The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde

by Norman Spinrad

  Tyson felt the familiar numbness inching towards his head from his extremities. There seemed to be a numbness in his mind as well, the numbness of fear, the fear of fear itself…

  He closed his eyes, trying to purge himself of fear, letting his mind plunge into the growing, deepening blackness, the endless, swirling sensationless chaos…

  There was the familiar moment of unguessable motion, and the Voyage began.

  The Place was a great, high-walled crater of smooth, black volcanic glass. Tyson found his ego in the middle of the crater, the rim wall stretching up high and smooth and shiny-black all around him. A great yellow sun blazed overhead, yet the sky was dead, space-black. If such criteria applied to the Places, this one must be airless.

  This was the most desolate Place he had yet seen. Black, featureless volcanic glass, black sky, harsh sun. A Place without pity. A Place without refuge.

  Grimly, without bothering to explore the Place at all, Tyson waited. He waited for it. He waited under the cold black sky, the harsh yellow light. He waited, alone, fearful. He waited…

  Then all at once, he felt its presence. He felt the fear, the nameless, reasonless dread. It was in the crater with him, transparent to all senses, but unmistakably there.

  The fear was terrible, demanding, unfaceable. He wavered for a moment, a small portion of his mind trying to convince the rest of him that there was nothing to be afraid of, that he could not die here, in the unreality of a Place, that his body was safe back in the Voyage Room under the watchful care of Ralph Yarmolinski…

  But the rational being that had made the decision to face it was long ago and far away, flayed into panic by bottomless terror. Tyson fled. He fled to the far wall of the crater. Madly, senselessly, forgetting the immutable laws of the Places which forbade to his detached ego any motion impossible to his body, he tried to force himself into the air and up over the sheer crater wall. But, of course, it was futile. The unbreakable illusion of bodyness, which had been a link with sanity on previous Voyages, now was the final piece of an inescapable trap.

  He felt it approaching. There was nothing to be seen, but he sensed it approaching, in a curiously jerky, hesitant manner.

  He fled around the base of the crater wall. It hesitated, then followed. Round and round, Tyson whirled, circling the base of the smooth crater wall as if caught on some mad monstrous merry-go-round.

  Wait… wait… something seemed to wail shrilly in his mind, in between waves of visceral fear.

  Tyson dully tried to marshal his courage, to turn and face the thing, which now almost seemed to be pleading: wait… wait.

  … But it was no use. No degree of curiosity could overcome the senseless terror.

  Tyson fled. The gleaming black wall of the crater became a dazzling blur as he whirled mindlessly around it, as the something gained slowly but inexorably on him, as waves of fear breached his mind.

  Round and round for an eternity… and it was almost upon him now. Another few moments, and…

  Then the crater began to dissolve, to grow vague, to flicker.

  The drug was wearing off! The Voyage was ending!

  Tyson gibbered with relief. In a moment, the Voyage would be over. He would be back, safe in the Voyage Room… but there seemed to be something he had forgotten…

  Suddenly, he remembered. The second shot of Psychion-36! Yarmolinski was going to give him another shot!

  The flickering stopped. Once again, the volcanic glass of the crater was cold and hard and terribly substantial. Yarmolinski had given him the second shot. The Voyage would last another hour.

  He was trapped. Irrevocably trapped.

  And it was almost upon him.

  I’m trapped! Tyson thought. There’s no way out… no place to hide… no escape… Well, if this must be it, he told himself savagely, at least let me face it like a man, not a whining dog!

  He stopped. Tremendous tides of fear roiled his being as he felt it approach.

  Then it hesitated. It stopped. It retreated. It began to move forward again, and once more hesitated. Again it retreated.

  The fear became more intense, overwhelming.

  Then Tyson suddenly understood. It was not his fear alone that he was feeling.

  It was afraid of him, too.

  It was radiating fear as he must be. The two of them were feeding each other’s terror.

  Of course! Tyson thought. I’m as alien to it as it is to me!

