The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  The spider began to move toward the dark promise of the gate. On the tower above, Simon Kress’s countenance stared down impassively.

  At once there was a flurry of activity. The nearest red mobiles formed themselves into two wedges and streamed over the sand toward the spider. More warriors erupted from inside the castle and assembled in a triple line to guard the approach to the underground chamber where the maw lived. Scouts came scuttling over the dunes, recalled to fight.

  Battle was joined.

  The attacking sandkings washed over the spider. Mandibles snapped shut on legs and abdomen, and clung. Reds raced up the golden legs to the invader’s back. They bit and tore. One of them found an eye, and ripped it loose with tiny yellow tendrils. Kress smiled and pointed.

  But they were small, and they had no venom, and the spider did not stop. Its legs flicked sandkings off to either side. Its dripping jaws found others, and left them broken and stiffening. Already a dozen of the reds lay dying. The sand spider came on and on. It strode straight through the triple line of guardians before the castle. The lines closed around it, covered it, waging desperate battle. A team of sandkings had bitten off one of the spider’s legs, Kress saw. Defenders leaped from atop the towers to land on the twitching, heaving mass.

  Lost beneath the sandkings, the spider somehow lurched down into the darkness and vanished.

  Jad Rakkis let out a long breath. He looked pale. “Wonderful,” someone else said. Malada Blane chuckled deep in her throat.

  “Look,” said Idi Noreddian, tugging Kress by the arm.

  They had been so intent on the struggle in the corner that none of them had noticed the activity elsewhere in the tank. But now the castle was still, the sands empty save for dead red mobiles, and now they saw.

  Three armies were drawn up before the red castle. They stood quite still, in perfect array, rank after rank of sandkings, orange and white and black. Waiting to see what emerged from the depths.

  Simon Kress smiled. “A cordon sanitaire,” he said. “And glance at the other castles, if you will, Jad.”

  Rakkis did, and swore. Teams of mobiles were sealing up the gates with sand and stone. If the spider somehow survived this encounter, it would find no easy entrance at the other castles. “I should have brought four spiders,” Jad Rakkis said. “Still, I’ve won. My spider is down there right now, eating your damned maw.”

  Kress did not reply. He waited. There was motion in the shadows.

  All at once, red mobiles began pouring out of the gate. They took their positions on the castle, and began repairing the damage the spider had wrought. The other armies dissolved and began to retreat to their respective corners.

  “Jad,” said Simon Kress, “I think you are a bit confused about who is eating who.”

  —

  The following week Rakkis brought four slim silver snakes. The sandkings dispatched them without much trouble.

  Next he tried a large black bird. It ate more than thirty white mobiles, and its thrashing and blundering virtually destroyed their castle, but ultimately its wings grew tired, and the sandkings attacked in force wherever it landed.

  After that it was a case of insects, armored beetles not too unlike the sandkings themselves. But stupid, stupid. An allied force of oranges and blacks broke their formation, divided them, and butchered them.

  Rakkis began giving Kress promissory notes.

  It was around that time that Kress met Cath m’Lane again, one evening when he was dining in Asgard at his favorite restaurant. He stopped at her table briefly and told her about the war games, inviting her to join them. She flushed, then regained control of herself and grew icy. “Someone has to put a stop to you, Simon. I guess it’s going to be me,” she said. Kress shrugged and enjoyed a lovely meal and thought no more about her threat.

  Until a week later, when a small, stout woman arrived at his door and showed him a police wristband. “We’ve had complaints,” she said. “Do you keep a tank full of dangerous insects, Kress?”

  “Not insects,” he said, furious. “Come, I’ll show you.”

  When she had seen the sandkings, she shook her head. “This will never do. What do you know about these creatures, anyway? Do you know what world they’re from? Have they been cleared by the ecological board? Do you have a license for these things? We have a report that they’re carnivores, possibly dangerous. We also have a report that they are semi-sentient. Where did you get these creatures, anyway?”

  “From Wo and Shade,” Kress replied.

