Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  “Obscene travesties,” said Desmond.

  “Now, now, it isn’t as bad as all that. Some imitation of last year, yes, but no more than usual.”

  We walked down the hall to see how my entry had been placed. Like Desmond, before he quit sculpting, I was chiefly interested in finding and isolating moments of dance that revealed, by themselves, all the grace of the whole act. This year I had stopped a pair of ballet dancers at the end of a pas de deux, the ballerina just off the base of the display as her partner firmly but delicately returned her to the boards. How long I had worked with the breeders, to get ectogenes with these lean dancers’ bodies! How many hours I had spent, programming their unconscious education, and training and choreographing them in their brief waking hours! And then at the end, how very often I had had them dance on the tableau base, and stopped them in the force field, before I caught them in the exact moment that I had envisioned! Yes, I had spent a great deal of time in my sculpting chamber, this year; and now my statue stood before us like the epitome of all that is graceful in the human spirit. At a proper angle to the viewers, too, I was pleased to see, and under tolerable lighting. On the two faces were expressions that said that for these two, nothing existed but dance; and in this case it was almost literally true. Yes, it was satisfactory.

  Desmond only shook his head. “No, Roarick. You don’t understand. We can’t keep doing this—”

  “Desmond!” cried Cleo, flowing through the crowd of sculptors and their guests. Her smile was wide, her eyes bright with malice. “Come see my latest, dear absent one!”

  Wordlessly Desmond followed her, his face so blank of expression that all his thoughts showed clear. A whole crew followed us discreetly, for Desmond and Cleo’s antipathy was legendary. How it had started none remembered, although some said they had once been lovers. If so, it was before I knew them. Others said Desmond hated Cleo for her success in the sculpture competitions, and some of the more sharp-tongued gossips said that this envy explained Desmond’s new, morbid interest in the world below—sour grapes, you know. But Desmond had always been interested in things no one else cared about—rediscovering little scientific truths and the like—and to me it was clear that his fascination was simply the result of his temperament, and of what his telescope had newly revealed to him. No, his and Cleo’s was a more fundamental hatred, a clash of contrary natures.

  Now Desmond stared at Cleo’s new statue. It is undeniable that Cleo is a superb artist, especially in facial expressions, those utterly complex projections of unique emotional states; and this work displayed her usual brilliance in that most difficult medium. It was a solo piece: A red-haired young woman looked back over one shoulder with an expression of intense vulnerability and confusion, pierced by a sharp melancholy. It was exquisite.

  The sight of this sculpture snapped some final restraint in Desmond Kean; I saw it happen. His eyes filled with pity and disgust; his lip curled, and he said loudly, “How did you do it, Cleo? What did you do to her in your little bubble world to get that expression out of her?”

  Now, this was a question one simply didn’t ask. Each artist’s arcology was his or her own sovereign ground, a physical projection of the artist’s creative unconscious, an entirely private cosmos. What one did to one’s material there was one’s own business.

  But the truth was no one had forgotten the unfortunate Arthur Magister, who had exhibited increasingly peculiar and morbid statues over a period of years, ending with one of a maiden who had had on her face such an expression that no one could bear to look at it. Though the rule of privacy was maintained, there were of course questions muttered; but no one would ever have found out the answers, if Arthur had not blown up himself and his arcology, revealing in the wreckage, among other things, a number of unpleasantly dismembered ectogenes.

  So it was a sensitive issue; and when Desmond asked Cleo his brazen question, with its dark implication, she blanched, then reddened with anger. Disdainfully (though I sensed she was afraid, too) she refused to reply. Desmond stared fiercely at us all; were he an ectogene, I would have stopped him at just that instant.

  “Little gods,” he snarled, and left the room.

  That would cost him, in reputation if not in actual sanctions. But the rest of us forgot his distemper, relieved that we could now begin the exhibit’s opening reception in earnest. Down at the drink tables champagne corks were already bringing down a fresh shower of jacaranda blooms.

  ***

  It was just a few hours later, when the reception was a riotous party, that I heard the news, passed from group to group instantly, that someone had broken the locks on the tableaux (this was supposed to be impossible) and turned their force fields off, letting most of the statues free. And it was while we rushed to the far end of the greenhouse-gallery, around the great curve of the perimeter of the penthouse, that I heard that Desmond Kean had been seen, leaving the gallery with Cleo’s red-headed ectogene.

  Utter scandal. This would cost Desmond more than money; they would exile him to some tedious sector of the city, to scrub walls with robots or teach children or the like: They would make him pay in time. And Cleo! I groaned; he would never live to see the end of her wrath.

  Well, a friend can only do so much, but while the rest were rounding up and pacifying the disoriented ectogenes (which included, alas, my two dancers, who were huddled in each other’s arms) I went in search of Desmond, to warn him that he had been seen. I knew his haunts well, having shared most of them, and I hurried to them through the uncrowded, vaguely Parisian boulevards of the penthouse’s northern quarter.

