The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  “That wasn’t necessary. It happens automatically.” Skip giggled again.

  Kyle said slowly, “You’re not dead, Skip. Believe me, I’ve seen many dead men. I’ve cut up their bodies and examined every organ; I know dead men, and you’re not one of them.”

  “Back on the ship, Kyle. My former physical self is lying in the Shadow Show, dead.”

  Marilyn said, “Your physical self is right here, darling, with Ky and me.” And then to the Director, “Sir, is L. Skinner Jansen’s module occupied?”

  The trace vanished, replaced by NEGATIVE: JANSEN 1’S MODULE IS EMPTY.

  “Console,” Skip himself ordered.

  Kyle did not turn to watch Skip’s fingers fly across the keys. After a moment Skip said, “You see, this place—the formal name of our great republic is Hades, by the way—looks the way it does only because of the color gradations you assigned the gravimeter data. I’m about to show you its true colors, as the expression has it.”

  A blaze of 4.5-, 6-, and 7.8-ten-thousandths-millimeter light, Polyaris fluttered away to watch Skip. When he made no attempt to shoo her off, she perched on a red emergency lever and cocked an eye like a bright black button toward his keyboard.

  Kyle turned his attention back to his screen. The letters faded, leaving only the blue southern ocean. As he watched, it darkened to sable. Tiny flames of ocher, citron, and cinnabar darted from the crests of the waves.

  “See what I mean?” Skip asked. “We’ve been sent to bring a demon back to Earth—or maybe just a damned soul. I don’t care. I’m going to stay right here.”

  Kyle looked across the vacant white hold toward Marilyn.

  “I can’t,” she whispered. “I just can’t, Ky. You do it.”

  “All right, Marilyn.” He plugged his index finger into the Exchange socket, so that he sensed rather than saw the letters overlaying the hellish sea on the screens: KAPPA UPSILON LAMBDA 23011 REPORTS JANSEN 1 PSYCHOTIC. CAN YOU CONFIRM, JANSEN 2?

  “Confirmed, Marilyn Jansen.”

  RESTRAINT ADVISED.

  Marilyn said, “I’m afraid restraint’s impossible as long as we’re in the Egg, sir.”

  DO NOT ABORT YOUR MISSION, JANSEN 2. WILL YOU ACCEPT THE RESTRAINT OF JANSEN 1 WHEN RESTRAINT IS PRACTICAL?

  “Accepted whenever practical,” Marilyn said. “Meanwhile, we’ll proceed with the mission.”

  SATISFACTORY, the Director said, and signed off.

  Skip asked, “So you’re going to lock me up, honeybone?”

  “I hope that by the time we get back it won’t be necessary. Ky, haven’t you anything to give him?”

  “No specifics for psychosis, Marilyn. Not here. I’ve got some back on the Shadow Show.”

  Skip ruffled his beard. “Sure. You’re going to lock up a ghost.” Across the wide hold, Kyle could see he was grinning.

  Polyaris picked up the word: “Ghost! Ghost! GHOST!” She flapped to the vacant center of the Egg, posing like a heraldic eagle and watching to make certain they admired her.

  The shoreline of a larger island entered their screens from the right. Its beach was ashes and embers, its forest a forest of flames.

  “If we’re going to make the grab, Marilyn…”

  “You’re right,” she said. Courageously, she straightened her shoulders. The new life within her had already fleshed out her cheeks and swollen her breasts; Kyle felt sure that she had never been quite so lovely before. When she put on her helmet, he breathed her name (though only to himself) before he plugged into the simulation that seemed so much more real than a screen.

  As a score of pink arms, Marilyn’s grav beams dipped into the shadow planet’s atmosphere, growing dark and heavy as they pulled up shadow fluid and gases from a lake on the island and whatever winds might ruffle it. Kyle reflected that those arms should be blue instead of black, and told the onboard assistant director to revert to the hues Marilyn had originally programmed.

  Rej, the assistant director snapped.

  And nothing happened. The gravs grew darker still, and the big accelerator jets grumbled at the effort required to maintain Egg in orbit. When Kyle glanced toward the hold, he discovered it had acquired a twelve-meter yolk as dark as the eggs Chinese bury for centuries. Polyaris was presumably somewhere in that black yolk, unable to see or feel it. He gave a shrill whistle, and she screamed and fluttered out to perch on his shoulder.

