The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  There was nothing they could do to intercept those ships. And once they reached Earth, would the biologists suspect? Not for a long time. First a new kind of rat would appear. A mutation could account for that. Without specific knowledge, there would be nothing to connect it with the specimens picked up from Glade.

  “We have to stay,” said the biologist. “We have to study them and we can do it best here.”

  He thought of the vast complex of buildings on Earth. There was too much invested to tear them down and make them vermin-proof. Billions of people could not be moved off the planet while the work was being done.

  They were committed to Glade not as a colony, but as a gigantic laboratory. They had gained one planet and lost the equivalent of ten, perhaps more when the destructive properties of the omnivores were finally assessed.

  A rasping animal cough interrupted the biologist’s thoughts. Hafner jerked his head and glanced out the window. Lips tight, he grabbed a rifle off the wall and ran out. Marin followed him.

  The exec headed toward the fields where the second fast crop was maturing. On top of a knoll, he stopped and knelt. He flipped the dial to extreme charge, aimed, and fired. It was high; he missed the animal in the field. A neat strip of smoking brown appeared in the green vegetation.

  He aimed more carefully and fired again. The charge screamed out of the muzzle. It struck the animal on the forepaw. The beast leaped high in the air and fell down, dead and broiled.

  They stood over the animal Hafner had killed. Except for the lack of markings, it was a good imitation of a tiger. The exec prodded it with his toe.

  “We chase the rats out of the warehouse and they go to the fields,” he muttered. “We hunt them down in the fields with dogs and they breed tigers.”

  “Easier than rats,” said Marin. “We can shoot tigers.” He bent down over the slain dog near which they had surprised the big cat.

  The other dog came whining from the far corner of the field to which he had fled in terror. He was a courageous dog, but he could not face the great carnivore. He whimpered and licked the face of his mate.

  The biologist picked up the mangled dog and headed toward the laboratory.

  “You can’t save her,” said Hafner morosely. “She’s dead.”

  “But the pups aren’t. We’ll need them. The rats won’t disappear merely because tigers have showed up.”

  The head drooped limply over his arm and blood seeped into his clothing as Hafner followed him up the hill.

  “We’ve been here three months,” the exec said suddenly. “The dogs have been in the fields only two. And yet the tiger was mature. How do you account for something like that?”

  Marin bent under the weight of the dog. Hafner never would understand his bewilderment. As a biologist, all his categories were upset. What did evolution explain? It was a history of organic life on a particular world. Beyond that world, it might not apply.

  Even about himself there were many things man didn’t know, dark patches in his knowledge which theory simply had to pass over. About other creatures, his ignorance was sometimes limitless.

  Birth was simple; it occurred on countless planets. Meek grazing creatures, fierce carnivores—the most unlikely animals gave birth to their young. It happened all the time. And the young grew up, became mature, and mated.

  He remembered that evening in the laboratory. It was accidental—what if he had been elsewhere and not witnessed it? They would not know what little they did.

  He explained it carefully to Hafner. “If the survival factor is high and there’s a great disparity in size, the young need not ever be young. They may be born as fully functioning adults!”

  —

  Although not at the rate it had initially set, the colony progressed. The fast crops were slowed down and a more diversified selection was planted. New buildings were constructed and the supplies that were stored in them were spread out thin, for easy inspection.

  The pups survived and within a year shot up to maturity. After proper training, they were released to the fields, where they joined the older dogs. The battle against the rats went on; they were held in check, though the damage they caused was considerable.

  The original animal, unchanged in form, developed an appetite for electrical insulation. There was no protection except to keep the power on at all times. Even then there were unwelcome interruptions until the short was located and the charred carcass was removed. Vehicles were kept tightly closed or parked only in vermin-proof buildings. While the plague didn’t increase in numbers, it couldn’t be eliminated, either.

  There was a flurry of tigers, but they were larger animals and were promptly shot down. They prowled at night, so the colonists were assigned to guard the settlement around the clock. Where lights failed to reach, the infrared scope did. As fast as they came, the tigers died. Except for the first one, not a single dog was lost.

  The tigers changed, though not in form. Externally, they were all big and powerful killers. But as the slaughter went on, Marin noticed one astonishing fact—the internal organic structure became progressively more immature.

  The last one that was brought to him for examination was the equivalent of a newly born cub. That tiny stomach was suited more for the digestion of milk than meat. How it had furnished energy to drive those great muscles was something of a miracle. But drive it had, for a murderous fifteen minutes before the animal was brought down. No lives were lost, though sick bay was kept busy for a while.

  That was the last tiger they shot. After that, the attacks ceased.

  The seasons passed and nothing new occurred. A spaceship civilization or even that fragment of it represented by the colony was too much for the creature, which Marin by now had come to think of as the “omnimal.” It had evolved out of a cataclysmic past, but it could not meet the challenge of the harshest environment.

  Or so it seemed.

  —

  Three months before the next colonists were due, a new animal was detected. Food was missing from the fields. It was not another tiger: they were carnivorous. Nor rats, for vines were stripped in a manner that no rodent could manage.

