The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  “I can’t,” Kress said. “My skimmer is destroyed, and I can’t get any of the others to start. I don’t know how to reprogram them. Can you come out for me?”

  “Yes,” said Wo. “Shade and I will leave at once, but it is more than two hundred kilometers from Asgard to you, and there is equipment we will need to deal with the deranged sandking you’ve created. You cannot wait there. You have two feet. Walk. Go due east, as near as you can determine, as quickly as you can. The land out there is pretty desolate. We’ll find you easily with an aerial search, and you’ll be safely away from the sandking. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” said Simon Kress. “Yes, oh, yes.”

  They signed off, and he walked quickly toward the door. He was halfway there when he heard the noise—a sound halfway between a pop and a crack.

  One of the sandkings had split open. Four tiny hands covered with pinkish-yellow blood came up out of the gap and began to push the dead skin aside.

  Kress began to run.

  —

  He had not counted on the heat.

  The hills were dry and rocky. Kress ran from the house as quickly as he could, ran until his ribs ached and his breath was coming in gasps. Then he walked, but as soon as he had recovered he began to run again. For almost an hour he ran and walked, ran and walked, beneath the fierce hot sun. He sweated freely, and wished that he had thought to bring some water. He watched the sky in hopes of seeing Wo and Shade.

  He was not made for this. It was too hot, and too dry, and he was in no condition. But he kept himself going with the memory of the way the maw had breathed, and the thought of the wriggling little things that by now were surely crawling all over his house. He hoped Wo and Shade would know how to deal with them.

  He had his own plans for Wo and Shade. It was all their fault, Kress had decided, and they would suffer for it. Lissandra was dead, but he knew others in her profession. He would have his revenge. He promised himself that a hundred times as he struggled and sweated his way east.

  At least he hoped it was east. He was not that good at directions, and he wasn’t certain which way he had run in his initial panic, but since then he had made an effort to bear due east, as Wo had suggested.

  When he had been running for several hours, with no sign of rescue, Kress began to grow certain that he had gone wrong.

  When several more hours passed, he began to grow afraid. What if Wo and Shade could not find him? He would die out here. He hadn’t eaten in two days; he was weak and frightened; his throat was raw for want of water. He couldn’t keep going. The sun was sinking now, and he’d be completely lost in the dark. What was wrong? Had the sandkings eaten Wo and Shade? The fear was on him again, filling him, and with it a great thirst and a terrible hunger. But Kress kept going. He stumbled now when he tried to run, and twice he fell. The second time he scraped his hand on a rock, and it came away bloody. He sucked at it as he walked, and worried about infection.

  The sun was on the horizon behind him. The ground grew a little cooler, for which Kress was grateful. He decided to walk until last light and settle in for the night. Surely he was far enough from the sandkings to be safe, and Wo and Shade would find him come morning.

  When he topped the next rise, he saw the outline of a house in front of him.

  It wasn’t as big as his own house, but it was big enough. It was habitation, safety. Kress shouted and began to run toward it. Food and drink, he had to have nourishment, he could taste the meal now. He was aching with hunger. He ran down the hill towards the house, waving his arms and shouting to the inhabitants. The light was almost gone now, but he could still make out a half-dozen children playing in the twilight. “Hey there,” he shouted. “Help, help.”

  They came running toward him.

  Kress stopped suddenly. “No,” he said, “oh, no. Oh, no.” He backpedaled, slipped on the sand, got up and tried to run again. They caught him easily. They were ghastly little things with bulging eyes and dusky orange skin. He struggled, but it was useless. Small as they were, each of them had four arms, and Kress had only two.

  They carried him toward the house. It was a sad, shabby house built of crumbling sand, but the door was quite large, and dark, and it breathed. That was terrible, but it was not the thing that set Simon Kress to screaming. He screamed because of the others, the little orange children who came crawling out from the castle, and watched impassive as he passed.

  All of them had his face.

