Universe 03 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Terry Carr

  ”You said he was better.”

  ”HE Is,” howled the wind. “YOU KILLED THE MONKEY THAT WANTED TO PLAY WITH YOU, NICHOLAS-AS I BELIEVED IGNACIO WOULD EVENTUALLY KILL YOU, WHO ARE SO EASILY HATED, SO DIFFERENT FROM WHAT IT IS THOUGHT A BOY SHOULD BE. BUT KILLING THE MONKEY HELPED YOU, REMEMBER MADE YOU BETTER. IGNACIO WAS FRIGHTENED BY WOMEN; NOW HE KNOWS THAT THEY ARE REALLY VERY WEAK, AND HE HAS ACTED UPON CERTAIN FANTASIES AND FINDS THEM BITTER.”

  ”You’re rocking,” Nicholas said. “Am I doing that?”

  ”YOUR THOUGHT.”

  A palm snapped in the storm; instead of falling, it flew crashing among the others, its fronded head catching the wind like a sail. “I’m killing you,” Nicholas said. “Destroying you.” The left side of his face was so contorted with grief and rage that he could scarcely speak.

  Dr. Island heaved beneath his feet. “NO.”

  ”One of your cables is already broken-I saw that. Maybe more than one. You’ll pull loose. I’m turning this world, isn’t that right? The attitude rockets are tuned to my emotions, and they’re spinning us around, and the slippage is the wind and the high sea, and when you come loose nothing will balance any more.”

  ”NO.”

  ”What’s the stress on your cables? Don’t you know?”

  ”THEY ARE VERY STRONG.”

  ”What kind of talk is that? You ought to say something like: `The D-twelve cable tension is twenty-billion kilograms’ force. WARNING! WARNING! Expected time to failure is ninety-seven seconds! WARNING!’ Don’t you even know how a machine is supposed to talk?” Nicholas was screaming now, and every wave reached farther up the beach than the last, so that the bases of the most seaward palms were awash.

  ”GET BACK, NICHOLAS. FIND HIGHER GROUND. GO INTO THE JUNGLE.” It was the crashing waves themselves that spoke.

  ”I won’t.”

  A long serpent of water reached for the fire, which hissed and sputtered.

  ”GET BACK!”

  ”I won’t!”

  A second wave came, striking Nicholas calf-high and nearly extinguishing the fire.

  ”ALL THIS WILL BE UNDER WATER SOON. GET BACK!”

  Nicholas picked up some of the still-burning sticks and tried to carry them, but the wind blew them out as soon as he lifted them from the fire. He tugged at the welder, but it was too heavy for him to lift.

  ”GET BACK!”

  He went into the jungle, where the trees lashed themselves to leafy rubbish in the wind and broken branches flew through the air like debris from an explosion; for a while he heard Diane’s voice crying in the wind; it became Maya’s, then his’ mother’s or Sister Carmela’s, and a hundred others; in time the wind grew less, and he could no longer feel the ground rocking. He felt tired. He said, “I didn’t kill you after all, did I?” but there was no answer. On the beach, when he returned to it, he found the welder half buried in sand. No trace of Diane’s ashes, nor of his fire. He gathered more wood and built another, lighting it with the welder.

  ”Now,” he said. He scooped aside the sand around the welder until he reached the rough understone beneath it, and turned the flame of the welder on that; it blackened and bubbled.

  ”No,” Dr. Island said.

  ”Yes.” He was bending intently over the flame, both hands locked on the welder’s trigger.

  ”Nicholas, stop that.” When he did not reply, “Look, behind you.” There was a splashing louder than the= crashing of the waves, and a groaning of metal. He whirled and saw the great, beetle-like robot Ignacio had shown him on the sea floor. Tiny shellfish clung to its metal skin,’ and water, faintly green, still poured from its body. Before he could turn the welding gun toward it, it shot forward hands like clamps and wrenched it from him. All up and down the beach similar machines were smoothing the sand and repairing the damage of the storm.

  ”That thing was dead,” Nicholas said. “Ignacio killed it.”

  It picked up the power pack, shook it clean of sand, and turning, stalked back toward the sea.

  ”That is what Ignacio believed, and it was better that he believed so.”

  ”And you said you couldn’t do anything, you had no hands.”

  ”I also told you that I would treat you as society will when you are released, that that was my nature. After that, did you still believe all I told you? Nicholas, you are upset now because Diane is dead-”

  ”You could have protected her!”

  ”-but by dying she made someone else-someone very important-well. Her prognosis was bad; she really wanted only death, and this was the death I chose for her. You could call it the death of Dr. Island, a death that would help someone else. Now you are alone, but soon there will be more patients in this segment, and you will help them, too-if you can-and perhaps they will help you. Do you understand?”

  ”No,” Nicholas said. He flung himself down on the sand. The wind had dropped, but it was raining hard. He thought of the vision he had once had, and of describing it to Diane the day before. “This isn’t ending the way I thought,” he whispered. It was only a squeak of sound far down in his throat. “Nothing ever turns out right.”