  The food was not important. The colony had enough in storage. But if the new animal signaled another plague, it was necessary to know how to meet it. The sooner they knew what the animal was, the better defense they could set up against it.

  Dogs were useless. The animal roamed the field they were loose in, and they did not attack nor even seem to know it was there.

  The colonists were called upon for guard duty again, but it evaded them. They patrolled for a week and they still did not catch sight of it.

  Hafner called them in and rigged up an alarm system in the field most frequented by the animal. It detected that, too, and moved its sphere of operations to a field in which the alarm system had not been installed.

  Hafner conferred with the engineer, who devised an alarm that would react to body radiation. It was buried in the original field and the old alarm was moved to another.

  Two nights later, just before dawn, the alarm rang.

  Marin met Hafner at the edge of the settlement. Both carried rifles. They walked; the noise of any vehicle was likely to frighten the animal. They circled around and approached the field from the rear. The men in the camp had been alerted. If they needed help, it was ready.

  They crept silently through the underbrush. It was feeding in the field, not noisily, yet they could hear it. The dogs hadn’t barked.

  They inched nearer. The blue sun of Glade came up and shone full on their quarry. The gun dropped in Hafner’s hand. He clenched his teeth and raised it again.

  Marin put out a restraining arm. “Don’t shoot,” he whispered.

  “I’m the exec here. I say it’s dangerous.”

  “Dangerous,” agreed Marin, still in a whisper. “That’s why you can’t shoot. It’s more dangerous than you know.”

  Hafner hesitated and Marin went on. “The omnimal couldn’t compete in the c
hanged environment and so it evolved mice. We stopped the mice and it countered with rats. We turned back the rat and it provided the tiger.

  “The tiger was easiest of all for us and so it was apparently stopped for a while. But it didn’t really stop. Another animal was being formed, the one you see there. It took the omnimal two years to create it—how, I don’t know. A million years were required to evolve it on Earth.”

  Hafner hadn’t lowered the rifle and he showed no signs of doing so. He looked lovingly into the sights.

  “Can’t you see?” urged Marin. “We can’t destroy the omnimal. It’s on Earth now, and on the other planets, down in the storage areas of our big cities, masquerading as rats. And we’ve never been able to root out even our own terrestrial rats, so how can we exterminate the omnimal?”

  “All the more reason to start now.” Hafner’s voice was flat.

  Marin struck the rifle down. “Are their rats better than ours?” he asked wearily. “Will their pests win or ours be stronger? Or will the two make peace, unite and interbreed, make war on us? It’s not impossible; the omnimal could do it if interbreeding had a high survival factor.

  “Don’t you still see? There is a progression. After the tiger, it bred this. If this evolution fails, if we shoot it down, what will it create next? This creature I think we can compete with. It’s the one after this that I do not want to face.”

  It heard them. It raised its head and looked around. Slowly it edged away and backed toward a nearby grove.

  The biologist stood up and called softly. The creature scurried to the trees and stopped just inside the shadows among them.

  The two men laid down their rifles. Together they approached the grove, hands spread open to show they carried no weapons.

  It came out to meet them. Naked, it had had no time to learn about clothing. Neither did it have weapons. It plucked a large white flower from the tree and extended this mutely as a sign of peace.

  “I wonder what it’s like,” said Marin. “It seems adult, but can it be, all the way through? What’s inside that body?”

  “I wonder what’s in his head,” Hafner said worriedly.

  It looked very much like a man.

  Aye, and Gomorrah

  SAMUEL R. DELANY

  Samuel Ray Delany Jr. (1942– ), who writes as Samuel R. Delany, is a widely influential and often avant-garde US author and academic associated with the New Wave movement. Delany’s best-known fiction is speculative fiction, but he also has written important essays on sexuality, including Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary (2000). Delany was for a time married to the National Book Award–winning poet Marilyn Hacker, with whom he had a daughter. Hacker’s poetry is important to Delany’s early novels, especially Babel-17 (winner of the 1966 Nebula Award).

  Delany’s other novels include The Einstein Intersection (winner of the 1967 Nebula Award), Dhalgren, and the swords-and-sorcery series Return to Nevèrÿon. Dhalgren elevated Delany beyond cult status, selling almost a million copies while polarizing the science fiction community; it was the quintessential New Wave text. More recently, Delany published the sprawling, ambitious novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012), which recounts the lives of a group of gay men. The novel ventures into the near future and reasserted Delany’s career-long commitment to ambitious, adult literature in the vein of Dhalgren. In terms of nonfiction, Delany’s book on science fiction The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977) remains influential on new generations of writers and readers.

  But Delany’s impact on the field has been felt in many ways. He won enough Nebulas that in 1986 Bantam could publish a 425-page book of Delany’s work entitled The Complete Nebula Award–Winning Fiction. His story “Atlantis: Model 1924” has been included in every edition of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. He wrote two issues of Wonder Woman, including the (in)famous “Women’s Lib” issue, and wrote the graphic novel Empire (illustrated by Howard Chaykin) as well as a graphic memoir, Bread and Wine (illustrated by Mia Wolff). He taught at the influential Clarion workshop many times, and his students included Octavia E. Butler and Kim Stanley Robinson. Delany’s story “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” written in 1984 and included in Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985), was, in Jeffrey Tucker’s words, “the first novel-length work of fiction on AIDS from a major publisher in the United States.”