  Wives

  LISA TUTTLE

  Lisa Tuttle (1952– ) is an influential US science fiction and fantasy writer whose work often contains a deep vein of horror. A longtime resident of the United Kingdom, Tuttle now has dual British–American citizenship. She has won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (1974) and the Nebula Award (1982; she refused the award because of campaigning by another nominee, which she objected to), among others. Her first short story collection to be published in France, Ainsi naissent les fantȏmes (Ghosts and Other Lovers), won the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire in 2012.

  Prolific and inquisitive, Tuttle has published more than a dozen novels, including Familiar Spirit (1983), Gabriel (1987), Lost Futures (1992), The Mysteries (2005), The Silver Bough (2006), and The Curious Affair of the Somnambulist & The Psychic Thief (2016). Her fiction has been compiled in several short story collections and her nonfiction titles include a reference book on feminism, Encyclopedia of Feminism (1986). She has also edited such anthologies as Skin of the Soul: New Horror Stories by Women (1990) and has reviewed books for publications such as The Sunday Times. Along with such writers as Howard Waldrop and Bruce Sterling, Tuttle helped found the Turkey City writer’s workshop in 1973. Tuttle’s collaborative novella with George R. R. Martin, “The Storms of Windhaven,” was nominated for a Hugo Award (1976). They later published a novel-length version titled Windhaven (1981).

  Tuttle has published several short stories considered classics in the field. “Replacements” (1992), reprinted in, among others, Joyce Carol Oates’s American Gothic Tales (1996) and The Weird: A Compendium of Strange Dark Stories (2011), is one such tale. Another is “Wives,” a classic of feminist science fiction and of alien contact, thought-provoking and sinister. It lives comfortably alongside Chad Oliver’s “Let Me Live in a House” (1954), found elsewhere in this volume. Asked about the story, written in 1976, Tuttle responded, “I fear [it] is still depressingly relevant today, rather than being a quaint artifact of the bad old sexist, violent, aggressively colonialist days as my younger self would have wished.”

  WIVES

  Lisa Tuttle

  A smell of sulphur in the air on a morning when the men had gone, and the wives, in their beds, smiled in their sleep, breathed more easily, and burrowed deeper into dreams.

  Jack’s wife woke, her eyes open and her little nose flaring, smelling something beneath the sulphur smell. One of those smells she was used to not noticing, when the men were around. But it was all right, now. Wives could do as they pleased, so long as they cleaned up and were back in their proper places when the men returned.

  Jack’s wife—who was called Susie—got out of bed too quickly and grimaced as the skintight punished her muscles. She caught sight of herself in the mirror over the dressing table: her sharp teeth were bared, and she looked like a wild animal, bound and struggling. She grinned at that, because she could easily free herself.

  She cut the skintight apart with scissors, cutting and ripping carelessly. It didn’t matter that it was ruined—skintights were plentiful. She had a whole boxful, herself, in the hall closet behind the Christmas decorations. And she didn’t have the patience to try soaking it off slowly in a hot bath, as the older wives recommended. So her muscles would be sore and her skintight a tattered rag—she would be free that much sooner.

  She looked down at her dead-white body, feeling distaste. She felt despair at the sight of her small arms, hanging limp, thin and useless in the hollow below her ribs. She tried to flex them but could not make
them move. She began to massage them with her primary fingers, and after several minutes the pain began, and she knew they weren’t dead yet.

  She bathed and massaged her newly uncovered body with oil. She felt terrifyingly free, naked and rather dangerous, with the skintight removed. She sniffed the air again and that familiar scent, musky and alluring, aroused her.

  She ran through the house—noticing, in passing, that Jack’s pet spider was eating the living room sofa. It was the time for building nests and cocoons, she thought happily, time for laying eggs and planting seeds; the spider was driven by the same force that drove her.