  “Never heard of them,” the woman said. “Probably smuggled them in, knowing our ecologists would never approve them. No, Kress, this won’t do. I’m going to confiscate this tank and have it destroyed. And you’re going to have to expect a few fines as well.”

  Kress offered her a hundred standards to forget all about him and his sandkings.

  She tsked. “Now I’ll have to add attempted bribery to the charges against you.”

  Not until he raised the figure to two thousand standards was she willing to be persuaded.

  “It’s not going to be easy, you know,” she said. “There are forms to be altered, records to be wiped. And getting a forged license from the ecologists will be time-consuming. Not to mention dealing with the complainant. What if she calls again?”

  “Leave her to me,” Kress said. “Leave her to me.”

  He thought about it for a while. That night he made some calls.

  First he got t’Etherane the Petseller. “I want to buy a dog,” he said. “A puppy.”

  The round-faced merchant gawked at him. “A puppy? That is not like you, Simon. Why don’t you come in? I have a lovely choice.”

  “I want a very specific kind of puppy,” Kress said. “Take notes. I’ll describe to you what it must look like.”

  Afterward he punched for Idi Noreddian. “Idi,” he said, “I want you out here tonight with your holo equipment. I have a notion to record a sandking battle. A present for one of my friends.”

  The night after they made the recording, Simon Kress stayed up late. He absorbed a controversial new drama in his sensorium, fixed himself a small snack, smoked a joy-stick or two, and broke out a bottle of wine. Feeling very happy with himself, he wandered into the living room, glass in hand.

  The lights were out. The red glow of the terrarium made the shadows flushed and feverish. He walked over to look at his domain, curious as to how the blacks were doing in the repairs on their castle. The puppy had left it in ruins.

  The restoration went well. But as Kress inspected the work through his magnifiers, he chanced to glance closely at the face. It startled him.

  He drew back, blinked, took a healthy gulp of wine, and looked again.

  The face on the wall was still his. But it was all wrong, all twisted. His cheeks were bloated and piggish, his smile was a crooked leer. He looked impossibly malevolent.

  Uneasy, he moved around the tank to inspect the other castles. They were each a bit different, but ultimately all the same.

  The oranges had left out most of the fine detail, but the result still seemed monstrous, crude—a brutal mouth and mindless eyes.

  The reds gave him a satanic, twitching kind of smile. His mouth did odd, unlovely things at its corners.

  The whites, his favorites, had carved a cruel idiot god.

  Simon Kress flung his wine across the room in rage. “You dare,” he said under his breath. “Now you won’t eat for a week, you damned…” His voice was shrill. “I’ll teach you.” He had an idea. He strode out of the room, and returned a moment later with an antique iron throwing-sword in his hand. It was a meter long, and the point was still sharp. Kress smiled, climbed up, and moved the tank cover aside just enough to give him working room, opening one corner of the desert. He leaned down, and jabbed the sword at the white castle below him. He waved it back and forth, smashing towers and ramparts and walls. Sand and stone collapsed, burying the scrambling mobiles. A flick of his wrist obliterated the features of the i
nsolent, insulting caricature the sandkings had made of his face. Then he poised the point of the sword above the dark mouth that opened down into the maw’s chamber, and thrust with all his strength. He heard a soft, squishing sound, and met resistance. All of the mobiles trembled and collapsed. Satisfied, Kress pulled back.

  He watched for a moment, wondering whether he’d killed the maw. The point of the throwing-sword was wet and slimy. But finally the white sandkings began to move again. Feebly, slowly, but they moved.

  He was preparing to slide the cover back in place and move on to a second castle when he felt something crawling on his hand.

  He screamed and dropped the sword, and brushed the sandking from his flesh. It fell to the carpet, and he ground it beneath his heel, crushing it thoroughly long after it was dead. It had crunched when he stepped on it. After that, trembling, he hurried to seal the tank up again, and rushed off to shower and inspect himself carefully. He boiled his clothing.

  Later, after several fresh glasses of wine, he returned to the living room. He was a bit ashamed of the way the sandking had terrified him. But he was not about to open the tank again. From now on, the cover stayed sealed permanently. Still, he had to punish the others.

