Lightspeed Magazine Issue 35

by Nina Allan

  “You observe the dietary code? You understand the language of scripture?”

  “Not exactly,” Schwartz admitted. “In fact I don’t do anything that’s specifically Jewish except think of myself as a Jew and adopt many of the characteristically Jewish personality modes, which however are not uniquely Jewish any longer—they can be traced among Italians, for example, and to some extent among Greeks. I’m speaking of Italians and Greeks of the late twentieth century, of course. Nowadays—” It was all becoming a terrible muddle. “Nowadays—”

  “It would seem,” said the Antarean, “that you are a Jew only because your maternal and paternal gene-givers were Jews, and they—”

  “No, not quite. Not my mother, just my father, and he was Jewish only on his father’s side, but even my grandfather never observed the customs, and—”

  “I think this has grown too confusing,” said the Antarean. “I withdraw the entire inquiry. Let us speak instead of my own traditions. The Time of Openings, for example, may be understood as—”

  In the Green Room some eighty or a hundred distinguished Papuans press toward him, offering congratulations. “Absolutely right,” they say. “A global catastrophe.” “Our last chance to save our culture.” Their skins are chocolate-tinted but their faces betray the genetic mishmash that is their ancestry: perhaps they call themselves Arapesh, Mundugumor, Tchambuli, Mafulu, in the way that he calls himself a Jew, but they have been liberally larded with chromosomes contributed by Chinese, Japanese, Europeans, Africans, everything. They dress in International Contemporary. They speak slangy, lively English. Schwartz feels seasick. “You look dazed,” Dawn whispers. He smiles bravely. Body like dry bone. Mind like dead ashes. He is introduced to a tribal chieftain, tall, gray-haired, who looks and speaks like a professor, a lawyer, a banker. What, will these people return to the hills for the ceremony of the yam harvest? Will newborn girl-children be abandoned, cords uncut, skins unwashed, if their fathers do not need more girls? Will boys entering manhood submit to the expensive services of the initiator who scarifies them with the teeth of crocodiles? The crocodiles are gone. The shamans have become stockbrokers.

  Suddenly he cannot breathe.

  “Get me out of here,” Schwartz mutters hoarsely, choking.

  Dawn, with stewardess efficiency, chops a path for him through the mob. The sponsors, concerned, rush to his aid. He is floated swiftly back to the hotel in a glistening little bubble-car. Dawn helps him to bed. Reviving, he reaches for her.

  “You don’t have to,” she says. “You’ve had a rough day.”

  He persists. He embraces her and takes her, quickly, fiercely, and they move together for a few minutes and it ends and he sinks back, exhausted, stupefied. She gets a cool cloth and pats his forehead and urges him to rest. “Bring me my drugs,” he says. He wants siddharthin, but she misunderstands, probably deliberately, and offers him something blue and bulky, a sleeping pill, and, too weary to object, he takes it. Even so, it seems to be hours before sleep comes.

  He dreams he is at the skyport, boarding the rocket for Bangkok, and instantly he is debarking at Bangkok—just like Port Moresby, only more humid—and he delivers his speech to a horde of enthusiastic Thais, while rockets flicker about him carrying him to skyport after skyport, and the Thais blur and become Japanese, who are transformed into Mongols, who become Uighurs, who become Iranians, who become Sudanese, who become Zambians, who become Chileans, and all look alike, all look alike, all look alike.

  The Spicans hovered above him, weaving, bobbing, swaying like cobras about to strike. But their eyes, warm and liquid, were sympathetic: loving, even. He felt the flow of their compassion. If they had had the sort of musculature that enabled them to smile, they would be smiling tenderly, he knew.

  One of the aliens leaned close. The little translating device dangled toward Schwartz like a holy medallion. He narrowed his eyes, concentrating as intently as he could on the amber words flashing quickly across the screen.

  “… has come. We shall …”

  “Again, please,” Schwartz said. “I missed some of what you were saying.”

  “The moment … has come. We shall … make the exchange of sacraments now.”

  “Sacraments?”

  “Drugs.”

