The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  But the front is not separate. It is inside Schwarzschild, and the symptoms I have been sending out, suppurative bullae and excoriated lesions, are not what is wrong with him at all. The lesions on his skin are only the barbed wire and shell holes and connecting trenches of a front that is somewhere farther in.

  The doctor puts a new dressing of crepe paper on my hand. “I have tried to invalid Schwarzschild out,” the doctor says, and Muller looks at him, astounded. “The supply lines are blocked with snow.”

  “Schwarzschild cannot be invalided out,” I say. “The front is inside him.”

  The doctor puts the roll of crepe paper back in his kit and closes it. “When the roads open again, I will invalid you out for frostbite. And Muller, too.”

  Muller is so surprised, he blurts, “I do not have frostbite.”

  But the doctor is no longer listening. “You must both escape,” he says—and I am not sure he is even listening to himself—“while you can.”

  “I have a theory about why you have not told me what is wrong with Schwarzschild,” Muller says as soon as the doctor is gone.

  “I am going for the mail.”

  “There will not be any mail,” Muller shouts after me. “The supply lines are blocked.” But the mail is there, scattered among the motorcycle parts. There are only a few parts left. As soon as the roads are cleared, the recruit will be able to climb on the motorcycle and ride away.

  I gather up the letters and take them over to the lantern to try to read them, but my eyes are so bad, I cannot see anything but a red blur. “I am taking them back to the wireless hut,” I say, and the recruit nods without looking up.

  It is starting to snow. Muller meets me at the door, but I brush past him and turn the flame of the Primus stove up as high as it will go and hold the letters up behind it.

  “I will read them for you,” Muller says eagerly, looking through the envelopes I have discarded. “Look, here is a letter from your mother. Perhaps she has sent your gloves.”

  I squint at the letters one by one while he tears open my mother’s letter to me. Even though I hold them so close to the flame that the paper scorches, I cannot make out the names.

  “ ‘Dear son,’ ” Muller reads, “ ‘I have not heard from you in three months. Are you hurt? Are you ill? Do you need anything?’ ”

  The last letter is from Professor Zuschauer in Jena. I can see his name quite clearly in the corner of the envelope, though mine is blurred beyond recognition. I tear it open. There is nothing written on the red paper.

  I thrust it at Muller. “Read this,” I say.

  “I have not finished with your mother’s letter yet,” Muller says, but he takes the letter and reads: “ ‘Dear Herr Rottschieben, I received your letter yesterday. I could hardly decipher your writing. Do you not have decent pens at the front? The disease you describe is called Neumann’s disease or pemphigus—’ ”

  I snatch the letter out of Muller’s hands and run out the door. “Let me come with you!” Muller shouts.

  “You must stay and watch the wireless!” I say joyously, running along the communication trench. Schwarzschild does not have the front inside him. He has pemphigus, he has Neumann’s disease, and now he can be invalided home to hospital.

  I go down and think I have tripped over a discarded helmet or a tin of beef, but there is a crash, and dirt and revetting fall all around me. I hear the low buzz of a daisy cutter and flatten myself into the trench, but the buzz does not become a whine. It stops, and there is another crash and the trench caves in.

  I scramble out of the trench before it can suffocate me and crawl along the edge toward Schwarzschild’s dugout, but the trench has caved in all along its length, and when I crawl up and over the loose dirt, I lose it in the swirling snow.

  I cannot tell which way the front lies, but I know it is very close. The sound comes at me from all directions, a deafening roar in which no individual sounds can be distinguished. The snow is so thick, I cannot see the burst of flame from the muzzles as the guns fire, and no part of the horizon looks redder than any other. It is all red, even the snow.

  I crawl in what I think is the direction of the trench, but as soon as I do, I am in barbed wire. I stop, breathing hard, my face and hands pressed into the snow. I have come the wrong way. I am at the front. I hear a sound out of the barrage of sound, the sound of tires on the snow, and I think it is a tank and cannot breathe at all. The sound comes closer, and in spite of myself I look up and it is the recruit who was at the quartermaster’s.

