Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  He reached the meadow that contained his camp just as the alien appeared overhead. He hesitated, torn between dashing for the van and diving back into the brush. The thing swooped forward.Perhaps it's friendly, Ramon thought in numb despair. Madre de Dios, it had better be friendly!

  The van exploded. A geyser of fire and smoke shot up out of the meadow with a waterfall roar, and tenfin birds rose screaming all along the mountain flank. The shockwave buffeted Ramon, splattering him with dirt and pebbles and shredded vegetation. He staggered, fighting to maintain his balance. Pieces of fused metal thumped down around him, burning holes in the moss of the meadow floor. Through the plume of smoke, Ramon saw the thing turn, flying fifteen feet above the ground and brandishing something that looked like a pair of eggbeaters twined together; obviously a weapon. In his shock, Ramon found himself entranced by the fluid way the thing moved—sure as a cat, jointless as a tentacle. It pointed the eggbeaters. The bubbletent went up in a ball of expanding gas, pieces of torn plastic tumbling and swooping like frightened white birds in the hot turbulence of the explosion.

  Ramon caught only a glimpse of that. He was already in frantic motion, running, swerving, tearing through the brush. He could hear his own gasping breath, and his heart slammed against his ribs like a fist. Faster!

  He felt the alien behind him more than he saw it. Some sixth sense made him turn, and there it was, bearing down on him with weapon leveled, a devil flying out of a hell of smoke and flame. Its eyes were bright orange. Ramon fumbled for his sidearm, confounded by the snap on the holster.

  Something hit him—

  · · · · ·

  Three

  · · · · ·

  Something nudged him, and Ramon returned from his vision or memory to the dark, empty infinite. A current moved against his skin; an invisible current in an invisible sea. He had the feeling of being turned in slow circles. Something solid bumped his shoulder and then rose up against his back, or else he sank down upon it. The syrupy liquid streamed past him, flowing past his face and his body. He thought of it as draining away, though he might as easily be being lifted up through it. The flow grew faster and more turbulent. A deep vibration shook him: boom.Then again, beating through flesh and bone:boom, boom. A blurred, watery light appeared above him, very dim and immensely far away. Like a star in a distant constellation. It grew brighter. The liquid in which he floated drained, the surface coming nearer, like he was rising from the bottom of a lake, until at last he breached it, and the last of the liquid was gone.

  Air and light and sound hit him like a fist.

  His body convulsed like a live fish on a frying pan, every muscle knotting. He arched up like an epileptic—head and heels bearing his weight, his spine bent like a bow. Something he couldn't see flipped him on his belly, and he felt a needle slide in at the base of his spine. He vomited with wrenching violence—thick amber syrup gouting from his mouth and nose. And then again, sick, racking spasms that expelled even more, as if his lungs had been filled with the stuff. Another long needle dug into his neck, and, with a terrible shudder, Ramon began to breathe.

  The air he gulped cut like glass on the way in, and his quiescent heart came suddenly, violently to life. The world went red. Pain drove away all thought, all sense of self, and then slowly abated.

  He was sprawled naked on the bottom of a metal tank not more than ten feet square. So much for his measureless midnight ocean! The walls were too high to see over, and the lights—blue-white and bitter—were too bright to see past and make out the ceiling beyond. He tried to sit up, but his muscles were putty. It was bitingly cold. He settled against the metal floor and shivered, feeling his teeth start to chatter. He tried lifting an arm, but the impulse was slow to reach his flesh, and the limb swayed drunkenly when it rose. Strong smells that he couldn't identify burned his nostrils.

  He was alive now, certainly, if he'd ever been dead at all. This was no supernatural otherworld, no Limbo, no Land of Ghosts—this was real.

  That in no way abated his terror. In fact, it increased it.

  A thing like a long gray snake reared up above the rim of the tank. Ramon saw it hesitate, as if considering him, and then stretch down. Three long, thin tendrils split off where the head should have been. The gray snake brushed aside Ramon's clumsy parry and seized him by the shoulder. Ramon struggled weakly. But his strength was gone, and the snake's grip was as cold and pitiless as death. Another of the snakes stretched down and wrapped itself around his waist.