  The inky simulation doubled and redoubled, swirling to the turbulence of the fresh shadow matter pumped into the Egg by the gravs. Generators sang the spell that kept the shadow “air” and “water” from boiling away in what was to them a high vacuum.

  The grumbling of the jets rose to an angry roar.

  Skip said, “You’ve brought hell in here with us, honeybone. You, not me. Remember that.”

  Marilyn ignored him, and Kyle told him to keep quiet.

  Abruptly the gravitors winked out. A hundred tons or more of the shadow world’s water (whatever that might be) fell back to the surface, fully actual to any conscious entity that might be there.

  “Rains of frogs and fish, Polyaris,” Kyle muttered to his bird. “Remember Charlie Fort?”

  Polyaris chuckled, nodding.

  Skip said, “Then remember too that when Moses struck the Nile with his staff, the Lord God turned the water to blood.”

  “You’re the one who got into the crayon box, Skip. I’ll call you Moses if you like, but I can hardly call you ‘I Am,’ after you’ve just assured us you’re not.” Kyle was following Marilyn’s hunt for an example of the dominant life form, less than a tenth of his capacity devoted to Polyaris and Skip.

  “You will call me Master!”

  Kyle grinned, remembering the holovamp of an ancient him. “No, Skip. For as long as you’re ill, I am the master. Do you know I’ve been waiting half my life to use that line?”

  Then he saw it, three-quarters of a second, perhaps, after Marilyn had: an upright figure striding down a fiery beach. Its bipedal locomotion was not a complete guarantee of dominance and intelligence, to be sure; ostriches had never ruled a world and never would, no matter how big a pest they became on Mars. But—yes—those powerful forelimbs were surely GP manipulators and not mere weapons. Now, Marilyn! Now!

  As though she had heard him, a pink arm flicked down. For an instant the shadow man floated, struggling wildly to escape, the gravitation of his shadow world countered by their gravitor; then he flashed toward them. Kyle swiveled to watch the black sphere splash (there could be no other word for it) and, under the prodding of the gravs, recoalesce. They were four.

  In a moment more, their shadow man bobbed to the surface of the dark and still trembling yolk. To him, Kyle reflected, they were not there, the Egg was not there. To him it must have seemed that he floated upon a watery sphere suspended in space.

  And possibly that was more real than the computer-enhanced vision he himself inhabited, a mere cartoon created from one of the weakest forces known to physics. He unplugged, and at once the Egg’s hold was white and empty again.

  Marilyn took off her helmet. “All right, Ky, from here on it’s up to you—unless you want something more from the surface?”

  Kyle congratulated her and shook his head.

  “Darling, are you feeling any better?”

  Skip said levelly, “I’m okay now. I think that damned machine must have drugged me.”

  “Ky? That seems pretty unlikely.”

  “We should de-energize or destroy him, if we can’t revise his programming.”

  Marilyn shook her head. “I doubt that we could reprogram him. Ky, what do you think?”

  “A lot of it’s hardwired, Marilyn, and can’t be altered without new boards. I imagine Skip could revise my software if he put his mind to it, though it might take him quite a while. He’s very good at that sort of thing.”

  Skip said, “And you’re a very dangerous device, Kyle.”

  Shaking his head, Kyle broke out the pencil-thin cable he had used so often in trainin
g exercises. One end jacked into the console, the other into a small socket just above his hips. When both connections were made, he was again in the cybernetic cartoon where true matter and shadow matter looked equally real.

  It was still a cartoon with colors by Skip: Marilyn’s skin shone snow-white, her lips were burning scarlet, her hair like burnished brass, and her eyes blue fire; Skip himself had become a black-bearded satyr, with a terra-cotta complexion and cruel crimson lips. Kyle tightened both ferrules firmly, tested his jets, released his safety harness, and launched himself toward the center of the Egg, making Polyaris crow with delight.

  The shadow man drifted into view as they neared the black yolk. He was lying upon what Kyle decided must be his back; on the whole he was oddly anthropomorphic, with recognizable head, neck, and shoulders. Binocular organs of vision seemed to have vanished behind small folds of skin, and Kyle would have called his respiration rapid in a human.