  Tyson felt a sudden pang of empathy for the something, whatever it was, that was transparent to all his normal senses. Whatever it is, he thought, I’m scaring it as much as it’s scaring me.

  As if in response, the atmosphere of terror seemed to wane.

  Before he could change his mind, purposely leaving himself no room for second thoughts, Tyson rushed forward to meet it.

  He saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing, but there was a soundless scream that was both his and its.

  And there, in a Place that might or might not be real, the two disembodied minds that were Tyson and the stranger occupied the same locus and merged.

  Who? Who? Who? a thing screeched in his mind, a thing alive with strangeness and fear.

  Me! Me! Me! Tyson thought back in panic and revulsion.

  Who? Who? Who? Who are you? Who are you? What are you? What are you?

  The alienness was like a reptile stench in his mind… But he fought his instinctive dread. It must be as bad for the thing as for himself.

  Voyager! he thought at it. Voyager! From another… time? place? dimension? reality? Who are you?

  Yes, thought the stranger, calmer, but still unalterably alien. Yes… Voyager… traveler… explorer into the unknown… I too am… Voyager… traveler… explorer. Why do you jear me? I mean you no harm.

  Why do you fear me? Tyson thought back, almost mirthfully.

  I do not know. I do not know. Perhaps because 1 feel your fear.

  That is why I fear you, Tyson thought. Then, suddenly, impulsively: We are fellow… Voyagers, explorers, adventurers… We should not fear each other.

  No, thought the stranger, calmer, almost wistfully, we should not fear each other.

  You are a stranger here too? Tyson thought. This is not your world?

  No. Not my world. Perhaps not even my Galaxy. Perhaps not even my universe.

  Not mine either, thought Tyson, with a growing sense of sympathy for the alien. I have been to many such Places.

  I too.

  What are the Places? Tyson asked hopefully. Do you know?

  No. Do you?

  No, thought Tyson. We do not know. Some of us have thought that they might simply be hallucinations of our own minds, but now that we have met, that obviously cannot be.

  Some of us thought the same, replied the alien. Not those of us who are Travelers, though. Perhaps the Places are in another universe, another time… We visit them through the medium of a drug. We do not know how it works.

  Nor do we, Tyson thought. The Places are a mystery.

  Yes.

  The Places are not of your universe?

  How can we know? Perhaps they are planets orbiting other suns in our own Galaxy. We cannot know, for we have not yet visited other suns with our bodies.

  Nor have we, Tyson answered. Perhaps… perhaps, he thought, with growing excitement, perhaps we live in the same Galaxy!

  Perhaps, answered the alien. I would like to think so. But how can we know? All we know is that our two races have met, here in this Place that is alien to both of us, here where both of us are minds without bodies, in a place that may not even exist. But we have met. Our minds have contacted each other, though our bodies are still chained to our planets.

  I am glad that we have met, Tyson thought. Our peoples can be friends.

  Yes, answered the alien, friends. Friends against the unknown.

  Perhaps, thought Tyson, feeling a strange new emotion that was both fear and hope, perhaps our peoples will meet someday, when we both go to the stars. Perhaps someda
y we will stand on the ground of each other’s planets.

  Perhaps, replied the alien. Perhaps, if we live in the same universe. Then, somehow sadly, filled with loss; But how can we ever know?

  The Places! Tyson thought. Our peoples have passed each other before in the Places, like fearful animals in the dark. But now there need be no more fear. We will meet again… in the Places, whether they are real or not. The Places will be our meeting ground, until someday, perhaps, our ships meet each other in our own universe…

  Yes, thought the stranger, no longer quite an alien, in the Places. In the Places where we are both aliens, we will have a meeting ground. We will meet again.

  Perhaps, together, some day, we will learn what the Places really are, Tyson thought.

  Yes, thought the stranger, his mind seeming to grow faint and dim in Tyson’s, yes, together. It is a good thought. This Place is fading now. The drug is wearing off. I am returning to my own world. Goodby… goodby… goodby till we meet again… in the Places… goodby… goodby…

  Goodby, Tyson thought. Goodby, fellow Voyager.