  Delany entered the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2002. From January 2001 until his recent retirement, Delany served as the director of the graduate creative writing program at Temple University. In 2010 he won the third J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in Science Fiction from the academic Eaton Science Fiction Conference at UCR Libraries. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named him its thirtieth grand master in 2013.

  “Aye, and Gomorrah” appeared in Harlan Ellison’s famous Dangerous Visions anthology in 1967. In his introduction to the story, Ellison wrote that Delany’s work approaches “shopworn clichés of speculative fiction with a bold and compelling ingenuity…He brings freshness to a field that occasionally slumps into the line of least resistance.” “Aye, and Gomorrah” remains a truly groundbreaking story that demystifies the epic role of the astronaut in science fiction, creating a grittier and stranger reality, much as James Tiptree Jr. does for other science fiction tropes in her “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side.”

  AYE, AND GOMORRAH

  Samuel R. Delany

  And came down in Paris:

  Where we raced along the Rue de Médicis with Bo and Lou and Muse inside the fence, Kelly and me outside, making faces through the bars, making noise, making the Luxembourg Gardens roar at two in the morning. Then climbed out, and down to the square in front of St. Sulpice, where Bo tried to knock me into the fountain.

  At which point Kelly noticed what was going on around us, got an ash can cover, and ran into the pissoir, banging the walls. Five guys scooted out; even a big pissoir only holds four.

  A very blond man put his hand on my arm and smiled. “Don’t you think, Spacer, that you…people should leave?”

  I looked at his hand on my blue uniform. “Est-ce que tu es un frelk?”

  His eyebrows rose, then he shook his head. “Une frelk,” he corrected. “No. I am not. Sadly for me. You look as though you may once have been a man. But now…” He smiled. “You have nothing for me now. The police.” He nodded across the street, where I noticed the gendarmerie for the first time. “They don’t bother us. You are strangers, though….”

  But Muse was already yelling, “Hey, come on! Let’s get out of here, huh?” And left.

  And went up again.

  And came down in Houston:

  “Goddamn!” Muse said. “Gemini Flight Control—you mean this is where it all started? Let’s get out of here, please!”

  So took a bus out through Pasadena, then the monoline to Galveston, and were going to take it down the Gulf, but Lou found a couple with a pickup truck—

  “Glad to give you a ride, Spacers. You people up there on them planets and things, doing all that good work for the government.”

  —who were going south, them and the baby, so we rode in the back for two hundred and fifty miles of sun and wind.

  “You think they’re frelks?” Lou asked, elbowing me. “I bet they’re frelks. They’re just waiting for us to give ’em the come-on.”

  “Cut it out. They’re a nice, stupid pair of country kids.”

  “That don’t mean they ain’t frelks!”

  “You don’t trust anybody, do you?”

  “No.”

  And finally a bus again that rattled us through Brownsville and across the border into Matamoros, where we staggered down the steps into the dust and the scorched evening, with a lot of Mexicans and chickens and Texas Gulf shrimp fishermen—who smelled worst—and we shouted the loudest. Forty-three whores—I counted—had turned out for the shrimp fishermen, and by the time we had broken two of the windows in the bus
station they were all laughing. The shrimp fishermen said they wouldn’t buy us no food but would get us drunk if we wanted, ’cause that was the custom with shrimp fishermen. But we yelled, broke another window; then, while I was lying on my back on the telegraph office steps, singing, a woman with dark lips bent over and put her hand on my cheek. “You are very sweet.” Her rough hair fell forward. “But the men, they are standing around and watching you. And that is taking up time. Sadly, their time is our money. Spacer, do you not think you…people should leave?”

  I grabbed her wrist. “¡Usted!” I whispered. “¿Usted es una frelka?”

  “Frelko en español.” She smiled and patted the sunburst that hung from my belt buckle. “Sorry. But you have nothing that…would be useful to me. It is too bad, for you look like you were once a woman, no? And I like women, too….”

  I rolled off the porch.

  “Is this a drag, or is this a drag!” Muse was shouting. “Come on! Let’s go!”

  We managed to get back to Houston before dawn, somehow.

  And went up.

  And came down in Istanbul:

  That morning it rained in Istanbul.

  At the commissary we drank our tea from pear-shaped glasses, looking out across the Bosphorus. The Princes’ Islands lay like trash heaps before the prickly city.

  “Who knows their way in this town?” Kelly asked.

  “Aren’t we going around together?” Muse demanded. “I thought we were going around together.”

  “They held up my check at the purser’s office,” Kelly explained. “I’m flat broke. I think the purser’s got it in for me,” and shrugged. “Don’t want to, but I’m going to have to hunt up a rich frelk and come on friendly,” went back to the tea; then noticed how heavy the silence had become. “Aw, come on, now! You gape at me like that, and I’ll bust every bone in that carefully-conditioned-from-puberty body of yours. Hey you!” meaning me. “Don’t give me that holier-than-thou gawk like you never went with no frelk!”