  Marilyn asked, “How does he look, Ky?”

  “Like hell,” Kyle muttered. “I’m afraid he may be in shock. At least, shock’s what I’d say if he were one of you. As it is, I…” He let the sentence trail away.

  There were strange, blunt projections just above the organs that appeared to be the shadow man’s ears. Absently, Kyle tried to palpate them; his hand met nothing, and vanished as it passed into the shadow man’s cranium.

  The shadow man opened his eyes.

  Kyle jerked backward, succeeding only in throwing himself into a slow spin that twisted his cable.

  Marilyn called, “What’s the matter, Ky?”

  “Nothing,” Kyle told her. “I’m jumpy, that’s all.”

  The shadow man’s eyes were closed again. His arms, longer than a human’s and more muscled than a bodybuilder’s, twitched and were still. Kyle began the minute examination required by the plan.

  When it was complete, Skip asked, “How’d it go, Kyle?”

  He shrugged. “I couldn’t see his back. The way you’ve got the shadow water keyed, it’s like ink.”

  Marilyn said, “Why don’t you change it, Skip? Make it blue but translucent, the way it’s supposed to be.”

  Skip sounded apologetic. “I’ve been trying to; I’ve been trying to change everything back. I can’t, or anyway not yet. I don’t remember just what I did, but I put some kind of block on it.”

  Kyle shrugged again. “Keep trying, Skip, please.”

  “Yes, please try, darling. Now buckle up, everybody. Time to rendezvous.”

  Kyle disconnected his cable and pulled his harness around him. After a moment’s indecision, he plugged into the console as well.

  If he had been unable to see it, it would have been easy to believe that Egg’s acceleration had no effect on the fifty-meter sphere of dark matter at its center; yet that too was mass, and the gravs whimpered like children at the strain of changing its speed and direction, their high wail audible—to Kyle at least—above the roaring of the jets. The black sphere stretched into a sooty tear. Acceleration was agony for Polyaris as well; Kyle cupped her fragile body in his free hand to ease her misery as much as he could.

  Somewhere so far above the Egg that the gravity well of the shadow planet had almost ceased to make any difference and words like above held little meaning, the Shadow Show was unfolding to receive them, preparing itself to embed the newly fertilized Egg in an inner wall. For a moment Kyle’s thoughts soared, drunk on the beauty of the image.

  Abruptly the big jets fell silent. The Egg had achieved escape velocity.

  Marilyn returned control of Egg to the assistant director. “That’s it, folks, until we start guiding in. Unbuckle if you want.”

  Kyle tossed Polyaris toward the yolk and watched her make a happy circuit of the Egg’s interior.

  Skip said, “Marilyn, I seem to have a little problem here.”

  “What is it?”

  Kyle took off his harness and retracted it. He unplugged, and the yolk and its shadow man were gone. Only the chortling Polyaris remained.

  “I can’t get this goddamned thing off,” Skip complained. “The buckle’s jammed or something.”

  Marilyn took off her own acceleration harness and sailed across to look at it. Kyle joined them.

  “Here, let me try it,” Marilyn said. Her slender fingers, less nimble but more deft than Skip’s, pressed the release and jiggled the locking tab; it would not pull free.

  Kyle murmured, “I’m afraid you can’t release Skip, Marilyn. Neither can I.”

  She turned to look at him.

  “You accepted restraint for Skip, Marilyn. I want to say that in my opinion you were correct to do so.”

  She began, “You mean—”

  “The Director isn’t satisfied yet that Skip has recovered, that’s all. Real recoveries aren’t usually so quick or so—” Kyle paused, searching his dictionary file for the best word. “Convenient. This may be no more than a lucid interval. That happens, quite often. It may be no more than a stratagem.”

  Skip cursed and tore at the straps.

  “Do you mean you can lock us…?”

  “No,” Kyle said. “I can’t. But the Director can, if in his judgment it is indicated.”

  He waited for Marilyn to speak, but she did not.

  “You see, Marilyn, Skip, we tried very hard to prepare for every foreseeable eventuality, and mental illness was certainly one of those. About ten percent of the human population suffers from it at some point in their lives, and so with both of you on board and under a great deal of stress, that sort of problem was certainly something we had to be ready for.”