  The stranger was gone. Once more, Tyson was alone in the Place, waiting for the Psychion-36 to wear off, waiting to return to an Earth that would no longer be quite the same.

  He was alone, but not in the same sense as he had been before. Somewhere, sometime, in some universe, there were other intelligent beings, beings that could be as much friends as aliens.

  In this Place, in this enigmatic reality that might or might not be real, two races had contacted each other for the first time, a contact so tenuous, so tentative, that all each had learned was that the other existed. It was not very much.

  But it was a beginning.

  Once More, With Feeling

  Sausalito, California, United States of America, 1967. The hour after dusk: the sky a crystalline blue-black, the lightscape of San Francisco across the obsidian waters of the Bay something straight off an old picture-postcard, the nightly tongue of fog just now pouring through the Golden Gate, the slow-motion ghost of an enormous breaker.

  Major Jase Stone, USAF, stood on the end of a short wooden pier looking out on the fog-bank as it advanced on San Francisco and listening to the slap-slap of the wavelets against the hulls of the pleasure boats moored in the marina. Stone was twenty-seven but he looked a well-preserved thirty-five in the bulky sweater and white duck pants; in uniform the etched angles in his face and the steel walls behind his eyes would seem routine, but in mufti he looked like a man who had seen too much of the underside of the world too soon.

  Well here I am, he thought. Was it worth it? He thought cynically of the Congressional Medal of Honor tucked beneath the pile of new civilian shirts in the dresser drawer of the room he had rented overlooking the Bay. A piece of metal and cloth gingerbread, awarded for dedication to the art of killing above and beyond the call of duty, perhaps beyond reason. A stupid thing, perhaps a wicked thing to risk your life for—but the three weeks in a rest area of your choosing that went with it under the new rules, that made it seem worth the gamble, worth the human lives that had paid for every second of this furlough in blood.

  Back there, the killing and the screaming women and the craters and the fog that killed. And here, now, a clean night sky unsullied by the contrails of rockets, and the fog was cool and bracing and smelled of the sea.

  Wouldn’t you?

  Stone shook the fireball visions out of his mind’s eye, turned, walked slowly off the pier and back towards the center of town where the lights were smoky jewels in the thickening fog and people laughed and smiled in the streets around him. He was suddenly seized by a frightening vision of hyper-reality: the warm brick-reds and wood-browns of the buildings, the deep blue-black of the sky, the romantic patina of the fog, seemed too perfect to be real, like the technicolor of a movie. The San Francisco-Gothic buildings seemed studiedly quaint and the young girl across the street with her long slim legs and flowing blonde hair was a creature of Central Casting.

  Stone shuddered but the illusion would not dissolve—and was it illusion when there was another reality where fireballs shattered the sky and urchins darted from one heap of rubble to the next in search of a scrap of garbage or a dead dog?

  Time to get drunk, Jase boy, he told himself. Time to really tie one on and soak the damned war out of your brain for three weeks. And for chrissakes, don’t let it get maudlin! A few good stiff ones, and then find yourself a nice chick and let her show you just how real she really is.

  Down the block was a medium-sized bar. No crowd outside, but as he neared it, he could hear a satisfying buzz of talk from within and he saw a man leave with a big-eyed girl and it looked like a good omen and so he stepped through the psuedo-antique swinging doors and into the smoke inside.

  To his left was a series of wooden tables crowded with couples and groups of couples mostly in their twenties and thirties, real cozy-like, and again that awful feeling of unreality as if they were extras hired to produce the proper atmosphere and Stone shivered. To his right was the bar with high wooden stools along it. At the far end of the bar, a man in his forties was hustling a girl in her early twenties. The rest of the stools were empty.

  Stone sat down on the stool nearest the door and ordered bourbon, neat.

  He drank it quickly, felt the warmth of the liquor begin to melt him into the unreality of the bar, ordered another and sipped at this one slowly, savoring the acrid, very real bite of the whiskey across his tongue. He began to relax. Sausalito, California, USA, 1967, a good old American bar—and the specter of that other reality within him began to fade as he willed himself into the ambience of here, now.

