The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  It happened right in front of Brand, who had been sitting with Wessel to keep an eye on him. Wessel had spent most of his time staring placidly at the wall, and neither of them had spoken all afternoon.

  Then his head opened, at the front end this time, and without any warning his face split down the front. Within, the brain was revealed like a lurking animal, eyes attached, still with its protective coating of gelatinous substance. Without delay its podium got a grip on Wessel’s chin, and it began to clamber out, dripping a pale pink fluid.

  Ruiger came at a run as Brand yelled. As he entered the room the brain seemed to realise for the first time that it was being observed. Its eyes swivelled; it backtracked, retreating guiltily into its bone cave. The face closed up; the eyes disappeared momentarily, then joggled themselves into their sockets.

  Wessel resumed staring woodenly at the wall, ignoring his two erstwhile friends. There was not the slightest trace of a join where his face had opened.

  Brand stood stupefied. “Well?” Ruiger rasped, “you still think he’s all right?”

  He went to the arms cupboard and got two dart rifles. “We’re paying a second visit,” he said curtly, handing a rifle to Brand. “This time we’ll stay and watch the operation. Let’s see how tricky those aliens are at the point of a gun.”

  Brand followed blindly. Wessel, too, seemed to have no will to resist or argue. When ordered to do so he went with them out of the ship and walked across the grass to the Chid hut.

  As soon as they reached it Ruiger kicked the door open, and barged in.

  The smell of rottenness invaded their nostrils. The interior was exactly as they had first seen it: one Chid lay sprawled on the couch, while the other lolled in the double sling. Only the latter reacted to the intrusion, raising his head to peer at Ruiger.

  “Our friends have returned!” he chortled. “They have arrived to give us our promised sport!”

  The Chid on the couch replied with the slightest trace of an acid-sounding accent. “Yes,” he said, “but it was not polite of them to spurn our parts offering.”

  Brand and Wessel entered behind Ruiger. Ruiger spoke thickly, holding his rifle at the ready.

  “You have misused our friend terribly. His brain is not fixed in his body!”

  The Chid turned his eyes to the roof. “Ah, to be able to leave one’s body! It is every Earthman’s desire—that is what I learn in Earth religion.”

  “You don’t understand—”

  Ruiger broke off as the Chid disengaged himself from his slings. The Chid’s big frame seemed awkward, yet somehow commanding, in the cramped, confined hut. He reached out to unhook what looked like a golfer’s carrying case, complete with shoulder strap, from the wall. The case contained numerous metal tools, many of which bore gleaming blades.

  With a snakelike motion the second Chid came off the couch and stretched himself. “Shall we take umbrage at the breach in their good manners?”

  “No. We should make allowance for their alienness. That said, we must of course recompense ourselves for the insult. Shall we arrange a brain-race? It will do our guests no harm, and provide us with welcome sport. How will you wager?”

  “I bet this one to win,” the second Chid said, pointing to Ruiger.

  The other laughed. “I bet that neither of them will make it.”

  An urgent feeling of danger seized Ruiger. He tried to speak, but could not. He tried to shoot the nearest Chid with his rifle, but could not. He was completely immobilised. The two Chid towered over him, inspecting him with their boiled-egg eyes. Their exchange continued, apparently with a discussion of stakes and odds. Then they reached for their surgical tools.

  What happened next was of such a nature that Ruiger’s mind was unable to apply any appropriate feelings to it. At first it was like being a babe in the hands of ultimately powerful adults, and the strangeness of it made all his perceptions hazy. He felt no pain, not even when the Chid, using a simple scalpel, cut his skull and face down the middle, bisecting his nose in the process, and prised apart the two halves. The minute his brain was levered out of place, however, he immediately ceased to feel that he was a human being possessing arms, legs, or a torso. Eyes still functioning, he emerged from the sawn-open skull as a different creature altogether. He was a rounded grey lump, a cleft down his back, a sort of armadillo’s tail at his rear.

  After that there was a short period of unconsciousness. When Ruiger came round again, his transformation was complete.

