplap. "You guessed the sliver taken at about ten thousand square miles in area and no more than a mile thick at its greatest. You said you thought they wanted to run this sliver from our Earth through their laboratories as a sample. Do you have something new on our missing sliver?"

  "I'm closing the inquiry," Gregory said. "They've brought it back."

  It was simple really, jekvasteskero, Gypsy-simple. It is the gadjo, the non-Gypsies of the world, who give complicated answers to simple things.

  "They came and took our country away from us," the Gypsies had always sai
d, and that is what had happened.

  The Outer Visitors had run a slip under it, rocked it gently to rid it of nervous fauna, and then taken it away for study. For a marker, they left an immaterial simulacrum of that high country as we ourselves sometimes set name or picture tags to show where an object will be set later. This simulacrum was often seen by humans as a mirage.

  The Outer Visitors also set simulacra in the minds of the superior fauna that fled from the moving land. This would be a homing instinct, inhibiting permanent settlement anywhere until the time should come for the resettlement; entwined with this instinct were certain premonitions, fortune-showings, and understandings.

  Now the Visitors brought the slice of land back, and its old fauna homed in on it.

  "What will the—ah—patronizing smile on my part—Outer Visitors do now, Gregory?" Aloysius Shiplap asked back at the Institute.

  "Why, take another sliver of our Earth to study, I suppose, Aloysius," Gregory Smirnov said.

  Low-intensity earthquakes rocked the Los Angeles area for three days. The entire area was evacuated of people. Then there was a great whistle blast from the sky as if to say, "All ashore that's going ashore."

  Then the surface to some little depth and all its superstructure was taken away. It was gone. And then it was quickly forgotten.

  From the Twenty-second Century Comprehensive Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, page 389:

  ANGELENOS. (See also Automobile Gypsies and Prune Pickers.) A mixed ethnic group of unknown origin, much given to wandering in automobiles. It is predicted that they will be the last users of this vehicle, and several archaic chrome-burdened models are still produced for their market. These people are not beggars; many of them are of superior intelligence. They often set up in business, usually as real estate dealers, gamblers, confidence men, managers of mail-order diploma mills, and promoters of one sort or other. They seldom remain long in one location.

  Their pastimes are curious. They drive for hours and days on old and seldom-used cloverleafs and freeways. It has been said that a majority of the Angelenos are narcotics users, but Harold Freelove (who lived for some months as an Angeleno) has proved this false. What they inhale at their frolics (smog-crocks) is a black smoke of carbon and petroleum waste laced with monoxide. Its purpose is not clear.

  The religion of the Angelenos is a mixture of old cults with a very strong eschatological element. The Paradise Motif is represented by reference to a mystic "Sunset Boulevard." The language of the Angelenos is a colorful and racy argot. Their account of their origin is vague:

  "They came and took our dizz away from us," they say.

  The End

  © 1967, 1995 by R. A. Lafferty; first appeared in Dangerous Visions; reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agents, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.

  They Bite

  Anthony Boucher

  There was no path, only the almost vertical ascent. Crumbled rock for a few yards, with the roots of sage finding their scanty life in the dry soil. Then jagged outcroppings of crude crags, sometimes with accidental footholds, sometimes with overhanging and untrustworthy branches of greasewood, sometimes with no aid to climbing but the leverage of your muscles and the ingenuity of your balance.

  The sage was as drably green as the rock was drably brown. The only color was the occasional rosy spikes of a barrel cactus.

  Hugh Tallant swung himself up onto the last pinnacle. It had a deliberate, shaped look about it—a petrified fortress of Lilliputians, a Gibraltar of pygmies. Tallant perched on its battlements and unslung his field glasses.

  The desert valley spread below him. The tiny cluster of buildings that was Oasis, the exiguous cluster of palms that gave name to the town and shelter to his own tent and to the shack he was building, the dead-ended highway leading straightforwardly to nothing, the oiled roads diagramming the vacant blocks of an optimistic subdivision.

  Tallant saw none of these. His glasses were fixed beyond the oasis and the town of Oasis on the dry lake. The gliders were clear and vivid to him, and the uniformed men busy with them were as sharply and minutely visible as a nest of ants under glass. The training school was more than usually active. One glider in particular, strange to Tallant, seemed the focus of attention. Men would come and examine it and glance back at the older models in comparison.

  Only the corner of Tallant's left eye was not preoccupied with the new glider. In that corner something moved, something little and thin and brown as the earth. Too large for a rabbit, much too small for a man. It darted across that corner of vision, and Tallant found gliders oddly hard to concentrate on.

  He set down the bifocals and deliberately looked about him. His pinnacle surveyed the narrow, flat area of the crest. Nothing stirred. Nothing stood out against the sage and rock but one barrel of rosy spikes. He took up the glasses again and resumed his observations. When he was done, he methodically entered the results in the little black notebook.