  “Drugs, yes. Yes. Of course.” Schwartz groped in his pouch. He felt the cool, smooth leather skin of his drug case. Leather? Snakeskin, maybe. Anyway. He drew it forth. “Here,” he said. “Siddharthin, learitonin, psilocerebrin, acid-57. Take your pick.” The Spicans selected three small blue siddharthins. “Very good,” Schwartz said. “The most transcendental of all. And now—”

  The longest of the aliens proffered a ball of dried orange fungus the size of Schwartz’s thumbnail.

  “It is an equivalent dose. We give it to you.”

  “Equivalent to all three of my tablets, or to one?”

  “Equivalent. It will give you peace.”

  Schwartz smiled. There was a time for asking questions and a time for unhesitating action. He took the fungus and reached for a glass of water.

  “Wait!” Pitkin cried, appearing suddenly. “What are you—”

  “Too late,” Schwartz said serenely, and swallowed the Spican drug in one joyous gulp.

  The nightmares go on and on. He circles the Earth like the Flying Dutchman, like the Wandering Jew, skyport to skyport to skyport, an unending voyage from nowhere to nowhere. Obliging committees meet him and convey him to his hotel. Sometimes the committee members are contemporary types, indistinguishable from one another, with standard faces, standard clothing, the all-purpose new-model hybrid unihuman, and sometimes they are consciously ethnic, elaborately decked out in feathers and paint and tribal emblems, but their faces, too, are standard behind the gaudy regalia, their slang is the slang of Uganda and Tierra del Fuego and Nepal, and it seems to Schwartz that these masqueraders are, if anything, less authentic, less honest, than the other sort, who at least are true representatives of their era. So it is hopeless either way. He lashes at his pillow, he groans, he wakens. Instantly Dawn’s arms enfold him. He sobs incoherent phrases into her clavicle and she murmurs soothing sounds against his forehead. He is having some sort of breakdown, he realizes: a new crisis of values, a shattering of the philosophical synthesis that has allowed him to get through the last few years. He is bound to the wheel; he spins, he spins, he spins, traversing the continents, getting nowhere. There is no place to go. No. There is one, just one, a place where he will find peace, where the universe will be as he needs it to be. Go there, Schwartz. Go and stay as long as you can. “Is there anything I can do?”Dawn asks. He shivers and shakes his head. “Take this,” she says, and gives him some sort of pill. Another tranquilizer. All right. All right. The world has turned to porcelain. His skin feels like a plastic coating. Away, away, to the ship. To the ship! “So long,” Schwartz says.

  Outside the ship the Capellans twist and spin in their ritual dance as, weightless and without mass, they are swept toward the rim of the galaxy at nine times the velocity of light. They move with a grace that is astonishing for creatures of such tremendous bulk. A dazzling light that emanates from the center of the universe strikes their glossy skin and, rebounding, resonates all up and down the spectrum, splintering into brilliant streamers of ultra red, infraviolet, exoyellow. All the cosmos glows and shimmers. A single perfect note of music comes out of the remote distance and, growing closer, swells in an infinite crescendo. Schwartz trembles at the beauty of all he perceives.

  Beside him stands the seal-slick Antarean. She—definitely she,no doubt of it, she—plucks at his arm and whispers, “Will you go to them?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course.”

  “So will I. Wherever you go.”

  “Now,” Schwartz says. He reaches for the lever that opens the hatch. He pulls down. The side of the starship swings open.

  The Antarean looks deep into his eyes and says blissfully, “I never told you my name. My name is Dawn.”

  Toget
her they float through the hatch into space.

