The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  And she understood—perhaps she had always known—struck mute and her skin going cold, and finally, after everything, she found herself starting to weep.

  —

  Perri was already home, by chance.

  “I was worried about you,” he confessed, sitting in the garden room with honest relief on his face. “The apartment said you were going to be gone for a year or more. I was scared for you.”

  “Well,” she said, “I’m back.”

  Her husband tried not to appear suspicious, and he worked hard not to ask certain questions. She could see him holding the questions inside himself. She watched him decide to try the old charm, smiling now and saying, “So you went exploring?”

  “Not really.”

  “Where?”

  “Cloud Canyon,” she lied. She had practiced the lie all the way from Port Beta, yet it sounded false now. She was halfway startled when her husband said:

  “Did you go into it?”

  “Partway, then I decided not to risk it. I rented a boat, but I couldn’t make myself step on board.”

  Perri grinned happily, unable to hide his relief. A deep breath was exhaled, then he said, “By the way, I’ve raised almost eight thousand credits already. I’ve already put them in your account.”

  “Fine.”

  “I’ll find the rest too.”

  “It can wait,” she offered.

  Relief blended into confusion. “Are you all right, darling?”

  “I’m tired,” she allowed.

  “You look tired.”

  “Let’s go to bed, shall we?”

  Perri was compliant, making love to her and falling into a deep sleep, as exhausted as Quee Lee. But she insisted on staying awake, sliding into her private bathroom, and giving her autodoc a drop of Perri’s seed. “I want to know if there’s anything odd,” she told it.

  “Yes, miss.”

  “And scan him, will you? Without waking him.”

  The machine set to work. Almost instantly, Quee Lee was being shown lists of abnormal genes and vestigial organs. She didn’t bother to read them. She closed her eyes, remembering what little Orleans had told her after he had admitted that she wasn’t anything more than an incidental bystander. “Perri was born Remora, and he left us. A long time ago, by our count, and that’s a huge taboo.”

  “Leaving the fold?” she had said.

  “Every so often, one of us visits his home while he’s gone. We slip a little dust into our joints, making them grind, and we do a pity-play to whomever we find.”

  Her husband had lied to her from the first, about everything.

  “Sometimes we’ll trick her into giving even more money,” he had boasted. “Just like we’ve done with you.”

  And she had asked, “Why?”

  “Why do you think?” he had responded.

  Vengeance, of a sort. Of course.

  “Eventually,” Orleans had declared, “everyone’s going to know about Perri. He’ll run out of hiding places, and money, and he’ll have to come back to us. We just don’t want it to happen too soon, you know? It’s too much fun as it is.”

  Now she opened her eyes, gazing at the lists of abnormalities. It had to be work for him to appear human, to cope with those weird Remora genetics. He wasn’t merely someone who had lived on the hull for a few years, no. He was a full-blooded Remora who had done the unthinkable, removing his suit and living below, safe from the mortal dangers of the universe. Quee Lee was the latest of his ignorant lovers, and she knew precisely why he had selected her. More than money, she had offered him a useful naïveté and a sheltered ignorance…and wasn’t she well within her rights to confront him, confront him and demand that he leave at once…?

  “Erase the lists,” she said.

  “Yes, miss.”

  She told her apartment, “Project the view from the prow, if you will. Put it on my bedroom ceiling, please.”

  “Of course, miss,” it replied.

  She stepped out of the bathroom, lasers and exploding comets overhead. She fully expected to do what Orleans anticipated, putting her mistakes behind her. She sat on the edge of her bed, on Perri’s side, waiting for him to wake on his own. He would feel her gaze and open his eyes, seeing her framed by a Remoran sky…

  …and she hesitated, taking a breath and holding it, glancing upwards, remembering that moment on the crater’s lip when she had felt a union with her body. A perfection; an intoxicating sense of self. It was induced by drugs and ignorance, yet still it had seemed true. It was a perception worth any cost, she realized; and she imagined Perri’s future, hounded by the Remoras, losing every human friend, left with no choice but the hull and his left-behind life….