  The snakes lifted him smoothly out of the tank. He tried to scream, but the sound came out more like a cough. He was high in the air now, above what seemed to be a vast, high-domed cavern full of noise and lights and motion and alien shapes. The cavern swarmed with activity that Ramon could not resolve into recognizable patterns, having no referents for it. His nose and mouth were filled with a biting, acrid odor, something like formaldehyde. The smell triggered a rush of raw hysterical horror, deep-buried xenophobic nightmares: they'll cut me open, dissection, they'll chop me up, put me in bottles, CUT me—He thrashed impotently, mad with terror, but was unable to break free.

  The snake-tentacles set him down on a platform near one wall of the cavern. He collapsed as soon as they released him, his legs too weak to bear his weight. He waited on his hands and knees, staring into the terrible bright lights, panting like a trapped animal.

  It was dimmer here, in the angle of the wall and the cavern floor. Inchoate shapes moved ponderously in the shadows; as they came forward, they were finished and fleshed by the light, but Ramon still could not discern them. His mind kept fighting to resolve them into the familiar aspects of humanity, and—terribly, terrifyingly—they would not resolve. They were too big, and shaped wrong, and their eyes were a bright glowing orange.

  A needle slid out of the end of a hovering gray tentacle, thrust quickly into Ramon's arm, too quickly for him to move or protest. A prickly wave of heat went through him, and he suddenly felt much stronger. What kind of injection had it given him? Glucose? Vitamins? Perhaps there'd been a tranquilizer in it as well; his head was clear now, and he felt more alert, less frightened. He drew himself up to his knees, one hand instinctively covering his crotch.

  The aliens had stopped a few feet away. There were three of them, one bigger than the others. Ramon could make them out more clearly now. His mind accepted them by treating them as frauds; he saw them now as men wearing grotesque monster costumes, and kept looking for some unconvincing detail that would betray the disguise.

  Intellectually, he knew better, of course. They were not men in costume. They were not men at all.

  They were humanoid bipeds, at least, not spiders or octopi or big-eyed blobs, although something about the articulation of the limbs was disturbingly odd. These three ranged in height from about six-and-a-half to seven feet tall, making even the shortest of them far taller than Ramon. Their torsos were columnar, seemingly of uniform breath at hip and waist and shoulder, and surely they must weigh more than three hundred pounds apiece, although somehow the dominant impression they created was one of grace and suppleness. Their skins were glossy, shining, but each had its own distinctive coloration: one was a mottled blue and gold, the second a pale amber, while the largest one had yellowish flesh covered with strange, swirling patterns in silver and black.

  All wore broad belts hung with unknown objects of metal and glass, and nondescript halters of some ash-gray and lusterless material. Their arms were disproportionately long, the hands huge, the fingers—three fingers, two thumbs—incongruously slender and delicate. Their heads were set low in a hollow between the shoulders and thrust a little forward on thick, stumpy necks, giving them a belligerent and aggressive look, like snapping turtles. Crests of hair or feathers slanted back from the tops of their heads at rakish angles. Quills protruded from their shoulders, the napes of their necks, and the top of their spinal ridges, forming a bristly ruff. Their heads were roughly triangular, flattened on top but bulging out at the base of the
skull, the faces tapering sharply to a point. And the faces were faces out of nightmare: large rubbery black snouts streaked with blue and orange, trembling and sniffing, mouths like raw wet wounds, too wide and lipless, and small staring eyes set too low on either side of the snout. Orange eyes, hot and featureless as molten marbles.

  Staring at him.

  They were staring at him as though he were a bug, and that fanned a spark of anger inside him. He got to his feet and glared back at them, still shaky but determined not to show it. Ramon Espejo knelt to nobody! Especially not to ugly, unnatural monsters like these!

  The biggest alien gestured: come with me. There was something studied about the motion, as though it had been learned by rote, as though its natural equivalent might be without meaning for men. The alien turned and began to walk toward the cavern wall. Reluctantly, Ramon followed. He glanced suspiciously at the two smaller aliens as he passed between them, but they neither moved nor looked his way.