  He is a long way away, behind a coiled line of barbed wire, but I can see him quite clearly in spite of the snow. He has the motorcycle fixed, and as I watch, he flings his leg over it and presses his foot down. “Go!” I shout. “Get out!” The motorcycle jumps forward. “Go!”

  The motorcycle comes toward me, picking up speed. It rears up, and I think it is going to jump the barbed wire, but it falls instead, the motorcycle first and then the recruit, spiralling slowly down into the iron spikes. The ground heaves, and I fall, too.

  I have fallen into Schwarzschild’s dugout. Half of it has caved in, the timber balks sticking out at angles from the heap of dirt and snow, but the blanket is still over the door, and Schwarzschild is propped in a chair. The doctor is bending over him. Schwarzschild has his shirt off. His chest looks like Hans’s did.

  The front roars and more of the roof crumbles. “It’s all right! It’s a disease!” I shout over it. “I have brought you a letter to prove it,” and hand him the letter which I have been clutching in my unfeeling hand.

  The doctor grabs the letter from me. Snow whirls down through the ruined roof, but Schwarzschild does not put on his shirt. He watches uninterestedly as the doctor reads the letter.

  “ ‘The symptoms you describe are almost certainly those of Neumann’s disease, or pemphigus vulgaris. I have treated two patients with the disease, both Jews. It is a disease of the mucous membranes and is not contagious. Its cause is unknown. It always ends in death.’ ” Dr. Funkenheld crumples up the paper. “You came all this way in the middle of a bombardment to tell me there is no hope?” he shouts in a voice I do not even recognize, it is so unlike his steady doctor’s voice. “You should have tried to get away. You should have—” And then he is gone under a crashing of dirt and splintered timbers.

  I struggle toward Schwarzschild through the maelstrom of red dust and snow. “Put your shirt on!” I shout at him. “We must get out of here!” I crawl to the door to see if we can get out through the communication trench.

  Muller bursts through the blanket. He is carrying, impossibly, the wireless. The headphones trail behind him in the snow. “I came to see what had happened to you. I thought you were dead. The communication trenches are shot to pieces.”

  It is as I feared. His curiosity has got the best of him, and now he is trapped, too, though he seems not to know it. He hoists the wireless onto the table without looking at it. His eyes are on Schwarzschild, who leans against the remaining wall of the dugout, his shirt in his hands.

  “Your shirt!” I shout, and come around to help Schwarzschild put it on over the craters and shell holes of his blasted skin. The air screams and the mouth of the dugout blows in. I grab at Schwarzschild’s arm, and the skin of it comes off in my hands. He falls against the table, and the wireless goes over. I can hear the splintering tinkle of the liquid barretter breaking, and then the whole dugout is caving in and we are under the table. I cannot see anything.

  “Muller!” I shout. “Where are you?”

  “I’m hit,” he says.

  I try to find him in the darkness, but I am crushed against Schwarzschild. I cannot move. “Where are you hit?”

  “In the arm,” he says, and I hear him try to move it. The movement dislodges more dirt, and it falls around us, shutting out all sound of the front. I can hear the creak of wood as the table legs give way.

  “Schwarzschild?” I say. He doesn’t answer, but I know he is not dead. His b
ody is as hot as the Primus stove flame. My hand is underneath his body, and I try to shift it, but I cannot. The dirt falls like snow, piling up around us. The darkness is red for a while, and then I cannot see even that.

  “I have a theory,” Muller says in a voice so close and so devoid of curiosity it might be mine. “It is the end of the world.”

  —

  “Was that when Schwarzschild was sent home on sick leave?” Travers said. “Or validated, or whatever you Germans call it? Well, yeah, it had to be, because he died in March. What happened to Muller?”

  I had hoped he would go away as soon as I had told him what had happened to Schwarzschild, but he made no move to get up. “Muller was invalided out with a broken arm. He became a scientist.”

  “The way you did.” He opened his notebook again. “Did you see Schwarzschild after that?”

  The question makes no sense.

  “After you got out? Before he died?”