  The waves, the wind, the rustling palm fronds and the pattering rain, the monkeys who had come down to the beach to search for food washed ashore, answered, “Go away-go back-don’t move.”

  Nicholas pressed his scarred head against his knees, rocking back and forth.

  ”Don’t move.”

  For a long time he sat still while the rain lashed his shoulders and the dripping monkeys frolicked and fought around him. When at last he lifted his face, there was in it some element of personality which had been only potentially present before, and with this an emptiness and an expression of surprise. His lips moved, and the sounds were the sounds made by a deaf-mute who tries to speak.

  ”Nicholas is gone,” the waves said. “Nicholas, who was the right side of your body, the left half of your brain, I have forced into catatonia; for the remainder of your life he will be to you only what you once were to him-or less. Do you understand?”

  The boy nodded.

  ”We will call you Kenneth, silent one. And if Nicholas tries to come again, Kenneth, you must drive him back-or return to what you have been.”

  The boy nodded a second time, and a moment after- ward began to collect sticks for the dying fire. As though to themselves the waves chanted:

  ”Seas are wild tonight. . . Stretching over Sado island Silent clouds of stars.”

  There was no reply.

  <>

  * * * *

  THE GHOST WRITER

  by Geo. Alec Effinger

  Geo. Alec Effinger was nominated for a Hugo Award for “All the Last Wars At Once” his story in Universe 1; the final balloting is taking place as this book goes to press, but win or lose, Effinger is obviously beginning to make his mark in science fiction. Here he writes a tale of our distant future, when art is no longer as we know it . . . but artists may not have changed so much. (Maybe one of those faraway writers will someday rediscover this very story; if so, I wonder what they might think of it. . .)

  Effinger’s first novel, What Entropy Means to Me, was published in 1972.

  * * * *

  HE WAS performing before several hundred million people, although he himself was the only person in the huge stadium. Concentric circles of transparent plastic slabs surrounded him, beginning only a few yards from his feet at the edge of the low stage and rising higher and higher, until the farthest row of seats was lost in the late evening’s darkness. Each of the places was occupied by a wandering consciousness, directed and guarded out-of-body by TECT.

  Anabben did not put on as energetic a show as the greater writers, but his stories themselves had a greater vigor. Although many of the audience had come to hear Phioth, the majority had been drawn also by the hope of hearing a long and exciting fragment from Anabben.

  He sat in a chair in the middle of the shiny black stage. His feet were on the floor, close together, and h
is hands were resting in his lap. His head did not droop forward, but his expression was drugged and sleepy. Phioth would not sit; no, the greatest of the writers would dash about his small area, shouting his story, or whispering, and earning his fame as much with his acting as with his words.

  This fragment was a particularly long one for Anabben. On the three previous exhibitions his story had ended within thirty minutes; the fragments had seemed unrelated, and none had even come close to being complete. There was always the chance that a new fragment might join two of the enigmatic earlier pieces, and a whole framework might begin to be evident. But not today. Here was another piece, of perhaps a totally different puzzle. It was longer, and it was exciting. The audience would be satisfied, but not the scholars.

  “He threw another bomb,” said Anabben, reciting slowly with only a minimum of inflection. “A department store fell in upon itself. Shards of brick and glass rained about him, and he was cut and bleeding. He felt nothing but a weird elation. The sound of authority in the explosion, the sound of tons of concrete and steel falling, the sound of hundreds of windows shattering—all these were strangely comforting and exciting to him.”

  Many words were unintelligible to those who listened, and indeed, the basic conflict of the story was meaningless. In some way a man seemed to be acting differently, in a new manner unlike people. In many of the stories told by the writers, people behaved in frightening patterns. A small number of persons had stopped attending the performances, protesting that the stories might teach one to act so differently. It would be the scholars, with the creative resources of TECT, who would ponder the meaning of the strange words: bomb, authority, concrete.

  Anabben continued. “In the middle of the twisted and charred rubble knelt.” He fell silent. It was clear that he had ended in the middle of a sentence. The audience, in their millions of scattered homes, sighed. Anabben sat quietly for a few moments. Gradually his face became more animated as he appeared to awaken from a deep trance. He stood, alone in the immense stadium, and walked to the edge of the stage. He was tired.

  Anabben sat down, awaiting the next performance. He was alone; Vakeis was in his house. Her empty body rested on the low couch by the pond. Anabben guessed that her mind was still here at the stadium, waiting for the great Phioth. Anabben smiled ruefully. How could he expect Vakeis to be waiting for him, when Phioth was performing? He indulged himself in a little jealousy, an emotion rare for people but just eccentric enough for writers. As a writer he had a permanent slab reserved at the stadium. He knew that thousands of people unable to attend the performance would be horrified at his lack of interest.

  He decided to stay because Phioth did entertain. And, since he was the greatest of them all, each performance held an element of history. TECT had lit the stage, for the sky was black, now. Phioth appeared from the tect near where Anabben was sitting. Anabben watched him go to the chair in the center of the stage. Phioth’s hands grasped the arms of the chair, and one thumb found the small groove where a small amount of relaxant would prepare him for the exhibition. Unless Phioth’s mind was calm and unafraid, it would not find its goal when TECT hurled it into the great death stream.