  The blackness receives them gently. There is no chill, no pressure at the lungs, no discomfort at all. He is surrounded by luminous surges, by throbbing mantles of pure color, as though he has entered the heart of an aurora. He and Dawn swim toward the Capellans, and the huge beings welcome them with deep, glad, booming cries. Dawn joins the dance at once, moving her sinuous limbs with extravagant ease; Schwartz will do the same in a moment, but first he turns to face the starship, hanging in space close by him like a vast coppery needle, and in a voice that could shake universes he calls, “Come, friends! Come, all of you! Come dance with us!” And they come, pouring through the hatch, the Spicans first, then all the rest, the infinite multitude of beings, the travelers from Fomalhaut and Achernar and Acrux and Aldebaran, from Thuban and Arcturus and Altair, from Polaris and Canopus and Sirius and Rigel, hundreds of star-creatures spilling happily out of the vessel, bursting forth, all of them, even Pitkin, poor little Pitkin, everyone joining hands and tentacles and tendrils and whatever, forming a great ring of light across space, everyone locked in a cosmic harmony, everyone dancing. Dancing. Dancing.

  © 1974 by Agberg, Inc.

  Originally published in Stellar 1, edited by Judy-Lynn del Rey.

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Robert Silverberg—four-time Hugo Award-winner, five-time winner of the Nebula Award, SFWA Grand Master, SF Hall of Fame honoree—is the author of nearly five hundred short stories, nearly one hundred-and-fifty novels, and is the editor of in the neighborhood of one hundred anthologies. Among his most famous works are Lord Valentine’s Castle, Dying Inside, Nightwings,and The World Inside. Learn more at www.majipoor.com.

  Deep Blood Kettle

  Hugh Howey

  They say the sky will fill with dust in a bad way if we don’t do something soon. My teacher Mrs. Sandy says that if the meteor hits, it’ll put up enough dirt to block the sun, and everything will turn cold for a long, long while. When I came home and told Pa about this, he got angry. He called Mrs. Sandy a bad word, said she was teaching us nonsense. I told him the dinosaurs died because of dust in the sky. Pa said there weren’t no such thing as dinosaurs.

  “You boys watch,” he told me and my brother. “That rock’ll burn up. It’ll be no more than a flash of light. I’ve seen a million shooting stars if I’ve seen a dozen.” Pa stopped rubbing his rifle and traced a big arc in the air with his oil-stained rag. “She’ll hit the sky and light up like fireworks, and the worst she’ll do is leave a crater like that one down in Arizona. Then we’ll show them suckers how we watch over our land.”

  Only Pa don’t use the word “suckers.” Pa uses worse words for the invaders than he ever did for Mrs. Sandy. He never calls them aliens. Sometimes he says it’s the Russians or the Chinese or the Koreans. He believes in aliens about as much as dinosaurs.

  Pa spat in the dirt and asked if I was taking a break or something. I told him “nossir” and went back to oiling my gun. He and my brother did the same.

  Pa says our land is fertile because of the killin’ we soak it in. That’s why things grow as tall as they do. The little critters are killed dead and give their life to the soil.

  I seen it every year when we plow it under for the new crops. When I was a boy, before father let me drive the John Deere, I’d play in the loose soil his plowing left behind. Acres and acres for a sandbox. The dust he kicked up would blot the sky and dry my mouth, but I’d kick through the furrows and dig for arrowheads until my fingernails were chipped or packed full of dirt.

  Where he hadn’t yet plowed, you could see the dead stalks from the last harvest. The soil there was packed tight from the rains and the dry spells. Pa used to laugh at the newfangled ways of planting that kept the ground like that by driving the seeds straight through. It weren’t the way the Samuels tended their land, he told us. We Samuels dragged great steel plows across the hard pack and the old stalks and we killed everything in the ground. That was what made the land ready again.

  When I was younger, I found half a worm floppin’ on top of the ground after a plow. It moved like the tail on a happy dog, but it was already dead. Took a while for it to realize, was all. I pinched it between my fingers and watched it wind down like the grandfather clock in the great room. When it was still, the worm went into a furrow, and I kicked some dirt over it. That was the whole point. The little things would feed the corn, and the corn would feed us, and we would all get taller because of it. Pa, meanwhile, drove that tractor in great circles that took him nearly out of sight; the dust he kicked up could blot out the whole Montana sky, and my boots would fill up with gravel as I kicked through the loose furrows he left behind.