  Kress decided to lubricate his mental processes with another glass of wine. As he finished it, an inspiration came to him. He went to the tank, smiling, and made a few adjustments to the humidity controls.

  By the time he fell asleep on the couch, his wineglass still in his hand, the sand castles were melting in the rain.

  —

  Kress woke to angry pounding on his door.

  He sat up, groggy, his head throbbing. Wine hangovers were always the worst, he thought. He lurched to the entry chamber.

  Cath m’Lane was outside. “You monster,” she said, her face swollen and puffy and streaked by tears. “I cried all night, damn you. But no more, Simon, no more.”

  “Easy,” he said, holding his head. “I’ve got a hangover.”

  She swore and shoved him aside and pushed her way into his house. The shambler came peering round a corner to see what the noise was. She spat at it and stalked into the living room, Kress trailing ineffectually after her. “Hold on,” he said. “Where do you…you can’t…” He stopped, suddenly horrorstruck. She was carrying a heavy sledgehammer in her left hand. “No,” he said.

  She went directly to the sandking tank. “You like the little charmers so much, Simon? Then you can live with them.”

  “Cath!” he shrieked.

  Gripping the hammer with both hands, she swung as hard as she could against the side of the tank. The sound of the impact set his head to screaming, and Kress made a low blubbering sound of despair. But the plastic held.

  She swung again. This time there was a crack, and a network of thin lines sprang into being.

  Kress threw himself at her as she drew back her hammer for a third swing. They went down flailing, and rolled. She lost her grip on the hammer and tried to throttle him, but Kress wrenched free and bit her on the arm, drawing blood. They both staggered to their feet, panting.

  “You should see yourself, Simon,” she said grimly. “Blood dripping from your mouth. You look like one of your pets. How do you like the taste?”

  “Get out,” he said. He saw the throwing-sword where it had fallen the night before, and snatched it up. “Get out,” he repeated, waving the sword for emphasis. “Don’t go near that tank again.”

  She laughed at him. “You wouldn’t dare,” she said. She bent to pick up her hammer.

  Kress shrieked at her, and lunged. Before he quite knew what was happening, the iron blade had gone clear through her abdomen. Cath m’Lane looked at him wonderingly, and down at the sword. Kress fell back whimpering. “I didn’t mean…I only wanted…”

  She was transfixed, bleeding, dead, but somehow she did not fall. “You monster,” she managed to say, though her mouth was full of blood. And she whirled, impossibly, the sword in her, and swung with her last strength at the tank. The tortured wall shattered, and Cath m’Lane was buried beneath an avalanche of plastic and sand and mud.

  Kress made small hysterical noises and scrambled up on the couch.

  Sandkings were emerging from the muck on his living room floor. They were crawling across Cath’s body. A few of them ventured tentatively out across the carpet. More followed.

  He watched as a column took shape, a living, writhing square of sandkings, bearing something, something slimy and featureless, a piece of raw meat big as a man’s head. They began to carry it away from the tank. It pulsed.

  That was when Kress broke and ran.

  —

  It was late afternoon before he found the courage to return. He had run to his skimmer and flown to the nearest city, some fifty kilometers away, almost sick with fear. But once safely away, he had found a small restaurant, put down several mugs of coffee and two anti-hangover tabs, eaten a full breakfast, and gradually regained his composure.

  It had been a dreadful morning, but dwelling on that would solve nothing. He ordered more coffee and considered his situation with icy rationality.

  Cath m’Lane was dead at his hand. Could he report it, plead that it had been an accident? Unlikely. He had run her through, after all, and he had already told that policer to leave her to him. He would have to get rid of the evidence, and hope that she had not told anyone where she was going this morning. That was probable. She could only have gotten his gift late last night. She said that she had cried all night, and she had been alone when it arrived. Very well; he had one body and one skimmer to dispose of.

  That left the sandkings. They might prove more of a difficulty. No doubt they had all escaped by now. The thought of them around his house, in his bed and his clothes, infesting his food—it made his flesh crawl. He shuddered and overcame his revulsion. It really shouldn’t be too hard to kill them, he reminded himself. He didn’t have to account for every mobile. Just the four maws, that was all. He could do that. They were large, as he’d seen. He would find them and kill them.