  My first try was the broken planetaria near the baths; I opened the door with the key we had quietly reproduced years before. An indiscretion!—for Desmond and the young ectogene were making love on the dais in the middle of the chamber, Desmond on his back, the woman straddling him, arced as if all the energy of the great spire were flowing up into her . . . he was breaking all the taboos this night. Immediately I shut the door, but given the situation saw fit to pound loudly on it. “Desmond! It’s Roarick! They saw you with the girl, you’ve got to leave!”

  Silence. What to do in such a situation? I had no precedent. After a good thirty seconds had passed I opened the door again. No Desmond, no girl.

  I, however, was one of those who with Desmond had first discovered the other exit from the planetaria, and I hurried to the central ball of optical fibers, which even he could not fix, and pulled up the trap door beside it. Down the stairs and along the passageway, into one of the penthouse’s other infrastructures I ran.

  I will not detail my long search, nor my desperate and ludicrous attempts to evade rival search parties. Despite my knowledge of Desmond’s ways and my anxious thoroughness, I did not find him until I thought of the place that should have occurred to me first. I returned to the northeast corner of the viewing terrace, right there outside the glass wall of the greenhouse-gallery, where (as it was now dusk) if the artists inside could have seen through their own reflections, they would have looked right at him.

  He and the redhead were standing next to Desmond’s telescope, their elbows on the railing as they looked over the edge side by side. Desmond had his duffel bag at his feet. Something in their stance kept me from emerging from the shadows. They looked as though they had just finished the most casual and intimate of conversations—a talk about trivial, inessential things, the kind of talk lovers have together after years of companionship. Such calmness, such resignation . . . I could only look, at what seemed to me then an unbreakable, eternal tableau.

  Desmond sighed and turned to look at her. He took a red curl of her hair between his fingers, watched the gold in it gleam in a band across the middle of the curl. “There are three kinds of red hair,” he said sadly. “Red black, red brown, and red gold. And the greatest of these is . . .”

  “Black,” said the girl.

  “Gold,” said Desmond. He fingered the curl . . .

  The woman pointed. “What’s all tha
t down there?”

  Dusky world below, long since in night: vast dark Africa, the foliage like black fur, sparking with the sooty flares of a thousand bonfires, little pricks of light like yellow stars. “That’s the world,” Desmond said, voice tightened to a burr. “I suppose you don’t know a thing about it. Around those fires down there are people. They are slaves, they live lives even worse than yours, almost.”

  But his words didn’t appear to touch the woman. She turned away, and lifted an empty glass left on the railing. On her face was an expression so . . . lost—a sudden echo of her expression as statue—that I shivered in the cold wind. She didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on.

  “Damn,” she said. “I wish I’d remembered to bring another drink.”

  A conversation from another world, resumed here. I saw Desmond Kean’s face then, and I know that I did right to interrupt at that moment. “Desmond!” I rushed forward and grasped his arm. “There’s no time, you really must get to one of our private rooms and hide! You don’t want to find out what sort of sentence they might hand down for this sort of thing!”

  A long moment: I shudder to think of the tableau we three made. The world is a cruel sculptor.

  “All right,” Desmond said at last. “Here, Roarick, take her and get her out of here.” He bent over to fumble in his bag. “They’ll put her down after all this if they catch her.”

  “But—but where should I go?” I stammered.

  “You know this city as well as I! Try the gallery’s service elevator, and get on the underfloor—you know,” he insisted, and yet he was about to give me further directions when the far greenhouse door burst open and a whole mob poured out. We were forced to run for it; I took the woman by the hand and sprinted for the closer greenhouse door. The last I saw of Desmond Kean, he was climbing over the railing. My God, I thought, he’s going to kill himself—but then I saw the purposefully rectangular package strapped to his back.

  © 1986 by Kim Stanley Robinson. Originally published in Omni.

  The Lunatics, by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Originally published in the Beth Meacham-edited original anthology Terry’s Universe (Tor, 1988), Kim Stanley Robinson’s dystopian SF tale “The Lunatics” has been reprinted several times, most recently in John Joseph Adams’s superb collection of dystopian SF Brave New Worlds (Night Shade, 2011). Writes Adams in his story intro:

  At the end of the nineteenth century, coal mining had become one of the biggest, meanest industries in the United States. Unhealthy working conditions and a reliance on child labor caused accidents and blackened men’s lungs. Crooked business practices like debt bondage and wage-cheating were just part of the misery. But it was dangerous to stand up against the mining companies. Miners didn’t just face losing their jobs—their lives were often at stake, as mining companies fought against unionizing with violence.

  The coal miners’ struggles for better conditions were captured in photos and songs that have become a warning for the workers of the world. But in the future, miners might not be so lucky.

  What could be worse than working deep beneath the ground, never seeing the light of day? What could be worse than knowing the money in your paycheck was a token worthless outside the company’s store?

  [“The Lunatics”] gives us a vision of a mine worse than anything in Pennsylvania. Powered by slavery and jump-started by torment, this mine might as well be hell.

  They were very near the center of the moon, Jakob told them. He was the newest member of the bullpen, but already their leader.

