New Writings in SF 25 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Kenneth Bulmer

  ‘Can I talk ?’ I asked Yuu Li, tapping her shoulder.

  ‘If you whisper.’

  ‘There is only one world, isn’t there?’ She must have recognised the urgency in my voice, for she nodded almost immediately.

  The idea had been developing in my mind since my conversation with Beranger. I had once read a story about a man going back in time to kill his own grandfather, out of curiosity, to see if he would still exist. To change the world required less effort; you merely changed the thoughts of a single man and if you picked the right man, at the right time, you had a new world and found yourself in it. The only way to go back was to undo what you had done. And Beranger wanted to go back.

  The dance had an almost hypnotic effect, the pale, gold-crowned faces flashing regularly as they danced in the moonlight, their rings glittering with each precise, meaningful motion of the hands, like a magnet drawing the metallic consciousness into the endless, engulfing labyrinth of Being, of non-existence. My thoughts blurred, not as if I were falling asleep, but almost consciously sliding towards ... I shook my head as if to dispel the muzziness, and turned away from the dance; it made no difference. I looked around for Beranger. He was not there.

  I climbed to my feet and hurried down one of the side corridors, into a well illumined maze, sure of my way; the blurring sensation changed, but did not grow more powerful.

  I found him crouched on a balcony, his hands covering his face. He looked up as he heard my footsteps.

  ‘You’re not co-operating,’ he said accusingly.

  ‘I don’t want to go.’

  ‘Don’t force me to leave you here to die!’

  I didn’t reply, and noticed that his face changed slightly, as if he had reached a decision.

  ‘It took me five years of planning, of metering a language, a history, a way of life. I discovered my talent early, and I never abused it. I examined, learned to understand the minds of the past. I searched for the optimum solution, and I found it. I would abuse my power just once, by moulding Jayavarman’s mind, and that only to make the world a decent place. I played God. This is my creation.’ He paused.

  ‘But I’m not cut out to be a God. The guilt is too terrible. You see I’ve destroyed the old world more completely than any bombs could; it’s as if it never existed.’

  ‘This world exists.’

  He took no notice of me. ‘I couldn’t kill you with the rest of the world, so I brought you with me. You were my only true friend.’

  I noticed the past tense.

  ‘I had to be in Angkor, and I had to work alone, so I used the old woman as an amplifier. She was a telepath, rather erratic, but good. It had taken me years to find her, but the strain killed her the first time I used her. When I change Jayavarman’s mind again, she will be dead.’ His voice was heavy with guilt and shame.

  ‘You must relax, empty your mind. If you don’t, you force me to leave you.’

  I realised that I couldn’t allow him to destroy the world he had initiated, whatever his motives. My own motives were desperately unclear, a mixture of altruism and contentment, perhaps, but they left me in no doubt as to what action should be taken. I moved towards him.

  * * * *

  Thirteen

  The dancing had stopped. The crowd separated and made a path for me as I walked. Srang and Yuu Li were kneeling over the body.

  ‘He’s dead,’ Yuu Li said. ‘The fall smashed his skull.’

  ‘It was necessary,’ I said in a neutral voice.

  ‘It was wrong to kill him,’ Srang said softly. ‘Terribly wrong.’

  I began to explain, but Srang cut me short. ‘You had no right to his life.’

  I moved nearer the body. They backed away a little, without hate or violence in their faces. They pitied even a murderer. I knelt down and lay my hand on the bloody, smashed head. I suddenly thought: what man had ever done more for the human race, with the help of my crime— his murder ? I forced myself to look at his pulped head; the grey mess of the brains oozed out slowly, pathetically, like the stuffing from a rag doll. It was not the head of a Slain God.

  I stood up and extended my blooded palm theatrically towards Srang.

  ‘I don’t deny my guilt, Srang, but I would be even more guilty if I were free of his blood.’

  Someone pinioned my arms.

  ‘Let him go,’ Yuu Li said softly, ‘he’s quite safe.’ She knelt down and smeared her hands with blood. ‘Surely there’s some significance in this, Srang, but which do you prefer, Original Sin or the Slain God?’ She walked forward and disengaged the arms that pinioned me.

  ‘We all wanted him dead. We knew he would be forced to go back, nobody can destroy a world and survive it. This was the only way, and only you could kill him.’ She turned about and faced the crowd. ‘Do we need a Scapegoat?’

  Srang bent down and blooded his hand. ‘We still need ceremonies, it seems,’ he said ruefully.

  * * * *

  Fourteen

  There was no doubt: Jayavarman the Great, Devaraja of Kambuja, Emperor of China, Emperor of India, Lord of the New Found Lands far to the south and east. Lord of Africa (this last was a lie) and Master of Constantinople was dying. He lay on his huge bed, a tiny, withered figure, wrapped at his own command in white, the colour of mourning, surrounded by Brahmans, saffron-robed bonzes, and a host of secretaries, courtiers and wives.