  Ahead was a door cut through the naked rock of the cavern wall, which the alien disappeared into. Ramon came slowly forward, looking warily all around him, wondering if he should try to run. Run to where, though? And some of the objects suspended from the alien's belt were almost certainly weapons. Shaking his head, grinning with fear and tension, Ramon followed the alien through the door.

  Afterward, Ramon could not clearly remember that trip. He was led through tunnels barely wide and tall enough to allow the alien to pass. The tunnels slanted steeply up and down, and doubled back on themselves, seemingly at random. The rock was slightly phosphorescent, providing just enough light to let him see his footing. He refused to look behind at the following darkness, although his nerves were crawling like worms.

  The silence was heavy here in the belly of the hill, although occasionally a far-away hooting could be heard through many thicknesses of rock, sounding to Ramon like the noise damned souls might make crying unheeded to a cold and distant God. Sometimes they passed through pockets of light and activity, rooms full of chattering noise and rich rotten smells, rooms drenched in glaring red or blue or green illumination, rooms dark as ink but for the faint silver line of the path they followed. Once they stood motionless for long moments in such a room, while Ramon's stomach dropped and he wondered if they could be in an elevator.

  Back in the tunnel again, it was close and dark and silent. The alien's back gleamed pale and faint in the phosphorescent glow of the rock, like a fish in dark water, and, for a moment, it seemed to Ramon as if the markings on its flesh were moving, writhing and changing like living things. He stumbled, and instinctively clutched the alien's arm to keep from falling. Its skin was warm and dry, like snake skin. In the enclosed space of the tunnel, he could smell the alien; it had a heavy, musky odor, like olive oil, like cloves, strange rather than unpleasant. It neither looked behind nor paused nor made a sound. It continued to walk imperturbably on, at the same steady pace, and Ramon had no choice but to follow after it or be left alone in the chilly darkness of this black alien maze.

  At last, the tunnel ended in another big, garishly lit chamber. To the human eye, there was something subtly wrong about the proportions and dimensions of the chamber: it was more a rhombus than a rectangle, the floor was slightly tilted, the ceiling tilted at another angle and not of uniform height, everything subliminally disorienting, everything off, making Ramon feel sick and dizzy. The light was too bright and too blue, and the chamber was filled with a whispering susurrus that hovered right at the threshold of hearing.

  This place had not been made by human beings, nor was it meant for them. As he came forward into the chamber, he saw that the walls streamed with tiny, crawling pictures, as though a film of oil was continuously flowing down over them from ceiling to floor and carrying with it a thin scum of ever-changing images: swirls of vivid color, geometric shapes, mazy impressionistic designs, vast surrealistic landscapes. Occasionally, something representational and recognizable would stream by, trees, mountains, stars, tiny alien faces that would seem to stare malignly at Ramon out of the feverdream chaos as they swept down to be swallowed by the floor.

  The alien stopped, but gestured him on. Gingerly, Ramon crossed the chamber, feeling uneasy and disconcerted, unconsciously leaning to one side to correct the tilt of the floor and putting his feet down cautiously, as though he expected the chamber to pitch or yaw.

  In the center of the chamber was a deep circular pit, lined by metal, and down in the pit was another alien.

  It was even taller than Ramon's guide, and thinner, and its crest and quills were much longer. Its skin was bone-white and completely free of markings. White with age? Dyed white as an indication of rank? Or was it of a different race? Impossible to say, but as the alien's eyes turned upward toward Ramon, he was seized and shaken by the force behind its gaze, by the harsh authority it palpably exuded. He noticed, with another little shock, that the creature was physically connected to the pit—things that might have been wires or rods or cables emerged from its body and disappeared into the smooth metal walls, forming an intricate cat's cradle around it. Some of the cables were black and dull, some were luminescent, and some, glossy red and gray and brown, pulsed slowly and rhythmically, as if with an obscene life of their own. Ramon looked away.

  "You will find him," said the thing in the pit.