  Outside the dusty ground was hard and cold beneath her bare feet. She felt the dust all over her body, raised by the wind and clinging to her momentary warmth. She was coated in the soft yellow dust by the time she reached the house next door—the house where the magical scent came from, the house which held a wife in heat, longing for someone to mate with.

  Susie tossed her head, shaking the dust out in a little cloud around her head. She stared up at the milky sky and around at all the houses, alien artefacts constructed by men. She saw movement in the window of the house across the street and waved—the figure watching her waved back.

  Poor old Maggie, thought Susie. Old, bulging, and ugly; unloved and nobody’s wife. She was only housekeeper to two men who were, rather unfortunately Susie thought, in love with each other.

  But she didn’t want to waste time by thinking of wives and men, or by feeling pity, now. Boldly, like a man, Susie pounded at the door.

  It opened. “Ooooh, Susie!”

  Susie grinned and looked the startled wife up and down. You’d never know from looking at her that the men were gone and she could relax—this wife, called Doris, was as dolled up as some eager-to-please newlywed and looked, Susie thought, more like a real woman than any woman had ever looked.

  Over her skintight (which was bound more tightly than Susie’s had been) Doris wore a low-cut dress, her three breasts carefully bound and positioned to achieve the proper, double-breasted effect. Gaily patterned and textured stockings covered her silicone-injected legs, and she tottered on heels three centimetres high. Her face was carefully painted, and she wore gold bands on neck, wrists, and fingers.

  Then Susie ignored what she looked like because her nose told her so much more. The smell was so powerful now that she could feel her pouch swelling in lonely response.

  Doris must have noticed, for her eyes rolled, seeking some safe view.

  “What’s the matter?” Susie asked, her voice louder and bolder than it ever was when the men were around. “Didn’t your man go off to war with the others? He stay home sick in bed?”

  Doris giggled. “Ooooh, I wish he would, sometimes! No, he was out of here before it was light.”

  Off to see his mistress before leaving, Susie thought. She knew that Doris was nervous about being displaced by one of the other wives her man was always fooling around with—there were always more wives than there were men, and her man had a roving eye.

  “Calm down, Doris. Your man can’t see you now, you know.” She stroked one of Doris’s hands. “Why don’t you take off that silly dress and your skintight. I know how constricted you must be feeling. Why not relax with me?”

  She saw Doris’s face darken with emotion beneath the heavy makeup, and she grasped her hand more tightly when Doris tried to pull away.

  “Please don’t,” Doris said.

  “Come on,” Susie murmured, caressing Doris’s face and feeling the thick paint slide beneath her fingers.

  “No, don’t…please…I’ve tried to control myself, truly I have. But the exercises don’t work, and the perfume doesn’t cover the smell well enough—he won’t even sleep with me when I’m like this. He thinks it’s disgusting, and it is. I’m so afraid he’ll leave me.”

  “But he’s gone now, Doris. You can let yourself go. You don’t have to worry about him when he’s not around! It’s safe, it’s all right, you can do as you please now—we can do anything we like and no one will know.” She could feel Doris trembling.

  “Doris,” she whispered, and rubbed her face demandingly against hers.

  At that, the other wife gave in, and collapsed in her arms.

  Susie helped Doris out of her clothes, tearing at them with hands and teeth, throwing shoes and jewellery high into the air and festooning the yard with rags of dress, stockings, and undergarment.

  But when Doris, too, was naked, Susie suddenly felt shy and a little frightened. It would be wrong to mate here in the settlement built by man, wrong and dangerous. They must go somewhere else, somewhere they could be something other than wives for a little while, and follow their own natures without reproach.

  They went to a place of stone on the far northern edge of the human settlement. It was a very old place, although whether it had been built by the wives in the distant time before they were wives or whether it was natural, neither Susie nor Doris could say. They both felt it was a holy place, and it seemed right to mate there, in the shadow of one of the huge, black standing stones.