  Simon Kress went shopping before he flew back to his home. He bought a set of skinthins that would cover him from head to foot, several bags of poison pellets for rockjock control, and a spray canister of illegally strong pesticide. He also bought a magnalock towing device.

  When he landed, he went about things methodically. First he hooked Cath’s skimmer to his own with the magnalock. Searching it, he had his first piece of luck. The crystal chip with Idi Noreddian’s holo of the sandking fight was on the front seat. He had worried about that.

  When the skimmers were ready, he slipped into his skinthins and went inside for Cath’s body.

  It wasn’t there.

  He poked through the fast-drying sand carefully, but there was no doubt of it; the body was gone. Could she have dragged herself away? Unlikely, but Kress searched. A cursory inspection of his house turned up neither the body nor any sign of the sandkings. He did not have time for a more thorough investigation, not with the incriminating skimmer outside his front door. He resolved to try later.

  Some seventy kilometers north of Kress’s estate was a range of active volcanoes. He flew there, Cath’s skimmer in tow. Above the glowering cone of the largest, he released the magnalock and watched it vanish in the lava below.

  It was dusk when he returned to his house. That gave him pause. Briefly he considered flying back to the city and spending the night there. He put the thought aside. There was work to do. He wasn’t safe yet.

  He scattered the poison pellets around the exterior of his house. No one would find that suspicious. He’d always had a rockjock problem. When that task was completed, he primed the canister of pesticide and ventured back inside.

  Kress went through the house room by room, turning on lights everywhere he went until he was surrounded by a blaze of artificial illumination. He paused to clean up in the living room, shoveling sand and plastic fragments back into the broken tank. The sandkings were all gone, as he’d feared. The
castles were shrunken and distorted, slagged by the watery bombardment Kress had visited upon them, and what little remained was crumbling as it dried.

  He frowned and searched on, the canister of pest spray strapped across his shoulders.

  Down in his deepest wine cellar, he came upon Cath m’Lane’s corpse.

  It sprawled at the foot of a steep flight of stairs, the limbs twisted as if by a fall. White mobiles were swarming all over it, and as Kress watched, the body moved jerkily across the hard-packed dirt floor.

  He laughed, and twisted the illumination up to maximum. In the far corner, a squat little earthen castle and a dark hole were visible between two wine racks. Kress could make out a rough outline of his face on the cellar wall.

  The body shifted once again, moving a few centimeters towards the castle. Kress had a sudden vision of the white maw waiting hungrily. It might be able to get Cath’s foot in its mouth, but no more. It was too absurd. He laughed again, and started down into the cellar, finger poised on the trigger of the hose that snaked down his right arm. The sandkings—hundreds of them moving as one—deserted the body and formed up battle lines, a field of white between him and their maw.

  Suddenly Kress had another inspiration. He smiled and lowered his firing hand. “Cath was always hard to swallow,” he said, delighted at his wit. “Especially for one your size. Here, let me give you some help. What are gods for, after all?”

  He retreated upstairs, returning shortly with a cleaver. The sandkings, patient, waited and watched while Kress chopped Cath m’Lane into small, easily digestible pieces.

  —

  Simon Kress slept in his skinthins that night, the pesticide close at hand, but he did not need it. The whites, sated, remained in the cellar, and he saw no sign of the others.

  In the morning he finished the cleanup of the living room. After he was through, no trace of the struggle remained except for the broken tank.

  He ate a light lunch, and resumed his hunt for the missing sandkings. In full daylight, it was not too difficult. The blacks had located in his rock garden, and built a castle heavy with obsidian and quartz. The reds he found at the bottom of his long-disused swimming pool, which had partially filled with windblown sand over the years. He saw mobiles of both colors ranging about his grounds, many of them carrying poison pellets back to their maws. Kress decided his pesticide was unnecessary. No use risking a fight when he could just let the poison do its work. Both maws should be dead by evening.