  A sudden breeze caused him to look over his shoulder at the doorway where a girl stood uncertainly paused at the threshold of the bar. Her tight full body seemed somehow costumed in the black stretch-pants and short suede jacket. Her red hair fell in billows to her shoulders. Their eyes met and something passingly strange seemed to happen: the reality of the bar faded again and as they looked through the smoke at each other there seemed to be an instant and long-standing bond between them, as if both knew they were the only real people in a world of wraiths.

  Without taking her eyes off him, she sat down on the stool next to his, propped her face in one hand as she leaned her elbow on the bar, studied him with hot, feral eyes.

  “Yeah” he said.

  “I have the feeling you are a stranger in this place,” she said as if they had been talking for hours. There was an expectant tension in her voice that he couldn’t fathom but that rippled the flesh of his thighs.

  “What makes you say that?” he asked.

  “I’m a stranger here too. How do you say, it takes one to know one, no? Something about the way you look, detached, you know? Almost disdainful of… all this.”

  “I’m… a soldier,” Stone said. “A soldier on leave. Sorry to hear it shows.”

  “Ah, a soldier!” she said. Her eyes gleamed, then banked, and Stone thought: Jesus, without being sure how he meant it.

  “You like soldiers?” he said, putting a testing edge on the words.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never met one before.” And the weird intensity, the almost manic earnestness coming off her as she stared at him like some exotic animal convinced him she was not putting him on.

  “Never met a soldier before? Where the hell you been keeping yourself, baby?”

  She seemed to hesitate before answering, as if about to say one thing, thinking better of it, then saying another: “Why is that so important to you?”

  Far too earnest a response, and Stone laughed to show her how important it wasn’t. But then he found the vehemence in his own voice betraying… almost betraying it all:

  “Because I’d like to take a good look at someplace where there’s no soldiers, no armies, no killing, no—”

  “You’ve been in a war!” she whispered. There was something positively obscene in the way she said it.

  “That turns you on too?” he said
, finding himself both repelled and attracted by this strange, somehow naively-feral creature.

  Something guarded came into her eyes, and at that moment Stone lost all illusions as to who was picking up whom. “What’s wrong?” she said. “You think I am some kind of… what is the old term, ‘camp-follower,’ that is it?”

  “That’s a polite word for it.”

  She laughed. The laugh was strained. “No,” she said, “I am like you, a… tourist, no? You see, I admit it openly, I am a tourist from a boring place looking for the exciting, the exotic. And there was that about you, excitement, a kind of aura of romance, you know. I didn’t know what it was until you told me you were a soldier. I’ve never met a soldier before; it is the idea that excites me. You know, being in the same room with a man who has lived by killing and bravery, who may tomorrow himself be—” She cut herself off at that, but the look on her face told Stone it was quite deliberate.

  “You’re pretty weird, baby,” he said. “You must come from a pretty far-out place.”

  She frowned. “You would find it strange, yes,” she said. “But not exciting at all. Very boring, controlled, how do you say it, sterile. No place for an exciting man such as yourself. But I am a boring woman from a boring place; let’s talk about you, much more exciting, no? I don’t even know your name.”

  “Major Jase Stone, USAF,” he said. The chick was clearly off her nut. But there was something tantalizing about it, titillating. He wondered what it would be like to make love to this girl. What form would her kinkiness take in bed?

  “USAF,” she said hesitantly. “Air Force of the United States, no? Ah, an officer in the fabled Air Force of the United States! I’m excited to know you, Major Stone. I am Tanya Grouzenko.”

  A chill went through Stone. “A Russian name?” he said.

  “My father is Russian, my mother a North American. Why do you…? Ah yes! The… what is it called, ‘Frozen War’?”

  “Cold War,” Stone said. “It’s been in all the papers.”

  “So you fight the Cold War…?” she asked rhetorically. Stone opened his mouth, abruptly realized he could not say what he was about to say, shut it. The moment passed as she smiled, paused, said: “Does that make you a cold warrior?”