  ‘Speak, Lord of the Earth, that your words; may be carried as far as the Winds blow ...’

  Tell us the name of your successor, so that we may kill or follow, depending on our inclination, the Devaraja translated for himself. He remained silent.

  ‘Order, Divinity of Khmer, that we who prostrate ourselves before you may do your least bidding, though it consumes our very lives.’

  Jayavarman stopped listening.

  ‘Let the secret of my distilled rice wine be given to the world, to mark my death,’ he said weakly.

  There was a stir in the room.

  It was the only innovation that didn’t come to me in a vision, he thought; then the agony in his chest re-asserted itself.

  <>

  * * * *

  THE CAT AND THE COIN

  Keith Wells

  Keith Wells makes his science fiction debut in the pages of New Writings in SF with a story in which the Comic Spirit lays about itself to the general discomfiture of all concerned. Well—almost all. If the famous and long-touted Helping Hand from Space ever does make touchdown on this knocked about old planet of ours, its bearers are just as likely to be met by the shambles as herein presented as by the stiff-necked heroes of fiction. On reflection, probably, taking in the imp of perversity, more likely . . .

  * * * *

  One

  ‘People are like planets,’ concluded the Old Man, ‘and only a few of them know which star they turn upon.’ He smiled at the assembled audience, sipped a glass of water sparingly while they applauded, touched both hands to his brow and quietly left the Temple.

  There was no conversation. People left the gigantic building singly or in pairs and made their way slowly out along the flying walkways that knit the City of Dreamers.

  It was a desert city, built among a strange oasis of jagged mountains amid a flat plain of fission-scarred land, the grains of sand melted into fused silicon so that travellers seemed to walk upon a blurred mirror that reflected the deep blue of the sky which was always clear. It never rained in the Blue Desert.

  At the main gate spies from everywhere were returning. They came through the silicon columns that dotted the plain outside the city walls and the Emperor’s Gate. A bright blue flash among the crystals—then a sudden darkness—a spot of night in the brightness of blazing sunlight, and out of this telescope of darkness would step another figure, hooded in the traditional green robe of the Interstellar Messengers.

  Jomo the beggar sat by the Gate and watched them arrive. Year in, year out, Jomo sat and observed and begged alms from each of them. He claimed he knew the disposition o
f the entire Galaxy from the dispensation of alms from the Messengers as they arrived with secret dispatches from every inhabited planet.

  But Jomo was always a liar. That is, he presented a view of the Universe which no one else could share. A vision of his own which fitted every fact he knew but was no more than the sum of them. In short, Jomo was his own star. His universe revolved upon himself and at his death would fall into extinction.

  He was near blind, leprous and missing a leg, but his choice of misfortunes had enabled him to achieve something few of his fellow citizens could aspire to. Stability. Jomo was a fixed point. An unwavering perception.

  He watched as the nearest of the crystal pillars fused with light and out of the spot of darkness came a tall, green-robed figure who stepped lightly across the glazed silicon land, his shoulders held high, with only a dim far-off sadness in his eyes to denote the misery he had witnessed.

  ‘Dar, Master of the Hopeless Planets,’ Jomo greeted him.

  The tall being stopped beside the beggar, smiling down.

  ‘If I give you much, you’ll think I succeeded; If I give you little you’ll know I failed.’

  ‘Here, take this,’ said Jomo and gave Dar a small coin from his bowl. ‘Take it to the Emperor and tell him I forgave you.’

  Dar took the coin and bowed. As he strode away Jomo shouted after him: ‘When will you bring us Paradise!’ in an angry, bitter voice. But Dar took no notice, knowing it was only for the mob, who drew aside from him as he passed.

  ‘He should give up, that one!’ shouted one of the rabble.

  ‘Master Hopeless!’ and he spat on the ground at Jomo’s feet.

  Jomo grabbed his bowl and began scraping the cockle of saliva into it, babbling incoherently as he reverently scummed the spit and sand off his finger and mixed it with the few coins he had managed to acquire since dawn. The crowd were enraged at his mockery.

  Someone threw a stone. It caught Jomo high up on the cheek, blotching his eye. The crowd laughed and another glassy stone was flung, and another. Jomo never moved or made a sound, twitching only when the chunks of rock and silicon thudded wetly against him, knocking his frail body this way and that. With a snarl, an old woman smashed his bowl over his head, screaming insults, and the crowd surged forward, mad for blood. Stomped and scratched, clutched and clawed.

  When the fury abated there was little to be seen. A few torn clothes and shreds of flesh. A sticky pool of gore upon the mirror-land for the dogs to lap. It was all over in minutes.

  ‘It was what he wanted!’ screamed the old woman, and the crowd drifted away.

  Dar watched from the basalt walkway that arched across the city from the Main Gate to the Emperor’s Palace. He clutched the tiny silicon coin hard in his hand, feeling the weight of the soul within it.

  ‘Thank you, Jomo,’ he whispered. ‘I shall have need of your company.’