  “How do you know?” Solly challenged him. It was stifling, the hot air thick with the reek of their sweat, and a pungent stink from the waste bucket in the corner. In the pure black, under the blanket of the rock’s basalt silence, their shifting and snuffling loomed large, defined the size of the pen. “I suppose you see it with your third eye.”

  Jakob had a laugh as big as his hands. He was a big man, never a doubt of that. “Of course not, Solly. The third eye is for seeing in the black. It’s a natural sense just like the others. It takes all the data from the rest of the senses, and processes them into a visual image transmitted by the third optic nerve, which runs from the forehead to the sight centers at the back of the brain. But you can only focus it by an act of the will—same as with all the other senses. It’s not magic. We just never needed it till now.”

  “So how do you know?”

  “It’s a problem in spherical geometry, and I solved it. Oliver and I solved it. This big vein of blue runs right down into the core, I believe, down into the moon’s molten heart where we can never go. But we’ll follow it as far as we can. Note how light we’re getting. There’s less gravity near the center of things.”

  “I feel heavier than ever.”

  “You are heavy, Solly. Heavy with disbelief.”

  “Where’s Freeman?” Hester said in her crow’s rasp.

  No one replied.

  Oliver stirred uneasily over the rough basalt of the pen’s floor. First Naomi, then mute Elijah, now Freeman. Somewhere out in the shafts and caverns, tunnels and corridors—somewhere in the dark maze of mines, people were disappearing. Their pen was emptying, it seemed. And the other pens?

  “Free at last,” Jakob murmured.

  “There’s something out there,” Hester said, fear edging her harsh voice, so that it scraped Oliver’s nerves like the screech of an ore car’s wheels over a too-sharp bend in the tracks. “Something out there!”

  The rumor had spread through the bullpens already, whispered mouth to ear or in huddled groups of bodies. There were thousands of shafts bored through the rock, hundreds of chambers and caverns. Lots of these were closed off, but many more were left open, and there was room to hide—miles and miles of it. First some of their cows had disappeared. Now it was people too. And Oliver had heard a miner jabbering at the low edge of hysteria, about a giant foreman gone mad after an accident took both his arms at the shoulder—the arms had been replaced by prostheses, and the foreman had escaped into the black, where he preyed on miners off by themselves, ripping them up, feeding on them—

  They all heard the steely squeak of a car’s wheel. Up the mother shaft, past cross tunnel Forty; had to be foremen at this time of shift. Would the car turn at the fork to their concourse? Their hypersensitive ears focused on the distant sound; no one breathed. The wheels squeaked, turned their way. Oliver, who was already shivering, began to shake hard.

  The car stopped before their pen. The door opened, all in darkness. Not a sound from the quaking miners.

  Fierce white light blasted them and they cried out, leaped back against the cage bars vainly. Blinded, Oliver cringed at the clawing of a foreman’s hands, searching under his shirt and pants. Through pupils like pinholes he glimpsed brief black-and-white snapshots of gaunt bodies undergoing similar searches, then blows. Shouts, cries of pain, smack of flesh on flesh, an electric buzzing. Shaving their heads, could it be that time again already? He was struck in the stomach, choked around the neck. Hester’s long wiry brown arms, wrapped around her head. Scalp burned, buzzz all chopped up. Thrown to the rock.

  “Where’s the twelfth?” In the foremen’s staccato language. No one answered.

  The foremen left, light receding with them until it was black again, the pure dense black that was their own. Except now it was swimming with bright red bars, washing around in painful tears. Oliver’s third eye opened a little, which calmed him, because it was still a new experience; he could make out his companions, dim redblack shapes in the black, huddled over themselves, gasping.

  Jakob moved among them, checking for hurts, comforting. He cupped Oliver’s forehead and Oliver said, “It’s seeing already.”

  “Good work.” On his knees Jakob clumped to their shit bucket, took off the lid, reached in. He pulled something out. Oliver marveled at how clearly he was able to see all this. Before, floating blobs of color had drifted in the black; but he had always assumed they were afterimages, or hallucina
tions. Only with Jakob’s instruction had he been able to perceive the patterns they made, the vision that they constituted. It was an act of will. That was the key.

  Now, as Jakob cleaned the object with his urine and spit, Oliver found that the eye in his forehead saw even more, in sharp blood etchings. Jakob held the lump overhead, and it seemed it was a little lamp, pouring light over them in a wavelength they had always been able to see, but had never needed before. By its faint ghostly radiance the whole pen was made clear, a structure etched in blood, redblack on black. “Promethium,” Jakob breathed. The miners crowded around him, faces lifted to it. Solly had a little pug nose, and squinched his face terribly in the effort to focus. Hester had a face to go with her voice, stark bones under skin scored with lines. “The most precious element. On Earth our masters rule by it. All their civilization is based on it, on the movement inside it, electrons escaping their shells and crashing into neutrons, giving off heat and more blue as well. So they condemn us to a life of pulling it out of the moon for them.”

  He chipped at the chunk with a thumbnail. They all knew precisely its clayey texture, its heaviness, the dull silvery gray of it, which pulsed green under some lasers, blue under others. Jakob gave each of them a sliver of it. “Take it between two molars and crush hard. Then swallow.”