  His hand was still white. The desert is cold and often sunless in winter. But it was a firm hand, and as well trained as his eyes, fully capable of recording faithfully the designs and dimensions which they had registered so accurately.

  Once his hand slipped, and he had to erase and redraw, leaving a smudge that displeased him. The lean, brown thing had slipped across the edge of his vision again. Going toward the east edge, he would swear, where that set of rocks jutted like the spines on the back of a stegosaur.

  Only when his notes were completed did he yield to curiosity, and even then with cynical self-reproach. He was physically tired, for him an unusual state, from this daily climbing and from clearing the ground for his shack-to-be. The eye muscles play odd nervous tricks. There could be nothing behind the stegosaur's armor.

  There was nothing. Nothing alive and moving. Only the torn and half-plucked carcass of a bird, which looked as though it had been gnawed by some small animal.

  It was halfway down the hill—hill in Western terminology, though anywhere east of the Rockies it would have been considered a sizable mountain—that Tallant again had a glimpse of a moving figure.

  But this was no trick of a nervous eye. It was not little nor thin nor brown. It was tall and broad and wore a loud red-and-black lumberjacket. It bellowed, "Tallant!" in a cheerful and lusty voice.

  Tallant drew near the man and said, "Hello." He paused and added, "Your advantage, I think."

  The man grinned broadly. "Don't know me? Well, I daresay ten years is a long time, and the California desert ain't exactly the Chinese rice fields. How's stuff? Still loaded down with Secrets for Sale?"

  Tallant tried desperately not to react to that shot, but he stiffened a little. "Sorry. The prospector getup had me fooled. Good to see you again, Morgan."

  The man's eyes narrowed. "Just having my little joke," he smiled. "Of course you wouldn't have no serious reason for mountain climbing around a glider school, now, would you? And you'd kind of need field glasses to keep an eye on the pretty birdies."

  "I'm out here for my health." Tallant's voice sounded unnatural even to himself.

  "Sure, sure. You were always in it for your health. And come to think of it, my own health ain't been none too good lately. I've got me a little cabin way to hell-and-gone around here, and I do me a little prospecting now and then. And somehow it just strikes me, Tallant, like maybe I hit a pretty good lode today."

  "Nonsense, old man. You can see—"

  "I'd sure hate to tell any of them Army men out at the field some of the stories I know about China and the kind of men I used to know out there. Wouldn't cotton to them stories a bit, the Army wouldn't. But if I was to have a drink too many and get talkative-like—"

  "Tell you what," Tallant suggested brusquely. "It's getting near sunset now, and my tent's chilly for evening visits. But drop around in the morning and we'll talk over old times. Is rum still your tipple?"

  "Sure is. Kind of expensive now, you understand—"

  "I'll lay some in. You can find the place easily
—over by the oasis. And we … we might be able to talk about your prospecting, too."

  Tallant's thin lips were set firm as he walked away.

  The bartender opened a bottle of beer and plunked it on the damp-circled counter. "That'll be twenty cents," he said, then added as an afterthought, "Want a glass? Sometimes tourists do."

  Tallant looked at the others sitting at the counter—the red-eyed and unshaven old man, the flight sergeant unhappily drinking a Coke—it was after Army hours for beer—the young man with the long, dirty trench coat and the pipe and the new-looking brown beard—and saw no glasses. "I guess I won't be a tourist," he decided.

  This was the first time Tallant had had a chance to visit the Desert Sport Spot. It was as well to be seen around in a community. Otherwise people begin to wonder and say, "Who is that man out by the oasis? Why don't you ever see him anyplace?"

  The Sport Spot was quiet that night. The four of them at the counter, two Army boys shooting pool, and a half-dozen of the local men gathered about a round poker table, soberly and wordlessly cleaning a construction worker whose mind seemed more on his beer than on his cards.

  "You just passing through?" the bartender asked sociably.

  Tallant shook his head. "I'm moving in. When the Army turned me down for my lungs, I decided I better do something about it. Heard so much about your climate here I thought I might as well try it."

  "Sure thing," the bartender nodded. "You take up until they started this glider school, just about every other guy you meet in the desert is here for his health. Me, I had sinus, and look at me now. It's the air."

  Tallant breathed the atmosphere of smoke and beer suds, but did not smile. "I'm looking forward to miracles."

  "You'll get 'em. Whereabouts you staying?"

  "Over that way a bit. The agent called it 'the old Carker place.'"

  Tallant felt the curious listening silence and frowned. The bartender had started to speak and then thought better of it. The young man with the beard looked at him oddly. The old man fixed him with red and watery eyes that had a faded glint of pity in them. For a moment, Tallant felt a chill that had nothing to do with the night air of the desert.