  The Customs check was as rigorous as usual but he palmed the coin and filled their heads with the misery he’d come from and they didn’t notice.

  Thus it was that Jomo got to see the Emperor of All.

  The Emperor’s Palace was not large. A simple circular hall burned from the rock, with veins of molten gold and silver running across the ceiling and the walls. The guards were discreet.

  The Emperor dismissed his chamberlains with a languid wave.

  ‘I have come,’ said Dar.

  ‘You are here,’ replied the Emperor formally. ‘How is it there? In the Hopeless Worlds?’

  Dar stared straight into his Emperor’s eyes and the knowledge flowed.

  The Emperor sat down. He was very troubled.

  ‘How do you travel?’ he asked, his courtesy unfailing.

  ‘As a cat. A large black cat, fast as thought. I flow around corners like black milk.’ He laughed and Jomo, in the coin, chuckled with him.

  ‘Ah, Jomo,’ said the Emperor. ‘At last you’ve decided to come.’

  ‘Yes,’ the coin replied from Dar’s extended palm. The Emperor took the coin, smiling at his own image stamped on the silicon face, whose mouth moved when Jomo spoke.

  ‘Karma is swift.’

  ‘Karma is swift,’ intoned the Emperor and Dar, touching fingertips from forehead to the coin.

  ‘Dar knows why I have come. One of my planets is near her time. I must be there to assist the birth.’

  The Emperor smiled, pleasure and pain equally mixed in his finely sketched features, his cheekbones smooth as beaten gold, his eyes colourless and of infinite depth.

  ‘I always wonder,’ he said, ‘whenever one of the Hopeless Worlds finds its grain of possibility, what it must be like. They always leave it so late.’

  ‘We must hurry,’ Dar blurted. ‘There is little time. The continents are about to shift. Cities will be lost, the only developed races are to be plunged into darkness.’

  ‘Very well,’ said the Emperor. He handed the coin back to Dar who slipped it carefully into a silk bag he wore at his throat.

  The old man shuffled into the room.

  ‘The Karma is swift,’ he chanted.

  ‘The Karma is swift,’ they responded, bowing.

  ‘Go to the tallest city,’ said the Old Man. ‘You will find the ones you need with the coin. Whoever refuses it you shall take.’

  Dar nodded to the Emperor and the Old Man and left the Palace. When he crossed the outer limits to the silicon column, the dogs had already licked Jomo’s blood clean from the glistening ground.

  ‘It was a good spot,’ said the coin at his throat; but Dar said nothing. He paused before the crystalline column of silicon and quartz, then dropped his body and spread himself among the molecules and electrons of silicon at the top of the column. And light-years away, Colonel Hubert Lawson said:

  ‘The process is outside our experience. Suffice it to say that the energy obtained by filtering conscious silicon through inanimate quartz is equal to that produced daily by a medium-sized star. As you know, glass is a liquid and flows down through the crystals of quartz without disturbing them. From what we could gather, the Chemistry of Consciousness is quite unexpected. I quote from the hypnosis report: “Human beings are chemical equations no matter how complex, but how long it takes a race to accept the consequences of that and realise the forces at work in their lives are only chemical ... that iron is a state of consciousness as well as a substance. There are Iron people and Oxygen people, Cobalt men and Sulphurous women.” According to Oscar, this City of Dreamers is on the planet of the Hydrogen People. The lightest, purest beings in the Universe.’

  The Colonel paused, glancing around him at the group of high-ranking military commanders and Defence experts.

  ‘Our technology is still tied to organic matter. Our experiments with living elements have so far been entirely negative.’

  ‘One thing I’d like to ask, Colonel,’ growled AeroSpace Marshal Zumgrald. The Colonel came subconsciously to attention.

  ‘How many of these ... er—star beings,’ Zumgrald coughed to conceal his irritation. ‘How many of these things do you think are getting through?’ *

  ‘One, sir.’

  ‘ONE!’ bellowed Zumgrald in the sudden detonation of rage which had made him feared throughout the service.

  ‘You mean to say, Lawson,’ he said, icily through gritted teeth, ‘one outer space alley cat is threatening the whole goddamn world?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying, sir,’ replied the Colonel, woodenly, knowing the only way to survive a Zumgrald attack was to stick to one’s guns no matter what.

  ‘One cat! One goddamn little rattlin’ tomcat and you can’t kill it?’

  There was a strained silence while the Colonel stared painfully at his tormentor.

  ‘Well, sir. As we have evidence ... that is ... er ... good reason to suppose that this cat—I mean, being ... er, is not a cat but a being. That is ... from Outer Space, sir. I mean, well ... conscious chemistry, sir ... If that’s how he got here ...’ the Colonel stuttered like a jammed machine-gun.
‘At that rate a cat could kill!’ he rattled off at last.

  ‘What do you mean?’ the Marshal’s voice had simmered to a low boiling menace.

  ‘To travel between stars is a technological feat way beyond us, Marshal. Who knows what else these beings can do?’