The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  The chamber was empty. Afriel had never seen it empty before, and it was very unusual for the Swarm to waste so much space. He felt dread. “Follow the food-giver,” he said. “Follow the smell.”

  The springtails snuffled without much enthusiasm along one wall; they knew he had no food and were reluctant to do anything without an immediate reward. At last one of them picked up the scent, or pretended to, and followed it up across the ceiling and into the mouth of a tunnel.

  It was hard for Afriel to see much in the abandoned chamber; there was not enough infrared heat. He leapt upward after the springtail.

  He heard the roar of a warrior and the springtail’s choked-off screech. It came flying from the tunnel’s mouth, a spray of clotted fluid bursting from its ruptured head. It tumbled end over end until it hit the far wall with a flaccid crunch. It was already dead.

  The second springtail fled at once, screeching with grief and terror. Afriel landed on the lip of the tunnel, sinking into a crouch as his legs soaked up momentum. He could smell the acrid stench of the warrior’s anger, a pheromone so thick that even a human could scent it. Dozens of other warriors would group here within minutes, or seconds. Behind the enraged warrior he could hear workers and tunnelers shifting and cementing rock.

  He might be able to control one enraged warrior, but never two, or twenty. He launched himself from the chamber wall and out an exit.

  He searched for the other springtail—he felt sure he could recognize it, since it was so much bigger than the others—but he could not find it. With its keen sense of smell, it could easily avoid him if it wanted to.

  Mirny did not return. Uncountable hours passed. He slept again. He returned to the alates’ chamber; there were warriors on guard there, warriors that were not interested in food and brandished their immense serrated fangs when he approached. They looked ready to rip him apart; the faint reek of aggressive pheromones hung about the place like a fog. He did not see any symbiotes of any kind on the warriors’ bodies. There was one species, a thing like a huge tick, that clung only to warriors, but even the ticks were gone.

  He returned to his chambers to wait and think. Mirny’s body was not in the garbage pits. Of course, it was possible that something else might have eaten her. Should he extract the remaining pheromone from the spaces in his vein and try to break into the alates’ chamber? He suspected that Mirny, or whatever was left of her, was somewhere in the tunnel where the springtail had been killed. He had never explored that tunnel himself. There were thousands of tunnels he had never explored.

  He felt paralyzed by indecision and fear. If he was quiet, if he did nothing, the Investors might arrive at any moment. He could tell the Ring Council anything he wanted about Mirny’s death; if he had the genetics with him, no one would quibble. He did not love her; he respected her, but not enough to give up his life, or his faction’s investment. He had not thought of the Ring Council in a long time, and the thought sobered him. He would have to explain his decision….

  He was still in a brown study when he heard a whoosh of air as his living air lock deflated itself. Three warriors had come for him. There was no reek of anger about them. They moved slowly and carefully. He knew better than to try to resist. One of them seized him gently in its massive jaws and carried him off.

  It took him to the alates’ chamber and into the guarded tunnel. A new, large chamber had been excavated at the end of the tunnel. It was filled almost to bursting by a black-splattered white mass of flesh. In the center of the soft speckled mass were a mouth and two damp, shining eyes, on stalks. Long tendrils like conduits dangled, writhing, from a clumped ridge above the eyes. The tendrils ended in pink, fleshy pluglike clumps.

  One of the tendrils had been thrust through Mirny’s skull. Her body hung in midair, limp as wax. Her eyes were open, but blind.

  Another tendril was plugged into the braincase of a mutated worker. The worker still had the pallid tinge of a larva; it was shrunken and deformed, and its mouth had the wrinkled look of a human mouth. There was a blob like a tongue in the mouth, and white ridges like human teeth. It had no eyes.

  It spoke with Mirny’s voice. “Captain-Doctor Afriel…”

  “Galina…”

  “I have no such name. You may address me as Swarm.”

  Afriel vomited. The central mass was an immense head. Its brain almost filled the room.

  It waited politely until Afriel had finished.

