The 13th Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 26 Great SF Stories!

by Lake, Jay

  The remark angered Blake to the extent that it dispelled his amazement. He shoved Smith away from the door and opened it. “All that may be,” he said, “and maybe I did know you once upon a time. But don’t let me find you here when I get back. Understand?” He paused in the doorway, frowning. “Tell me one more thing, though. Why Burns’s birthplace? Why should a memory-image like this appeal to a mind-comber?”

  Smith grinned. “Bobby Burns has always fascinated me—just as he has you. Or should I say ‘us’?” The grin turned into a leer, and he picked up the bottle and waved it back and forth like a baton—

  My love, she’s but a lassie yet,

  My love, she’s but a lassie yet;

  We’ll let her stand a year or twa,

  She’ll no be half sae saucy yet;

  I rue the day I sought her O!

  I rue the day I sought her O!

  Wha gets her needs na say he’s woo’d,

  But he may say he has bought her O.

  Furious, Blake strode down the path. Smith’s taunting laughter sounding in his wake.

  The three Erinyes were waiting for him at the gate, and fell in behind him when he turned down the lane. He lost Sabrina’s trail in front of the farmhouse where Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan, picked it up again opposite the Mitre Tavern. Presently it veered right, passed between Milton’s birthplace and Stratford-on-Avon, and entered a night-image. He was halfway down a dim-lit street, the Erinyes just behind him, before he realized where he was.

  * * * *

  Disciplined trees stood at attention along two suburban strips of lawn. Beyond them, half-remembered houses showed. One of them stood out vividly—a round, modernesque affair surrounded by a quarter-acre of grass and shrubs and flowers. It was the house he had rented while Deirdre Eldoria was attending high school. It was a house he had hoped never to see again.

  He was seeing it now, though, and he was going to see it at much closer quarters, for Sabrina’s footprints led straight across the remembered lawn to the very doorstep. She had not gone in, however, he discovered presently; instead, she had forsaken the door for a concave picture window through which bright light streamed out onto the grass. The depth of a pair of her footprints showed that she had stood there for a long time, peeking into his past. Despite himself, Blake peeked too. So did the three Erinyes.

  The room was a far cry from the one he had just left. The hearth was built of meticulously mortared red bricks. The thick rug was a two-dimensional garden of multicolored flowers. There were exquisite tables and flower-petal stools. There were deep chairs that begged to be sat in. A sybaritic sofa occupied an entire wall.

  On the sofa sat a man and a girl. The man was himself at the age of thirty-four. The girl was Deirdre Eldoria at the age of seventeen.

  Blake Past was helping her with her lessons. The moment was a composite of a hundred similar scenes. Now she raised her eyes from the book on her lap, and Blake Past caught her girlish profile ... and Blake Present, standing in the soft and scented darkness of the remembered spring night with the three Erinyes breathing down the back of his neck, caught it too, and both Blakes knew pain. Now she returned her attention to the book, and Blake Past leaned forward in order to read the passage that she was in doubt about. And as he did so, her copper-colored hair touched his cheek and the warm tingle of the contact traveled down through the years to Blake Present.

  Overcome by the poignancy of the moment, he stepped back from the window, colliding with the three Erinyes as he did so. They moved a little distance away, arrayed themselves, and started to raise their right arms. “Oh, can it!” Blake said disgustedly. In the darkness behind him, someone laughed. “My love, she’s but a lassie yet,” Smith sang in a cracked baritone. “We’ll let her stand a year or twa, she’ll no be half sae saucy yet!”

  Blake whirled, and flashed his light into the shadows. The light picked up Smith’s retreating figure. “Get out of my mind!” Blake shouted. “Do you hear me? Get out of my mind!”

  Laughter danced in the darkness, silence ensued. Turning back toward the window, Blake saw that Blake Past and Deirdre Yesterday were leaving the living room. He watched them come out the front door, walk around the corner of the house and start down a starlit garden path.

  Forsaking Sabrina’s trail, he followed them along the path, the Erinyes at his heels, and watched them sit down on a little white bench beside a rose-riotous trellis. As he watched, Blake Past broke one of the roses free and pinned it in Deirdre’s cupreous hair.

  Blake Present plunged away from the moment and picked up Sabrina’s trail again. Why did I sit there beside her? he demanded silently of the remembered stars. Sit there beside her like her lover when the roses were in bloom? Father-protector—father-fool! I slept with her mistress, and I would have been her Naoise! Within earshot of her conched ear I lay with her black whore-mother, and when the satyr in me was replete I stepped over her thin child’s body and ran away!

  Behind him in the night, the Erinyes hissed and murmured to each other gloatingly.

  * * * *

  Sabrina’s trail had been erratic before. Now it became even more so. It approached this boundary and that, only to veer off in another direction. Sometimes it doubled back upon itself, and each time Blake was able to cut down on her lead. He should have been elated. Strangely, however, he was not. Instead, a feeling of uneasiness afflicted him, increasing as the distance between them shrank.

  At length, after detouring around an impassable memory-image of deep space, the trail extended into what at first appeared to be a vast woodland park. It was not a park, though. It was a Dubhe 4 rubber plantation. Blake groaned. Did he have to relive this sequence too?