  It seems to take a long time for his words to get to me. The message bends and curves, shifting into the red, and I can hardly make it out. “No,” I say, though that is a lie.

  Travers scribbles. “I really do appreciate this, Dr. Rottschieben. I’ve always been curious about Schwarzschild, and now that you’ve told me all this stuff, I’m even more interested,” Travers says, or seems to say. Messages coming in are warped by the gravitational blizzard into something that no longer resembles speech. “If you’d be willing to help me, I’d like to write my thesis on him.”

  Go. Get out. “It was a lie,” I say. “I never knew Schwarzschild. I saw him once, from a distance—your fixed observer.”

  Travers looks up expectantly from his notes as if he is still waiting for me to answer him.

  “Schwarzschild was never even in Russia,” I lie. “He spent the whole winter in hospital in Göttingen. I lied to you. It was nothing but a thought problem.”

  He waits, pencil ready.

  “You can’t stay here!” I shout. “You have to get away. There is no safe distance from which a fixed observer can watch without being drawn in, and once you are inside the Schwarzschild radius, you can’t get out. Don’t you understand? We are still there!”

  We are still there, trapped in the trenches of the Russian front, while the dying star burns itself out, spiralling down into that center where time ceases to exist, where everything ceases to exist except the naked singularity that is somehow Schwarzschild.

  Muller tries to dig the wireless out with his crushed arm so he can send a message that nobody can hear—“Help us! Help us!”—and I struggle to free the hands that in spite of Schwarzschild’s warmth are now so cold I cannot feel them, and in the very center Schwarzschild burns himself out, the black hole at his center imploding him cell by cell, carrying him down into darkness, and us with him.

  “It is a trap!” I shout at Travers from the center, and the message struggles to escape and then falls back.

  “I wonder how he figured it out,” Travers says, and now I can hear him clearly. “I mean, can you imagine trying to figure out something like the theory of black holes in the middle of a war and while you were suffering from a fatal disease? And just think, when he came up with the theory, he didn’t have any idea that black holes even existed.”

  All the Hues of Hell

  GENE WOLFE

  Gene Wolfe (1931– ) is an award-winning US writer of science fiction and fantasy who was born in New York City and had polio as a child. He attended Texas A&M University before being drafted to serve in the military during the Korean War. He later graduated from the University of Houston and worked as an industrial engineer—which culminated in his helping create the machine that makes Pringles potato chips. The cartoon face on the side of the Pringles package is purportedly a rendering of Wolfe’s face. Wolfe then turned to fiction, at which he proved to have a unique talent; in addition to the brilliant, complex The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972), Wolfe’s signature creation is The Book of the New Sun, a tetralogy (1980–83). This far-future series has received substantial acclaim and awards consideration, while redefining the antihero within science fiction. Wolfe has won the Nebula Award, the Locus Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the August Derleth Award several times. He also is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame and has received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement.

  Although not a bestselling author, Wolfe is highly regarded by critics and fellow writers, and considered by many to be one of the best living science fiction authors. Indeed, he has sometimes been called the best living American writer regardless of genre. In a sympathetic profile on the New Yorker website (April 24, 2015), Peter Berbegal wrote of Wolfe, “His stories and novels are rich with riddles, mysteries, and sleights of textual hand. His working lexicon is vast, and his plots are unspooled by narrators who deliberately confuse or are confused—or both…His science fiction is neither operatic nor scientifically accurate; his fantasy works are not full of clanging swords and wizardly knowledge.” The critic and author John Clute has written about Wolfe’s fiction, “From the first, and with a prolific output that has not ebbed for more than four decades, he has created texts [that]—almost uniquely—marry modernism and SF, rather than putting them into rhetorical opposition; his ultimate importance to world literature derives from the success of that marriage.” The award-winning science fiction author Michael Swanwick has said, with perhaps some hyperbole: “Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today. Let me repeat that: Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today!” Among others, writers Neil Gaiman and Patrick O’Leary have credited Wolfe for inspiration.