  “I find myself awakened again,” Swarm said dreamily. “I am pleased to see that there is no major emergency to concern me. Instead it is a threat that has become almost routine.” It hesitated delicately. Mirny’s body moved slightly in midair; her breathing was inhumanly regular. The eyes opened and closed. “Another young race.”

  “What are you?”

  “I am the Swarm. That is, I am one of its castes. I am a tool, an adaptation; my specialty is intelligence. I am not often needed. It is good to be needed again.”

  “Have you been here all along? Why didn’t you greet us? We’d have dealt with you. We meant no harm.”

  The wet mouth on the end of the plug made laughing sounds. “Like yourself, I enjoy irony,” it said. “It is a pretty trap you have found yourself in, Captain-Doctor. You meant to make the Swarm work for you and your race. You meant to breed us and study us and use us. It is an excellent plan, but one we hit upon long before your race evolved.”

  Stung by panic, Afriel’s mind raced frantically. “You’re an intelligent being,” he said. “There’s no reason to do us any harm. Let us talk together. We can help you.”

  “Yes,” Swarm agreed. “You will be helpful. Your companion’s memories tell me that this is one of those uncomfortable periods when galactic intelligence is rife. Intelligence is a great bother. It makes all kinds of trouble for us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You are a young race and lay great stock by your own cleverness,” Swarm said. “As usual, you fail to see that intelligence is not a survival trait.”

  Afriel wiped sweat from his face. “We’ve done well,” he said. “We came to you, and peacefully. You didn’t come to us.”

  “I refer to exactly that,” Swarm said urbanely. “This urge to expand, to explore, to develop, is just what will make you extinct. You naively suppose that you can continue to feed your curiosity indefinitely. It is an old story, pursued by countless races before you. Within a thousand years—perhaps a little longer—your species will vanish.”

  “You intend to destroy us, then? I warn you it will not be an easy task—”

  “Again you miss the point. Knowledge is power! Do you suppose that fragile little form of yours—your primitive legs, your ludicrous arms and hands, your tiny, scarcely wrinkled brain—can contain all that power? Certainly not! Already your race is flying to pieces under the impact of your own expertise. The original human form is becoming obsolete. Your own genes have been altered, and you, Captain-Doctor, are a crude experiment. In a hundred years you will be a relic. In a thousand years you will not even be a memory. Your race will go the same way as a thousand others.”

  “And what way is that?”

  “I do not know.” The thing on the end of the Swarm’s arm made a chuckling sound. “They have passed beyond my ken. They have all discovered something, learned something, that has caused them to transcend my understanding. It may be that they even transcend being. At any rate, I cannot sense their presence anywhere. They seem to do nothing, they seem to interfere in nothing; for all intents and purposes, they seem to be dead. Vanished. They may have become gods, or ghosts. In either case, I have no wish to join them.”

  “So then—so then you have—”

  “Intelligence is very much a two-edged sword, Captain-Doctor. It is useful only up to a point. It interferes with the business of living. Life and intelligence do not mix very well. They are not at all closely related, as you childishly assume.”

  “But you, then—you are a rational being—”

  “I a
m a tool, as I said.” The mutated device on the end of its arm made a sighing noise. “When you began your pheromonal experiments, the chemical imbalance became apparent to the queen. It triggered certain genetic patterns within her body, and I was reborn. Chemical sabotage is a problem that can best be dealt with by intelligence. I am a brain replete, you see, specially designed to be far more intelligent than any young race. Within three days I was fully self-conscious. Within five days I had deciphered these markings on my body. They are the genetically encoded history of my race…within five days and two hours I recognized the problem at hand and knew what to do. I am now doing it. I am six days old.”

  “What is it you intend to do?”

  “Your race is a very vigorous one. I expect it to be here, competing with us, within five hundred years. Perhaps much sooner. It will be necessary to make a thorough study of such a rival. I invite you to join our community on a permanent basis.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I invite you to become a symbiote. I have here a male and a female, whose genes are altered and therefore without defects. You make a perfect breeding pair. It will save me a great deal of trouble with cloning.”