  Pa only believes in things he can see. He didn’t believe in the meteor until it became brighter than any star in the sky. Before long, you could see it in the daytime if you knew where to look and squinted just right. The people on the TV talked to scientists who said it was coming straight for us. They had a date and time and everything. One of them said you could know where it would land, but that nobody wanted a panic. It just meant people panicked everywhere. And then it leaked that the rock would hit somewhere between Russia and China, and Pa reckoned those people were panicking a little worse.

  He called it a rock, not a meteor. Like a bunch of people, Pa don’t think it’ll amount to much. Folks been predicting doom since his grandpa was a boy, and the world outside still looked pretty much the same.

  This was before we got “First Contact.” That’s what they called it even though the rock hadn’t set down yet. It was nothing but a phone call from what I could tell. On the TV they said it was coming from the other side of the rock. That’s when even the scientists and all the smart people started acting a little crazy.

  First Contact happened back when Mrs. Sandy was still our teacher. We listened to the news at school, I talked to her, and I didn’t tell Pa any of what I learned. It made him angry hearing about the demands, but Mrs. Sandy said it was the best thing that ever happened to our planet, them deciding to come here. She told me a lot before she left and the substitute took her place. She was going to be one of them that welcomed the invaders, even sold her house and bought a pickup with a camper back. I eventually reckoned Pa was right to call her some of those bad things.

  But I did sort out a bunch between the TV and what Mrs. Sandy said. The rock weren’t no accident like the scientists used to suppose. It was aimed. Like the stones I chucked after a plowing, trying to hit one rock with another. The invaders, they was right behind the big rock.

  Mrs. Sandy liked to say that our governments would make the right choice. And all of a sudden, the same channels on TV that I watched for news showed new people. They wore headphones and spoke funny and argued over what to do. My brother wouldn’t stop asking about the little flags in front of each of them, and I had to tell him to shut up so I could hear.

  The invaders were giving us a choice, it sounded like. All they wanted was half our land and for us to get rid of all of our weapons, and they would leave most of us alone. They gave a date. It was the same one the scientists had already figured. The rock could be moved, they said. It didn’t have to hit. It could go into orbit, and then we could have it for our own.

  On a different channel, men with suits and ties argued real loud over how much the rock was worth. They used words I’d never heard of before, something more than “trillion.” I knew what gold and some of the other valuable things were, but some were called rare and sounded like they were from Earth. I couldn’t sort out how something that could kill us one day could be worth so much the next, but the invaders said the rock only needed a nudge.

  When I turned thirteen, Pa said I was finally old enough to drive. He taught me in the old pickup with the missing tailgate and the tires that were always starving for air. It was a shifter, which seemed a hard way to start driving, but Pa believed in learning the worst to begin with. I had to yank up on the steering wheel to push the old clu
tch all the way in. Damn thing made it so my arms would be as sore at night as my legs. Pa cursed every time the gears growled, and it was hot in the truck even with the windows down. But I got to where he would send me to fetch the mail. And once I’d mastered the old pickup, he taught me on the John Deere, and I learned to plow. Pa was right that it made driving the tractor easier. But it was still scary as hell.

  The first time you drive something so big, you wonder if one man ought to be able. There was a red lever that went from rabbit to turtle, and Pa would stand in the cabin with me and yell for me to nudge it up. But we were already bouncing around something fierce. The noise was terrible. And looking back, I couldn’t see the house through the haze I was stirring. It weren’t even like we were moving so much as the great big tires of the tractor were spinning the Earth beneath their knobby treads. Pa would bend over the seat and knock the red lever up, and the bucking would grow worse. The steering wheel jittered side to side, and I had to clutch it just to stay in my seat.

  But like the truck, my fear of the tractor didn’t keep. Before long, Pa hitched the great plow to the back, twenty-four feet wide, and I learned how to kill the soil to make it ready for planting. The seat would bounce me along like I was in a saddle, and the radio would blare in the little cabin that smelled like my dad when he was sweaty. I did circles like I was mowing grass, but twenty-four feet at a time. The mesa behind our house would disappear behind the dust, and it got so I couldn’t see the cliffs along the back of the homestead. But I could see the soil in front packed hard and tight, and I could see out the side where I’d already been. Plowing was a lot like mowing—I just had to overlap where I’d been before.