  She looked at him, the peaceful face stirring.

  Compassion. Pity. Not love, but there was something not far from love making her feel for the fallen Remora.

  “What if…?” she whispered, beginning to smile.

  And Perri smiled in turn, eyes closed and him enjoying some lazy dream that in an instant he would surely forget.

  The Ghost Standard

  WILLIAM TENN

  William Tenn (pseudonym of Philip Klass, 1920–2010) was a British-American writer of science fiction whose famous story “The Liberation of Earth” appears earlier in this volume. Although Tenn’s output dropped after the early 1960s, he was still active and writing into the 1990s—and still writing fiction relevant to the times.

  “The Ghost Standard,” published in Playboy in 1994, shows Tenn in a more playful mode than the biting “The Liberation of Earth,” with a rather amazing tale of alien contact. As Tenn wrote in his afterword to the story in Immodest Proposals, the first volume of his collected fiction, “An attempted definition of ‘humanness’ is what precipitated the story. If you believe, as I do, that we will shortly…be encountering alien intelligent life-forms and having to learn to live with them on various moral levels…you must be thinking also of the necessary distinctions in many areas that we and they will have to make.”

  The “essential plot gimmick,” as Tenn put it, “is the variations the characters play on ‘dirigible,’ and ‘limousine,’ and the results thereof. It is based on an actual game of Ghost in which [the author] Daniel Keyes and my brother Mort were participants and used these variations against each other. I won’t tell who did which.”

  “Ghost Standard” is a comic masterpiece, showcasing the ways in which science fiction and humor can be a perfect match.

  THE GHOST STANDARD

  William Tenn

  Remember the adage of the old English legal system: “Let justice be done though the heavens fall”? Well, was justice done in this case?

  You have three entities here. An intelligent primate from Sol III—to put it technically, a human. An equally intelligent crustacean from Procyon VII—in other words, a sapient lobstermorph. And a computer of the Malcolm Movis omicron beta design, intelligent enough to plot a course from one stellar system to another and capable of matching most biological minds in games of every sort, from bridge to chess to double zonyak.

  Now—add a shipwreck. A leaky old Cascassian freighter comes apart in deep space. I mean quite literally comes apart. Half the engine segment explodes off, the hull develops leaks and begins to collapse, all those who are still alive and manage to make it to lifeboats get away just before the end.

  In one such lifeboat you have the human, Juan Kydd, and the lobstermorph, Tuezuzim. And, of course, the Malcolm Movis computer—the resident pilot, navigator, and general factotum of the craft.

  Kydd and Tuezuzim had known each other for more than two years. Computer programmers of roughly the same level of skill, they had met on the job and had been laid off together. Together they had decided to save money by traveling on the scabrous Cascassian freighter to Sector N-42B5, where there were rumored to be many job opportunities available.

  They were in the dining salon, competing in a tough hand of double zonyak, when the disaster occurred. They helped each othe
r scramble into the lifeboat. Activating the computer pilot, they put it into Far Communication Mode to search for rescuers. It informed them that rescue was possible no sooner than twenty days hence, and was quite likely before thirty.

  Any problems? The lifeboat had air, fuel, more than enough water. But food…

  It was a Cascassian freighter, remember. The Cascassians, of course, are a silicon-based life-form. For their passengers, the Cascassians had laid in a supply of organic, or carbon-based, food in the galley. But they had not even thought of restocking the lifeboats. So the two non-Cascassians were now imprisoned for some three to four weeks with nothing to eat but the equivalent of sand and gravel.

  Or each other, as they realized immediately and simultaneously.

  Humans, on their home planet, consider tinier, less sapient crustaceans such as lobsters and crawfish great delicacies. And back on Procyon VII, as Tuezuzim put it, “We consider it a sign of warm hospitality to be served a small, succulent primate known as spotted morror.”

  In other words, each of these programmers could eat the other. And survive. There were cooking and refrigerating facilities aboard the lifeboat. With careful management and rationing, meals derived from a full-size computer programmer would last until rescue.