  It was a little like being a snail. He could move about on the podium on which he squatted. He was covered with a gelatinous layer which protected his vulnerable tissue. And he could see. But he could not, of course, hear, or feel, or smell. The podium did, however, support other small organs which comprised a partial life-support. He could breathe and, after a fashion, feed, though on somewhat specialised food.

  He had been put down outside the Chid hut, amid the coarse broad-bladed grass. Not far from him he saw another part-animal like himself. He knew it was Brand. And ahead, already striding away towards the cliff’s edge by means of vestigial motor functions, were two human bodies. One was Brand’s. The other was his.

  Ruiger experienced a terrible hunger for the body that went walking away from him. He knew that he could possess it again, but to do so he must catch up with it before it fell over the cliff, and so he set off, sliding over the uneven ground with all his puny strength.

  This, he realised, was the Chid’s brain-race. The Chid had placed bets on whether he or Brand, who also was straining not far away, would recover his body first. Already Ruiger was gaining on his body. If it should fall but once, he told himself, he would be able to catch up with it.

  But the minutes passed and the body did not fall. Instead, Ruiger himself became entangled in a clump of grass. By the time he freed himself it was far too late. Desperately he lunged forward, only to see his body, striated by blades of grass, walk straight over the edge of the cliff, to fall on the rocks and the sea below.

  It was gone. His body was gone. Numb with failure, Ruiger turned round. The Brand body, too, had disappeared, and of the Brand brain there was no sign. He made out the Chid hut. Near it was Wessel, standing casually, his brain out of his skull again and clinging to the side of his neck like an enormous slug. Beyond that, he dimly saw the Chid spaceship, not far from the little wood.

  He saw his own spaceship, too, but that was no use to him now. Ruiger’s gaze settled on the wood. The dark patch, the motionless copse, was like an island amid the tawny bush. Curious…he was already forgetting what it was like to have a body….The burning hunger faded, his humanity receded from him as if he had lost it not minutes ago, but decades ago, and the little wood was no longer gruesome or grotesque. It was a lush, gentle, sheltering place to part-animals like himself. It protected and nurtured them. In the wood he could live—after a fashion. And life, he remembered dimly, was worth hanging on to at any cost.

  The sun and stars were burning down on him. He was naked and helpless here in the open. He could not live here. Steadily, pushing his way through the stiff grass, thinking of the welcoming pool of blood, of the enclosing black foliage, of the pulsing warmth, he crawled towards the still, dark hollow.

  Sandkings

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN

  George R. R. Martin (1948– ) is a popular US writer who has written influential horror and science fiction but is widely known for his fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, an international bestseller. Martin’s work has become only more wildly popular since HBO launched its series based on his fantasy novels, Game of Thrones. Time has called Martin “the American Tolkien,” and the magazine included him in the 2011 “Time 100,” a list of the “most influential people in the world.” He has won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, as well as a Bram Stoker Award and a World Fantasy Award. In 2012, Martin won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement.

  Martin has over the course of his career been among the most versatile of writers, craftin
g classics in several genres. To name just two of his best works, “Nightflyers” (1980) is a marvel of science fiction horror, and “The Pear-Shaped Man” (1987) is a disturbing modern weird tale. The impressive entirety of his short fiction output, across several decades, can be found in the volume Dreamsongs (2003). Although Martin often writes fantasy or horror, a number of his earlier works are science fiction tales occurring in a milieu known as “the Thousand Worlds” or “the Manrealm.”

  His 1979 story “Sandkings,” published in Omni, won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the only one of his stories to do so. Martin was inspired to write “Sandkings” after watching horror movies with a friend who had a tank of piranhas. Martin’s friend would throw goldfish into the tank between films “like a weird intermission.” Originally Martin believed “Sandkings” would be the start of a series of stories. It was adapted for an episode of The Outer Limits (1995). It has been parodied by The Simpsons, Futurama, and South Park. A British rock band from the late eighties and early nineties also used “Sandkings” as their name. Despite its appropriation by pop culture, “Sandkings” remains a powerful tale of science fiction horror, one with political overtones.