  “You think I’ll betray my race and deliver a slave species into your hands?”

  “Your choice is simple, Captain-Doctor. Remain an intelligent, living being, or become a mindless puppet, like your partner. I have taken over all the functions of her nervous system; I can do the same to you.”

  “I can kill myself.”

  “That might be troublesome, because it would make me resort to developing a cloning technology. Technology, though I am capable of it, is painful to me. I am a genetic artifact; there are fail-safes within me that prevent me from taking over the Nest for my own uses. That would mean falling into the same trap of progress as other intelligent races. For similar reasons, my life span is limited. I will live for only a thousand years, until your race’s brief flurry of energy is over and peace resumes once more.”

  “Only a thousand years?” Afriel laughed bitterly. “What then? You kill off my descendants, I assume, having no further use for them.”

  “No. We have not killed any of the fifteen other races we have taken for defensive study. It has not been necessary. Consider that small scavenger floating by your head, Captain-Doctor, that is feeding on your vomit. Five hundred million years ago its ancestors made the galaxy tremble. When they attacked us, we unleashed their own kind upon them. Of course, we altered our side, so that they were smarter, tougher, and, naturally, totally loyal to us. Our Nests were the only world they knew, and they fought with a valor and inventiveness we never could have matched….Should your race arrive to exploit us, we will naturally do the same.”

  “We humans are different.”

  “Of course.”

  “A thousand years here won’t change us. You will die and our descendants will take over this Nest. We’ll be running things, despite you, in a few generations. The darkness won’t make any difference.”

  “Certainly not. You don’t need eyes here. You don’t need anything.”

  “You’ll allow me to stay alive? To teach them anything I want?”

  “Certainly, Captain-Doctor. We are doing you a favor, in all truth. In a thousand years your descendants here will be the only remnants of the human race. We are generous with our immortality; we will take it upon ourselves to preserve you.”

  “You’re wrong, Swarm. You’re wrong about intelligence, and you’re wrong about everything else. Maybe other races would crumble into parasitism, but we humans are different.”

  “Certainly. You’ll do it, then?”

  “Yes. I accept your challenge. And I will defeat you.”

  “Splendid. When the Investors return here, the springtails will say that they have killed you, and will tell them to never return. They will not return. The humans should be the next to arrive.”

  “If I don’t defeat you, they will.”

  “Perhaps.” Again it sighed. “I’m glad I don’t have to absorb you. I would have missed your conversation.”

  Mondocane

  JACQUES BARBÉRI

  Translated by Brian Evenson

  Jacques Barbéri (1954– ) is a French writer of science fiction and fantasy. He was initially inspired to write science fiction by the film 2001: A Space Odyssey and Philip K. Dick’s novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch in the early 1970s. While working on a doctorate in dental surgery and dentistry, he continued to write, leading up to his first collection of short fiction, Kosmokrim (1985), which revealed his obsessions with time, memory, myth, metamorphoses of flesh, and perceptions of reality. He is also a screenplay writer, a translator from Italian, and a musician (in the group Palo Alto).

  With Antoine Volodine, Francis Berthelot, Emmanuel Jouanne, and a few other writers, he formed Limite, a group that worked to experiment and push back against the conventions imposed by the history of the genre. Their first collective work, Despite the World, profoundly changed the French science fiction of the eighties.

  Barbéri has published a dozen novels (none yet in English), including Narcose (Narcosis, 1989), his most popular title, and one hundred short stories. In addition to a new edition of the Narcosis trilogy (Narcosis, La Mémoire du crime [The Memory of the Crime, 2009], Le Tueur venu du Centaure [The Killer from Centaur, 2010]), he recently has published in French (through La Volte editions) two collections of short stories, L’Homme qui parlait aux araignées (The Man Who Speaks to Spiders, 2008) and Le Landeau du rat (The Rat’s Cradle, 2011), as well as two novels, Les Crépuscule des chimères (The Twilight of Chimeras, 2013) and Cosmos Factory (2014).