  But who was to eat whom? And how was a decision to be reached?

  By fighting? Hardly. These were two highly intellectual types, neither of them good exemplars of their species.

  Kydd was round shouldered, badly nearsighted, and slightly anemic. Tuezuzim was somewhat undersized, half deaf, and suffering from one crippled chela. The claw had been twisted at birth and had never matured normally. With these disabilities, both had avoided participation in athletic sports all their lives, especially any sport of a belligerent nature.

  Yet the realization that there was nothing else available to eat had already made both voyagers very hungry. What was their almost-friendship compared with the grisly prospect of starvation?

  For the record, it was the lobstermorph, Tuezuzim, who suggested a trial by game, with the computer acting as referee and also as executioner of the loser. Again, only for the record and of no importance otherwise, it was the human, Juan Kydd, who suggested that the logical game to decide the issue should be Ghost.

  They both liked Ghost and played it whenever they could not play their favorite game—that is, when they lacked zonyak tiles. In the scrambling haste of their emergency exit, they had left both web and tiles in the dining salon. A word game now seemed the sole choice remaining, short of flipping a coin, which—as games-minded programmers—they shrugged off as childishly simplistic. There also was the alternative of trial by physical combat, but that was something that neither found at all attractive.

  Since the computer would function as umpire and dispute-settling dictionary as well as executioner, why not make it a three-cornered contest and include the computer as a participant? This would make the game more interesting by adding an unpredictable factor, like a card shuffle. The computer could not lose, of course—they agreed to ignore any letters of ghost that it picked up.

  They kept the ground rules simple: a ten-minute time limit for each letter; no three-letter words; the usual prohibition against proper nouns; and each round would go in the opposite direction from that of the previous round. Thus, both players would have equal challenging opportunities, and neither would be permanently behind the other in the contest.

  Also, challenging was to be allowed across the intervening opponent—the computer not part of the combat.

  Having sent off one last distress signal, they addressed themselves to programming the computer for the game (and the instantaneous execution of the loser). Combing through the immense software resources of the computer, they were pleased to discover that its resident dictionaries included Webster’s First and Second, their own joint favorites. They settled on the ancient databases as the supreme arbiters.

  The verdict-enforcer took a little more time to organize. Eventually, they decided on what amounted to a pair of electric chairs controlled by the computer. The killing force would be a diverted segment of the lifeboat’s Hametz Drive. Each competitor would be fastened to his seat, locked in place by the computer until the game was over. At the crucial moment, when one of them incurred the t in Ghost, a single blast of the diverted drive would rip through the loser’s brain, and the winner would be released.

  “Everything covered?” asked Tuezuzim as they finished their preparations. “A fair contest?”

  “Yes, everything’s covered,” Kydd replied. “All’s fair. Let’s go.”

  They went to their respective places: Kydd to a chair, Tuezuzim to the traditional curved bed of the lobstermorph. The computer activated their electronic bonds. They stared at each other and softly said their good-byes.

  We have this last information from the computer. The Malcolm Movis omicron beta is bundled at sale with Al-truix 4.0, a fairly complex ethicist program. It was now recording the proceedings, with a view to the expected judicial inquest.

  —

  The lobstermorph drew the first g. He had challenged Juan Kydd, who had just added an e to t-w-i-s. Kydd came up with twisel, the Anglo-Saxon noun and verb for fork. To Tuezuzim’s bitter protests that twisel was archaic, the Malcolm Movis pointed out that there had been no prior agreement to exclude archaisms.

  Kydd himself was caught a few minutes later. Arrogant over his initial victory, he was helping to construct laminectomy (“surgical removal of the posterior arch of a vertebra”) by adding m after l-a-m-i-n-e-c-t-o. True, this would end on the computer’s turn, which could incur no penalty letters, but Kydd was willing to settle for a neutral round. Unfortunately, he had momentarily forgotten the basic escape hatch for any seasoned Ghost player—plurals. The Malcolm Movis indicated i, and Tuezuzim added the e so fast it sounded like an echo. There was absolutely no escape for Kydd from the concluding s in laminectomies.