  Marilyn looked pale and drained. Kyle added, as gently as he could, “I hope this hasn’t been too much of a shock to you.”

  Skip had opened the cutting blade of his utility knife and was hacking futilely at his straps. Kyle took it from him, closed it, and dropped it into one of his own storage areas.

  Marilyn pushed off. He watched her as she flew gracefully across the hold, caught the pilot’s-chair grab bar, and buckled herself into the seat; her eyes were shining with tears. As if sensing her distress, Polyaris perched on the bar and rubbed her ear with the side of her feathered head.

  Skip muttered, “Go look at your demon, Kyle. Go anyplace but here.”

  Kyle asked, “Do you still think it’s a demon, Skip?”

  “You’ve seen it a lot closer up than I have. What do you think?”

  “I don’t believe in demons, Skip.”

  Skip looked calm now, but his fingers picked mechanically at his straps. “What do you believe in, Kyle? Do you believe in God? Do you worship man?”

  “I believe in life. Life is my God, Skip, if you want to put it like that.”

  “Any life? What about the mosquito?”

  “Yes, any life. The mosquito won’t bite me.” Kyle smiled his metal smile.

  “Mosquitoes spread disease.”

  “Sometimes,” Kyle admitted. “Then they must be destroyed, the lower life sacrificed to the higher. Skip, your Marilyn is especially sacred to me now. Do you understand that?”

  “Marilyn’s doomed.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because of the demon, of course. I tried to tell her that she had doomed herself, but it was actually you that doomed her. You were the one who wanted him. You had to have him, you and the Director; and if it hadn’t been for you, we could have gone home with a hold full of dark matter and some excuse.”

  “But you aren’t doomed, Skip? Only Marilyn?”

  “I’m dead and damned, Kyle. My doom has caught up with me. I’ve hit bottom. You know that expression?”

  Kyle nodded.

  “People talk about hitting bottom and bouncing back up. If you can bounce, that isn’t the bottom. When somebody gets where I am, there’s no bouncing back, not ever.”

  “If you’re really dead, Skip, how can the straps hold you? I wouldn’t think that an acceleration harness could hold a lost soul, or even a ghost.”

  “They’re
not holding me,” Skip told him. “It was just that at the last moment I didn’t have guts enough to let Marilyn see I was really gone. I’d loved her. I don’t anymore—you can’t love anything or anyone except yourself where I am. But—”

  “Can you get out of your seat, Skip? Is that what you’re saying, that you can get out without unfastening the buckle?”

  Skip nodded slowly, his dark eyes (inscrutable eyes, Kyle thought) never leaving Kyle’s face. “And I can see your demon, Kyle. I know you can’t see him because you’re not hooked up. But I can.”

  “You can see him now, Skip?”

  “Not now—he’s on the far side of the black ball. But I’ll be able to see him when he floats around to this side again.”

  Kyle returned to his seat and connected the cable as he had before. The black yolk sprang into being again; the shadow man was facing him—in fact glaring at him with burning yellow eyes. He asked the Director to release Skip.

  Together they drifted toward the center of the Egg. Kyle made sure their trajectory carried them to the side of the yolk away from the shadow man, and when the shadow man was no longer in view, he held Skip’s arm and stopped them both with a tug at the cable. “Now that I know you can see him too, Skip, I’d like you to point him out to me.”

  Skip glanced toward the watery miniature planet over which they hovered like flies—or perhaps merely toward the center of the hold. “Is this a joke? I’ve told you, I can see him.” A joyous blue and yellow comet, Polyaris erupted from the midnight surface, braking on napping wings to examine them sidelong.

  “That’s why I need your input, Skip,” Kyle said carefully. “I’m not certain the feed I’m getting is accurate. If you can apprehend shadow matter directly, I can use your information to check the simulation. Can you still see the demon? Indicate his position, please.”

  Skip hesitated. “He’s not here, Kyle. He must be on the other side. Shall we go around and have a look?”

  “The water’s still swirling quite a bit. It should bring him to us before long.”

  Skip shrugged. “Okay, Kyle, you’re the boss. I guess you always were.”

  “The Director’s our captain, Skip. That’s why we call him what we do. Can you see the demon yet?” A hand and part of one arm had floated into view around the curve of the yolk.