  Every year TECT was used to send the consciousnesses of dozens of aspiring writers, each hoping to align itself with the drifting residue of an ancient master. Sometimes, as with Phioth, there was good fortune, and the young man’s self would find a comfortable mate. Most often, however, there were no minds waiting to meet the adventurer, and instead of glory, there was raving panic. Of course TECT made each of these unfortunates away, and only the other writers had seen the terrifying display of a living man with his mind in death.

  Phioth approached the chair with confidence, though, having made the journey many times and knowing that a welcoming soul waited for him. There were countless elder intellects abandoned to the strange flaming plane after their bodies died. But if the youthful volunteer did not have a mind suitably attuned to one of them, the ghostly traffic was of no use. If the writer were lucky, he would return sane, with a small scrap of lost literature. If the man were supremely lucky, he would find himself matched with a legendary genius, a reflection of his own innate powers.

  Phioth was the luckiest, and the greatest, of all the writers. After two centuries of fishing the mind stream, one man had become William Shakespeare/Phioth. Although none of Shakespeare’s works remained in the world, as no literature of any sort existed, the Elizabethan’s reputation had lived and grown. Phioth’s audiences listened excitedly, for every new fragment that he brought back was heard on earth for the first time in two thousand years.

  “Resembles what it was,” said Phioth, still in the chair. He rose slowly and, while his face kept the possessed look of the performing writer, his body paced the narrow stage. His hands flew about, pointing, gesturing, threatening. His voice shifted in both tone and tempo, and Anabben marveled at the impact of the nearly senseless words.

  “What it should be,

  More than his father’s death, that thus hath put him

  So much from the understanding of himself,

  I cannot dream of. I entreat you both,

  That, being of so young days brought up with him

  And since so neighbour’d to his youth and humour,

  That you vouchsafe your rest here in our court

  Some little time; so by your companies...”

  Anabben watched enviously. Phioth marched back and forth across the scanty thumbnail stage, and Anabben was caught up in the flurry of motion. This sort of behavior was so provocative, so different, that Anabben wondered that the tectmen did not come to make Phioth away. Here were not only great, dead words, but also some nameless feeling from the past, a dangerous passion that aroused Anabben. The people of Anabben’s time had rediscovered the idea of theater, that certain products of the writer’s mind were to be more than merely read. The scholars and TECT had made a vague reconstruction of the forms of literature, based on the several sorts of fragments they received from their writers.

  Phioth spoke on as Anabben considered his own popularity. It was obvious from the content of the story fragments that his source was of another time than Shakespeare. Each writer knew the identity of his long-dead tutor, felt it intimately housed within his transported mind until the connection weakened and the tired vessel awoke. Anabben spoke the stories of one Sandor Courane; the scholars knew nothing about him, and they argued his merits relative to Shakespeare. Courane was less subtle, less universal, but more—involving. Courane had greater popular appeal, and such a phenomenon required study. It was not for Anabben to care what the factors were that maintained his distinction. He secretly enjoyed his fame and, even more secretly, wished ill for Phioth.

  “—And I do think,” said Phioth, his fist clenched above his head, “or else this brain of mine

  Hunts not the trail of policy so sure

  As it hath us’d to do, that I have found

  The very cause of Hamlet’s lunacy.”

  Hamlet! Another piece of that famous myth. The scholars must be squealing now, thought Anabben. On an impulse he got up, stepped into the tect, and transported home.

  The grass was cool beneath his feet. Among the random pieces of roof Anabben could see the first quiet flush of stars. Thin, widely separated panels stood here and there to support the patches of roof and the house’s mechanisms. Among them trees grew, brooks ran, and furniture stood ready for service. At the bottom of the hill Anabben saw a dim light around the couch where Vakeis’ body still rested, while she observed Phioth’s grandiose performance.

  The air was chill, and Anabben requested TECT to raise the temperature of his outdoor home. As an afterthought he had the entire area of his estate lit brightly. TECT scattered the night, broke the darkness into ragged shadows, and chased even these small bits of shade among the roots of the trees. Anabben felt better. He walked down to the pond and sat down in the grass opposite his mistress. He waited for Phioth to end.

&n
bsp; In a few minutes Vakeis stirred. She sat up and rubbed her neck, which had become stiff during the long period while her mind traveled to the stadium. She noticed Anabben and smiled. “You’re back early,” she said, with a puzzled expression.

  “I was very tired,” said Anabben. He did not return her smile. “I saw only a little of Phioth’s reading. Hamlet again, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. Very beautiful, but strange. I’m sorry you didn’t stay. There must be thousands who would have given their Vote to see him.”

  “I know,” said Anabben, standing and holding out his hand to her. They walked around the pond, which, through TECT, Anabben kept frozen all year long. He led her back up the hill to the meeting area. He did not feel like talking, knowing that anything that he said he would lead her to a discussion of Phioth.

  “I enjoyed your performance, dear,” she said.

  “I’m glad. Of course, I can’t remember it. Maybe if Charait and the others come over tonight I’ll play it. It is sad how my own work interests me so little.”