  Apparently he did. Sabrina’s footprints were deep and undeniable in the soft earth. They pointed unerringly in the remembered direction. Had she discovered that he was following her? Was she deliberately torturing him by making him back-track along a mental trail that he wanted desperately to avoid? It would certainly seem so.

  He forced himself to move forward among the gray ghosts of trees. He crossed a shallow, scum-covered stream, leaping from rock to rock, and afterward climbed a hill. Hearing a loud splash behind him, he turned and looked back.

  Miss Stoddart, in trying to cross the stream, had lost her balance and fallen in, and Officer Finch and Vera Velvetskin were trying to help her to her feet. As he watched, they too lost their balance and joined their companion in the greenish water. There followed a period of hysterical floundering, after which the trio waded dripping and bedraggled to the bank.

  Blake would have laughed, had not the place-time oppressed him. Descending the opposite slope of the hill, he entered a wide valley. Presently he glimpsed the buildings of the Great Starway Cartel processing plant through the trees.

  The overseer’s bungalow was visible just to the left, and it was toward this latter structure that Sabrina’s footprints pointed. The original clearing had swarmed with chocolettos. Blake’s, however, did not. In his single-mindedness of six years ago he had had eyes for only two people—the overseer and Deirdre.

  Stepping into the clearing, he saw the man now—the bearded bestial face, the long arms, the large and hairy hands—and he saw the fifteen-year old girl lying on the ground where the man had thrown her after she had slapped his face. After a moment he saw himself of six years ago step out of the grove of rubber trees and advance white-faced into the scene.

  “No!” the girl lying on the ground cried. “He’ll kill you!”

  Blake Past ignored her. The overseer had drawn a knife. Now the knife flashed, and a streak of crimson appeared on Blake Past’s arm. The knife flashed again, but this time it described a large arc and landed a dozen feet away. Now the overseer’s throat was between Blake Past’s hands, and the bearded face was changing colors. It grew green first, then blue. Blake Past shook t
he man several times before letting him slip to the ground. He dropped a handful of quandoe-notes on the heaving chest.

  “That’s what you paid for her,” he said. He withdrew a paper from his breast pocket, unfolded it and held it before the gasping overseer’s eyes. “Sign it,” he said, handing it to him.

  The overseer did so, lying on his side. Blake Past pocketed the paper and helped the girl to her feet. The tarn-blue eyes were wide in the thin child’s face. “Eldoria died,” she blurted. “They—”

  Blake Past nodded. “I know. But they can’t sell you any more. I own you now.”

  “I am glad,” the girl said. “I knew from the first moment I saw you that you were noble. I shall like being your slave, and I will serve you very faithfully.”

  Blake Past looked away. Blake Present lowered his eyes. “Can you walk?” Blake Past asked.

  “Oh, yes. I am very strong.”

  She took a step forward, swayed and would have fallen, had not Blake Past caught her. “I—I guess I am not quite as strong as I thought,” she said. “But I shall recuperate swiftly. Why did you come back, mensakin Blake?”

  “I came back to buy you from Eldoria,” Blake Past said. He did not add that the memory of her saintly face as he had seen it when he stepped over her had lasted a whole year, or that his dreams of her had made a mockery of his sleep. “When I found out that Eldoria had died and that you had been sold again, I came directly here.”

  “You will not be sorry. I will make you an excellent slave.”

  “I didn’t buy you for that reason. I bought you to give you your—”

  “There is one request I would like to make, however,” the girl interrupted. “I would like to take ‘Eldoria’ as my surname. She was very kind to me, and I would like to repay her in some way.”

  “Very well,” Blake Past said. “’Deirdre Eldoria’ it will be, then.”

  He picked her up and carried her into the grove. Blake Present watched them till they disappeared among the trees. He knew where Blake Past was taking her—had taken her. Back to the settlement, and from there to the spaceport, and thence to Ex-earth. Ex-earth and high school, then college—

  She had never been his slave, though. He had been hers.

  * * * *

  Sabrina’s trail circled back into the grove and left the place-time by a different route. Immediately it became erratic again. It was evident to Blake that she was searching for a particular memory-image and that she was having trouble finding it. Perhaps she knew of some moment in his past where she would be safe even from him.

  When he stepped into the little Dubhe 4 settlement he instinctively assumed that it was on the same chronological plane as the plantation place-time. However, the darkness that instantly enclosed him and the stars that sprang to life in the sky apprised him that such could not possibly be the case. This was the Dubhe 4 settlement of seven years ago. This was the night he had sat in the chocoletto cafe and watched Eldoria dance—the night he had kept a tryst with her in her hut; the night he had first seen Deirdre.

  But why had Sabrina come here? Where in this wretched little memory-image did she expect to find sanctuary?

  Suddenly he knew. Eldoria’s hut. He would rather die than enter it again, and somehow Sabrina must have discovered his attitude. Probably even now she was within those four remembered walls, laughing at him.