  It was a feast, an orgy of life after a season of death. They found pleasure in exploring the bodies which seemed so similar to men but which they knew to be miraculously different, each from the other, in scent, texture, and taste. They forgot that they had ever been creatures known as wives. They lost their names and forgot the language of men as they lay entwined.

  There were no skintights imprisoning their bodies now, barring them from sensation, freedom, and pleasure, and they were partners, not strangers, as they explored and exulted in their flesh. This was no mockery of the sexual act—brutishly painful and brief as it was with the men—but the true act in all its meaning.

  They were still joined at sundown, and it was not until long after the three moons began their nightly waltz through the clouds that the two lovers fell asleep at last.

  “In three months,” Susie said dreamily. “We can—”

  “In three months we won’t do anything.”

  “Why not? If the men are away…”

  “I’m hungry,” said Doris. She wrapped her primary arms around herself. “And I’m cold, and I ache all over. Let’s go back.”

  “Stay here with me, Doris. Let’s plan.”

  “There’s nothing to plan.”

  “But in three months we must get together and fertilize it.”

  “Are you crazy? Who would carry it then? One of us would have to go without a skintight, and do you think either of our husbands would let us slop around for four months without a skintight? And then when it’s born how could we hide it? Men don’t have babies, and they don’t want anyone else to. Men kill babies, just as they kill all their enemies.”

  Susie knew that what Doris was saying was true, but she was reluctant to give up her new dream. “Still, we might be able to keep it hidden,” she said. “It’s not so hard to hide things from a man….”

  “Don’t be so stupid,” Doris said scornfully. Susie noticed that she still had smears of makeup on her face. Some smears had transferred themselves to Susie in the night. They looked like bruises or bloody wounds. “Come back with me now,” Doris said, her voice gentle again. “Forget this, about the baby. The old ways are gone—we’re wives now, and we don’t have a place in our lives for babies.”

  “But someday the war may end,” Susie said. “And the men will all go back to Earth and leave us here.”

  “If that happens,” said Doris, “then we would make new lives for ourselves. Perhaps we would have babies again.”

  “If it’s not too late then,” Susie said. “If it ever happens.” She stared past Doris at the horizon.

  “Come back with me.”

  Susie shook her head. “I have to think. You go. I’ll be all right.”

  She realized when Doris had gone that she, too, was tired, hungry, and sore, but she was not sorry she had remained in the place of stone. She needed to stay awhile longer in one of the old places, away from
the distractions of the settlement. She felt that she was on the verge of remembering something very important.

  A large, dust-coloured lizard crawled out of a hole in the side of a fallen rock, and Susie rolled over and clapped her hands on it. But it wriggled out of her clutches like air or water or the windblown dust and disappeared somewhere. Susie felt a sharp pang of disappointment—she had a sudden memory of how that lizard would have tasted, how the skin of its throat would have felt, tearing between her teeth. She licked her dry lips and sat up. In the old days, she thought, I caught many such lizards. But the old days were gone, and with them the old knowledge and the old abilities.

  I’m not what I used to be, she thought. I’m something else now, a “wife,” created by man in the image of something I have never seen, something called “woman.”

  She thought about going back to her house in the settlement and of wrapping herself in a new skintight and then selecting the proper dress and shoes to make a good impression on the returning Jack; she thought about painting her face and putting rings on her fingers. She thought about boiling and burning good food to turn it into the unappetizing messes Jack favoured, and about killing the wide-eyed “coffee fish” to get the oil to make the mildly addictive drink the men called “coffee.” She thought about watching Jack, and listening to him, always alert for what he might want, what he might ask, what he might do. Trying to anticipate him, to earn his praise and avoid his blows and harsh words. She thought about letting him “screw” her and about the ugly jewellery and noisome perfumes he brought her.

  Susie began to cry, and the dust drank her tears as they fell. She didn’t understand how this had all begun, how or why she had become a wife, but she could bear it no longer.

  She wanted to be what she had been born to be—but she could not remember what that was. She only knew that she could be Susie no longer. She would be no man’s wife.

  —