  And so it went, neck and neck, or, rather, neck and cephalothorax. Tuezuzim pulled ahead for a time and seemed on the verge of victory, as Kydd incurred g-h-o-s and then was challenged in a dangerous situation with a questionable word.

  “Dirigibloid?” Tuezuzim demanded. “You just made that one up. There is no such word. You are simply trying to avoid getting stuck with the e of dirigible.”

  “It certainly is a word,” Kydd maintained, perspiring heavily. “As in ‘like a dirigible, in the form of or resembling a dirigible.’ It can be used, probably has been used, in some piece of technical prose.”

  “But it’s not in Webster’s Second—and that’s the test. Computer, is it in your dictionary?”

  “As such, no,” the Malcolm Movis replied. “But the word dirigible is derived from the Latin dirigere, ‘to direct.’ It means ‘steerable,’ as a dirigible balloon. The suffix -oid may be added to many words of classical derivation. As in spheriod and colloid and asteroid, for example—”

  “Just consider those examples!” Tuezuzim broke in, arguing desperately. “All three have the Greek suffix -oid added to words that were originally Greek, not Latin. Aster means ‘star’ in Greek, so with asteroid you have ‘starlike or in the form of a star.’ And colloid comes from the Greek kolla, for ‘glue.’ Are you trying to tell me that dictionaries on the level of Webster’s First or Second mix Greek with Latin?”

  It seemed to the anxiously listening Kydd that the Malcolm Movis computer almost smiled before continuing. “As a matter of fact, in one of those cases, that’s exactly what happens. Webster’s Second describes spheroid as deriving from both Greek and Latin. It provides as etymologies, on the one hand, the Greek sphairoeides (sphaira, ‘sphere,’ plus eidos, ‘form’) and, on the other, the Latin sphaeroides, ‘ball-like’ or ‘spherical.’ Two different words, both of classical origin. Dirigibloid is therefore ruled a valid word.”

  “I protest that ruling!” Tuezuzim waved his claw angrily. “Data are being most selectively used. I am beginning to detect a pro-human, anti-lobstermorph bias in
the computer.”

  Another faint suggestion of an electromechanical smile. “Once more, a matter of fact,” the computer noted silkily. “The Malcolm Movis design team was headed by Dr. Hodgodya Hodgodya, the well-known lobstermorph electronicist. Pro-human, anti-lobstermorph bias is therefore most unlikely to have been built in. Dirigibloid is ruled valid; the protest is noted and disallowed. Juan Kydd begins the next round.”

  Since both opponents were now tagged with g-h-o-s, the round coming up would be the rubber, or execution, round. This was most definitely it.

  Kydd and Tuezuzim looked at each other again. One of them would be dead in a few minutes. Then Kydd looked away and began the round with the letter that had always worked best for him in three-cornered Ghost, the letter l.

  The computer added i, and Tuezuzim, a bit rashly, came up with m. He was quite willing for the word to be limit, and thus to end on the Malcolm Movis. A null round, and he, Tuezuzim, would be starting the next one.

  But Kydd was not interested in a null round this time. He added an o to the l-i-m and, when the computer supplied a u, the developing limousine that had to end on Tuezuzim became obvious.

  The lobstermorph thought desperately. With a hopeless squeak from deep in his cephalothorax, he said s.

  It must be recognized here, as the computer testified at the subsequent inquest, that the s already completed a word, to wit limous (“muddy, slimy”). But the Malcolm Movis pointed out that the individual who should have triumphantly called attention to limous, Juan Kydd, was so committed to catching his opponent with limousine that he didn’t notice.

  Limousine moved right along, with an i from Kydd and an n from the computer. And once again it was up to Tuezuzim.

  He waited until his ten-minute time limit had almost expired. Then he came up with a letter. But it wasn’t e.

  It was o.

  Juan Kydd stared at him. “L-i-m-o-u-s-i-n-o?” he said in disbelief, yet already suspecting what the lobstermorph was up to. “I challenge you.”