  SANDKINGS

  George R. R. Martin

  Simon Kress lived alone in a sprawling manor house among the dry, rocky hills fifty kilometers from the city. So, when he was called away unexpectedly on business, he had no neighbors he could conveniently impose on to take his pets. The carrion hawk was no problem; it roosted in the unused belfry and customarily fed itself anyway. The shambler Kress simply shooed outside and left to fend for itself; the little monster would gorge on slugs and birds and rockjocks. But the fish tank, stocked with genuine Earth piranha, posed a difficulty. Kress finally just threw a haunch of beef into the huge tank. The piranha could always eat each other if he were detained longer than expected. They’d done it before. It amused him.

  Unfortunately, he was detained much longer than expected this time. When he finally returned, all the fish were dead. So was the carrion hawk. The shambler had climbed up to the belfry and eaten it. Simon Kress was vexed.

  The next day he flew his skimmer to Asgard, a journey of some two hundred kilometers. Asgard was Baldur’s largest city and boasted the oldest and largest starport as well. Kress liked to impress his friends with animals that were unusual, entertaining, and expensive; Asgard was the place to buy them.

  This time, though, he had poor luck. Xenopets had closed its doors, t’Etherane the Petseller tried to foist another carrion hawk off on him, and Strange Waters offered nothing more exotic than piranha, glow-sharks, and spider squids. Kress had had all those; he wanted something new.

  Near dusk, he found himself walking down the Rainbow Boulevard, looking for places he had not patronized before. So close to the starpon, the street was lined by importers’ marts. The big corporate emporiums had impressive long windows, where rare and costly alien artifacts reposed on felt cushions against dark drapes that made the interiors of the stores a mystery. Between them were the junk shops—narrow, nasty little places whose display areas were crammed with all manner of offworld bric-a-brac. Kress tried both kinds of shop, with equal dissatisfaction.

  Then he came across a store that was different.

  It was quite close to the port. Kress had never been there before. The shop occupied a small, single-story building of moderate size, set between a euphoria bar and a temple-brothel of the Secret Sisterhood. Down this far, the Rainbow Boulevard grew tacky. The shop itself was unusual. Arresting.

  The windows were full of mist; now a pale red, now the gray of true fog, now sparkling and golden. The mist swirled and eddied and glowed faintly from within. Kress glimpsed objects in the window—machines, pieces of art, other things he could not recognize—but he could not get a good look at any of them. The mists flowed sensuously around them, displaying a bit of first one thing and then another, then cloaking all. It was intriguing.

  As he watched, the mist began to form letters. One word at a time. Kress stood and read:

  WO. AND. SHADE. IMPORTERS.

  ARTIFACTS. ART. LIFE-FORMS. AND. MISC.

  The letters stopped. Through the fog, Kress saw something moving. That was enough for him, that and the word life-forms in their advertisement. He swept his walking cloak over his shoulder and entered the store.

  Inside, Kress felt disoriented. The interior seemed vast, much larger than he would have guessed from the relatively modest frontage. It was dimly lit, peaceful. The ceiling was a starscape, complete with spiral nebulae, very dark and realistic, very nice. The counters all shone faintly, the better to display the merchandise within. The aisles were carpeted with ground fog. In places, it came almost to his knees and swirled about his feet as he walked.

  “Can I help you?”

  She seemed almost to have risen from the fog. Tall and gaunt and pale, she wore a practical gray jumpsuit and a strange little cap that rested well back on her head.

  “Are you Wo or Shade?” Kress asked. “Or only sales help?”

  “Jala Wo, ready to serve you,” she replied. “Shade does not see customers. We have no sales help.”

  “You have quite a large establishment,” Kress said. “Odd that I have never heard of you before.”

  “We have only just opened this shop on Baldur,” the woman said. “We have franchises on a number of other worlds, however. What can I sell you? Art, perhaps? You have the look of a collector. We have some fine Nor T’alush crystal carvings.”

  “No,” Simon Kress said. “I own all the crystal carvings I desire. I came to see about a pet.”

  “A life-form?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alien?”

  “Of course.”