  Wolfe wrote of his views of fiction, “My definition of a great story has nothing to do with ‘a varied and interesting background.’ It is: One that can be read with pleasure by a cultivated reader and reread with increasing pleasure.” “All the Hues of Hell” first appeared in the anthology Universe in 1987. For a Gene Wolfe story, it is fairly straightforward science fiction. Yet it contains hidden depths.

  ALL THE HUES OF HELL

  Gene Wolfe

  Three with egg roll, Kyle thought. Soon four without—if this shadow world really has (oh, sacred!) life. The Egg was still rolling, still spinning to provide mock gravitation.

  Yet the roar of the sharply angled guidance jets now seeped only faintly into the hold, and the roll was slower and slower, the feeling of weight weaker and weaker. The Egg was in orbit…around nothing. Or at least around nothing visible. As its spin decreased, its ports swept the visible universe. Stars that were in fact galaxies flowed down the synthetic quartz like raindrops down a canopy. Once Kyle caught sight of their mother ship; the Shadow Show herself looked dim and ghostly in the faint light. Of the planet they orbited, there was no trace. Polyaris screamed and took off, executing a multicolored barrel roll with outstretched wings through the empty hold; like all macaws, Polyaris doted on microgravity.

  In his earphones Marilyn asked, “Isn’t it pretty, Ky?” But she was admiring her computer simulation, not his ecstatic bird: an emerald forest three hundred meters high, sparkling sapphire lakes—suddenly a vagrant strip of beach golden as her hair, and the indigo southern ocean.

  One hundred and twenty degrees opposed to them both, Skip answered instead, and not as Kyle himself would have.

  “No, it isn’t.” There was a note in Skip’s voice that Kyle had noticed, and worried over, before.

  Marilyn seemed to shrug. “Okay, darling, it’s not really anything to us, less even than ultraviolet. But—”

  “I can see it,” Skip told her.

  Marilyn glanced across the empty hold toward Kyle.

  He tried to keep his voice noncommittal as he whispered to his mike. “You can see it, Skip?”

  Skip did not reply. Polyaris chuckled to herself. Then silence (the utter, deadly quiet of nothingness, of the void where shadow matter ruled and writhed invisible) filled the Egg. For a wild instant, Kyle wondered whether silence it
self might not be a manifestation of shadow matter, a dim insubstance felt only in its mass and gravity, its unseen heaviness. Galaxies drifted lazily over the ports, in a white Egg robbed of Up and Down. Their screens were solid sheets of deepest blue.

  Skip broke the silence. “Just let me show it to you, Kyle. Allow me, Marilyn, to show you what it actually looks like.”

  “Because you really know, Skip?”

  “Yes, because I really know, Kyle. Don’t you remember, either of you, what they said?”

  Kyle was watching Marilyn across the hold; he saw her shake her head. “Not all of it.” Her voice was cautious. “They said so much, darling, after all. They said quite a lot of things.”

  Skip sounded as though he were talking to a child. “What the Life Support people said. The thing, the only significant thing, they did say.”

  Still more carefully, Marilyn asked, “And what was that, darling?”

  “That one of us would die.”

  An island sailed across her screen, an emerald set in gold and laid upon blue velvet.

  Kyle said, “That’s my department, Skip. Life Support told us there was a real chance—perhaps as high as one in twenty—that one of you would die, outbound from Earth or on the trip back. They were being conservative; I would have estimated it as one in one hundred.”

  Marilyn murmured, “I think I’d better inform the Director.”

  Kyle agreed.

  “And they were right,” Skip said. “Kyle, I’m the one. I died on the way out. I passed away, but you two followed me.”

  Ocean and isle vanished from all the screens, replaced by a blinking cursor and the word DIRECTOR.

  Marilyn asked, “Respiration monitor, L. Skinner Jansen.”

  Kyle swiveled to watch his screen. The cursor swept from side to side without any sign of inhalation or exhalation, and for a moment he was taken aback. Then Skip giggled.

  Marilyn’s sigh filled Kyle’s receptors. “The programming wizard. What did you do, Skip? Turn down the gain?”