  Anger kindled in him. The effrontery of her! Daring to pre-empt a moment that belonged solely to him! He would enter the hut if it killed him. If he had to, he would tear down its walls and banish its memory forever from the country of his mind.

  With the aid of his pocket torch, he found her footprints in the dust. He followed them down the street, the three Erinyes tagging doggedly along behind him. The trail, erratic no longer, led straight to the labyrinthine alleys of the native sector and thence along the shortest route to Eldoria’s hut. For a person who had never been to Dubhe 4, Sabrina York certainly knew her way around.

  Maybe, though, she had been to Dubhe 4. He knew very little about her. He knew nothing at all, in fact, save that she had murdered her father. He did not even know how she had murdered him, or why. Abruptly Blake shoved the matter from his mind. It wasn’t his business to know how or why she had done the deed. It was his business to find and apprehend her.

  Presently, in the darkness before him, he made out a motionless white-robed figure. He approached it warily, found to his consternation that it was frozen in the act of taking a step forward. He shone his light into the face. It was dark bronze in hue. The eyes were wide apart, and the teeth showed in a vivid white line between half-parted purple lips. Eldoria, on her way to keep her tryst with him....

  But why didn’t she move on? Suddenly Blake knew. In treating a patient, Trevorite psychologists sometimes froze certain place-times in his past in order to study them in greater detail. The girl in Blake’s mind had either frozen the Dubhe 4 place-time herself, then, or had hired a professional to do the job.

  Clearly she had something up her sleeve about which Blake knew nothing.

  He went on, not quite so confidently now. He had proceeded less than a dozen steps when he saw the brooch. It was lying in the dust just to the left of one of Sabrina’s footprints, and it threw back the light of the torch in glittering shards that hurt his eyes. Disbelievingly, he picked it up. The Erinyes clustered around him to see what he had found. They were still wet and dishelved and reeked of the piercing odor of decayed algae. They looked anything but happy.

  Blake turned the brooch over in the palm of his hand. The inscription on the back leaped up and smote him right between the eyes, and he staggered and nearly fell. To Deirdre Eldoria, he read, from Nathan Blake.

  He stood there numbly for a long while, not thinking—unable to think. Finally he slipped the brooch into his pocket and moved on.

  * * * *

  He was trembling when he reached the door of Eldoria’s hut. The footprints led straight up to the threshold and came to an end. Diffidently he touched the primitive knob, turned it and pushed the door open. He stepped inside and closed the door in the faces of the three Erinyes. The remembered anteroom seemed smaller and more sordid than the original, but he knew that it was really no different. He had remembered it accurately enough. It was he who was different, not the room.

  Opposite the door, Deirdre Yesterday sat immobile before the arras. Equally immobile, Blake Past sat facing her. Deirdre Yesterday’s lips were parted in the midst of uttering a soundless word. The Anabasis lay open on her lap.

  Blake Present found it difficult to breathe. The difficulty stemmed from a physical as well as an emotional source. Someone was burning incense.

  He wiped his forehead. Then, bracing himself, he walked over to the arras, parted it and stepped into the inner room.

  The inner room was empty.

  A small notebook lay upon the dais among the scattered scarlet cushions. Near it was a faint depression in the foamy coverlet. Blake picked up the notebook. The first page contained a hastily written message:

  Nate dearest, I’ve lost my nerve, and by the time you read this I shall have run away. Please forgive me for disobeying you. I wanted desperately to fulfill your wishes by going to New Earth and attending Trevor University, and now I shall, because sitting here in this little room I have faced at last the very real possibility that you really do not love me. I had hoped that by entering your mind and leading you back through our moments together to the moment when we met and by freezing that moment and letting you find me in this room, you would be shocked into associating me with Eldoria rather than with the naive little girl sitting outside the arras—with sex, rather than with saintliness; that I could bring you to understand that the little-girl image you have of me is as unrealistic as the father-image you have of yourself. But the passing moments have made me realize that all this w
hile I have been deluding myself with false hopes and that I am merely hopelessly in love with a man who does not regard me as a woman at all, who—

  Here the message broke off as abruptly as it had begun. There was a mist before Blake’s eyes, and he could not swallow. He bent down and felt the depression in the coverlet. It was still warm. There had been no footprints leading away from the hut, he remembered.

  Straightening, he surveyed the golden tapestries that adorned the room’s four walls. It was not at all difficult to pick out the one behind which she was standing. It was difficult, though, to go over and raise it. Her face was pale, and the khaki hiking suit she was wearing made it seem all the more so. She stepped out of her hiding place, and he let the tapestry fall into place behind her.

  She would not meet his eyes. “In another moment I would have been gone,” she said. “Oh, Nate, why did you come so soon!”

  Suddenly the arras parted, and Smith stepped into the room. Without pausing, he advanced across the resilient carpet, shoved Blake aside and took Deirdre into his arms. He grasped her hair, pulled her head back and bent his evil face toward hers.

  Outraged, Blake seized the man’s shoulder, spun him around and struck him in the mouth. Instantly his own mouth went numb, and he tasted blood.

  He knew who Smith was then.

  Glancing into Deirdre’s eyes, he saw that she knew too, and realized that she had known all along.