  “Mondocane” (1983), appearing here for the first time in English, is a stunning example of surreal science fiction, carrying forward the legacy of Paul Scheerbart and Alfred Jarry in a much more visceral way.

  MONDOCANE

  Jacques Barbéri

  Translated by Brian Evenson

  The end of the war gave birth to bottle-men and hives of homunculi. The war had left behind her a bleeding and swollen Earth. The wounds filled at the end of years with water and sand, transforming cities into deserts and continents into islets.

  —

  What had really happened, nobody knew. A slippage of forces, an uncontrollable hatred…

  Humans again found themselves attracted to the greatly ill, the cancerous, the leprous, the diabetic. They were tugged by a mysterious force, dragged liked dogs along the dusty streets. Aspirated. And they rushed, dislocated, into the hallways of clinics, of hospitals, to finish their trajectories in operating rooms, glued to the bodies of the dying. Gigantic pyramids formed, making the walls of these edifices, the porous buildings, burst.

  In this way, new mountains invaded the changing geography of the globe. The most farsighted quickly hid themselves away in the depths of nuclear bunkers. Once all the hatches were closed, the last fanatics of protection were locked up in old blockhouses or, if need be, behind the meters of concrete of shut-down nuclear factories.

  For the captives of the surface, one of the most corrosive neuroses was then that of wearing a gas mask. An obsessive fear of radiation convinced a number of people that they should no longer remove their masks. And, through the glass of the goggles, it is now possible to observe a certain putrefaction of the flesh. The skin is attired in mould and the condensation which forms on the glass is perhaps due to not just the principal occupant.

  —

  A process of expansion/compression, most likely owing to the theories of Anton Ravon on the localization of a point of perceptual modulation at the level of the central sulcus of the cerebrum, was manifested a short while later. Gigantic metropolises like New York or Paris found themselves transformed into trinkets, like those little miniatures frozen within glass, under a tempest of snow. Thousands of inhabitants died like this, crushed by dogs or by jackasses. Certain buildings, on the contrary, expanded immensely, forcing their occupants to walk for several months befo
re reaching the exit door, fed by the crumbs stuck in the warp of the floor covering. Freighters came to run aground on the immaculate tiling of operating rooms. Entire trains, be they locomotive or wagon, finished their route at the bottom of the toilet bowls of water closets.

  —

  To flee the rising waters, men and animals saw themselves forced to scale the mountains of bodies and, in the rarefied atmosphere of the heights, they fell asleep, exhausted, their slumber lulled by the backwash of the waves breaking against the skulls, the legs, the amalgamated torsos, the nightmares carved by the groaning of the still living bodies lost in the heap.

  Some, during the climb, coupled savagely with a man or a woman whose sex was accessible, hugging the mountainside. The orgasm seemed to spread through the entire mountain; and the violator found himself soldered to the ensemble, after having experienced, for the space of an instance, extreme pleasure.

  —

  To try to flee this uncertain ground once and for all, the most inventive created strange machines. Giant catapults launched masses of dismantled men and women, floating in fat canvas suits, beyond the stratosphere. Implantations of subcutaneous micro-reactors propelled “cannon-men” toward the stars. The most adventurous were crushed, after a harmonious curve, behind the wheel of homemade rockets, pedal- or powder-driven. Others tried all sorts of telekinetic drugs, stolen from deserted space centers, or else synthesized based on formulas of doubtful authenticity.

  —

  And for some, the journey still continues. It will last until cellular putrefaction, the osseous erosion of their frame, frozen, in an S or an L, in their delicate salon easy chairs, as if they were watching an anodyne television broadcast or listening on their radio to a classical piece requiring deep contemplation. Insufficient or damaged doses; and in their listless heads, stars march along the fuselage of spacecraft, meteorites collide with the metal; ghost captains of a memory-vessel, they try desperately to reach a welcoming planet, braving meteor showers and the impish mutinies of the crew.