  “We have a mimic in stock. From Celia’s World. A clever little simian. Not only will it learn to speak, but eventually it will mimic your voice, inflections, gestures, even facial expressions.”

  “Cute,” said Kress. “And common. I have no use for either, Wo. I want something exotic. Unusual. And not cute. I detest cute animals. At the moment I own a shambler. Imported from Cotho, at no mean expense. From time to time I feed him a litter of unwanted kittens. That is what I think of cute. Do I make myself understood?”

  Wo smiled enigmatically. “Have you ever owned an animal that worshipped you?” she asked.

  Kress grinned. “Oh, now and again. But I don’t require worship, Wo. Just entertainment.”

  “You misunderstood me,” Wo said, still wearing her strange smile. “I meant worship literally.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I think I have just the thing for you,” Wo said. “Follow me.”

  She led Kress between the radiant counters and down a long, fog-shrouded aisle beneath false starlight. They passed through a wall of mist into another section of the store, and stopped before a large plastic tank. An aquarium, thought Kress.

  Wo beckoned. He stepped closer and saw that he was wrong. It was a terrarium. Within lay a miniature desert about two meters square. Pale and bleached scarlet by wan red light. Rocks: basalt and quartz and granite. In each corner of the tank stood a castle.

  Kress blinked, and peered, and corrected himself; actually only three castles stood. The fourth leaned, a crumbled, broken ruin. The other three were crude but intact, carved of stone and sand. Over their battlements and through their rounded porticoes, tiny creatures climbed and scrambled. Kress pressed his face against the plastic. “Insects?” he asked.

  “No,” Wo replied. “A much more complex life-form. More intelligent as well. Considerably smarter than your shambler. They are called sandkings.”

  “Insects,” Kress said, drawing back from the tank. “I don’t care how complex they are.” He frowned. “And kindly don’t try to gull me with this talk of intelligence. These things are far too small to have anything but the most rudimentary brains.”

  “They share hiveminds,” Wo said. “Castle minds, in this case. There are only three organisms in t
he tank, actually. The fourth died. You see how her castle has fallen.”

  Kress looked back at the tank. “Hiveminds, eh? Interesting.” He frowned again. “Still, it is only an oversized ant farm. I’d hoped for something better.”

  “They fight wars.”

  “Wars? Hmmm.” Kress looked again.

  “Note the colors, if you will,” Wo told him. She pointed to the creatures that swarmed over the nearest castle. One was scrabbling at the tank wall. Kress studied it. It still looked like an insect to his eyes. Barely as long as his fingernail, six-limbed, with six tiny eyes set all around its body. A wicked set of mandibles clacked visibly, while two long, fine antennae wove patterns in the air. Antennae, mandibles, eyes, and legs were sooty black, but the dominant color was the burnt orange of its armor plating. “It’s an insect,” Kress repeated.

  “It is not an insect,” Wo insisted calmly. “The armored exoskeleton is shed when the sandking grows larger. If it grows larger. In a tank this size, it won’t.” She took Kress by the elbow and led him around the tank to the next castle. “Look at the colors here.”

  He did. They were different. Here the sandkings had bright red armor; antennae, mandibles, eyes, and legs were yellow. Kress glanced across the tank. The denizens of the third live castle were off-white, with red trim. “Hmmm,” he said.

  “They war, as I said,” Wo told him. “They even have truces and alliances. It was an alliance that destroyed the fourth castle in this tank. The blacks were getting too numerous, so the others joined forces to destroy them.”

  Kress remained unconvinced. “Amusing, no doubt. But insects fight wars too.”

  “Insects do not worship,” Wo said.

  “Eh?”

  Wo smiled and pointed at the castle. Kress stared. A face had been carved into the wall of the highest tower. He recognized it. It was Jala Wo’s face. “How…?”

  “I projected a hologram of my face into the tank, kept it there for a few days. The face of god, you see? I feed them; I am always close. The sandkings have a rudimentary psionic sense. Proximity telepathy. They sense me, and worship me by using my face to decorate their buildings. All the castles have them, see.” They did.