  Ramon turned back to stare at the alien, fighting to keep surprise from his face. It had spoken in Portuglish, the bastard lingua franca of the colony, and quite clearly, though its voice was disturbingly rusty and metallic, as though a machine had spoken. Ramon, who also spoke Spanish, English, Portuguese, and a smattering of Navaho and French, slyly and instinctively pretended not to understand, although even he was unsure what he hoped to gain by doing so. "¿Como?" he said.

  The alien's cold opaque eyes fixed on him. "It is statistically unlikely that you speak only that language," it said.

  The arrogance of its harsh, unused voice and the steady gaze of those orange, unblinking eyes made Ramon angry. In times of stress—when he had lost his first van in a drunken bet, when his wife had left him, when Eleana threatened to throw him out—Ramon's rage had never deserted him. Now it returned, flushing him with heat and certainty. "What are you, you creatures?" he said. "Where do you come from? From this planet? Somewhere else? What do you think you're doing, attacking me, keeping me here against my will? And what about my van, eh? Who's going to get me a new van?"

  The alien stared at him wordlessly. It struck Ramon that this was likely the first conversation ever to take place between a human and an alien. And he was bitching about his van! He had to fight down the urge to laugh, trying to keep his anger hot and stoked.

  "Those are sounds, not words," the alien said after a long pause. "Discordancies outside proper flow. You must not speak in meaningless sounds, or you will be corrected."

  Ramon shivered and looked away; his rage had ebbed as quickly as it had flared, and now he felt tired, chilled by the alien's imperturbability. "What do you want?" he asked wearily.

  "We do not 'want' anything," the alien said. "Again, you speak outside the way of reality. You have a function: therefore, you exist. You will exercise that function because it is your purpose to do so, your tatecredue. No 'wanting' is involved: all is inevitable flow."

  "And if I do not function as you wish?"

  The alien paused, as though briefly puzzled. "You live," it said finally. "Therefore, you exercise your function. Nonfunctioning, you could not exist. To exist and yet not exist—you would be a contradiction, aubre, a disruption in the flow.Aubre cannot be tolerated. To restore balanced flow, it would be necessary to deny the illusion that you exist."

  That at least was clear enough, Ramon thought, feeling gooseflesh sweep across his skin.

  Ramon chose his words carefully when he spoke again. "And what function am I to fulfill?"

  The cold orange eyes fixed on him again. "Take care," the alien warned. "That we must interpret your tatecredue for you is a sign that you incli
ne toward aubre. But we will grant you a dispensation, as you are not a proper creature. Listen: a man has escaped from us. Three days ago he fled from us on foot, and we have not been able to find him. By this act, he has shown himself to be aubre, and so proved that he does not exist. The illusion of his existence must therefore be negated. The man must not be allowed to reach a human settlement, to tell other humans about us. Should he do so, that would interfere with our own tatecredue. Such interference is gaesu, prime contradiction. Therefore you will find him, negate him, in order to restore balanced flow."

  "How am I supposed to find him if you could not?"

  "You are men. You are the same. You will find him."

  "He could be anywhere by now!" Ramon protested.

  "Where you would go and where he would go—they are the same. You will go where he has gone, and you will find him."

  Ramon chewed his lip and thought. He had no intention of playing Judas Goat for these monsters, but he was naked, alone, and in their power. If he pretended to agree, they would have to take him out—out to the world he knew. After that, he could slip away. It wouldn't do to give in too easily, though. Even things as strange as these might recognize that as subterfuge.

  "If I do this thing for you, what do I get out of it?" he asked.

  The alien stared at him for several long moments. "You are an improper and contradictory creature.Aubre may manifest in you. We will insure against such manifestations, by separating a part of ourselves to act as overseer. Maneck will sacrifice himself to maintain the flow."

  The alien who had led him from the first chamber moved silently to Ramon's side. It was eerie—nothing so big should be so quiet.

  "Maneck, eh?" Ramon said to the thing. "Your name's Maneck?"

  Before Ramon could react, Maneck reached out and took him by the shoulders, lifted him like a doll, and held him immobile in the air. Ramon fought instinctively—nights at the bar and in the street coming back to his arms and legs in a rage. He might as well have punched the ocean. Maneck didn't budge.