The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  ‘Live food?’ Kress asked.

  Wo shrugged. ‘Each maw eats mobiles from the other castles, yes.’

  ‘I am intrigued,’ he admitted. ‘If only they weren’t so small.’

  ‘Yours can be larger. These sandkings are small because their tank is small. They seem to limit their growth to fit available space. If I moved these to a larger tank, they’d start growing again.’

  ‘Hmmmm. My piranha tank is twice this size, and vacant. It could be cleaned out, filled with sand…’

  ‘Wo and Shade would take care of the installation. It would be our pleasure.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Kress, ‘I would expect four intact castles.’

  ‘Certainly,’ Wo said.

  They began to haggle about the price.

  Three days later Jala Wo arrived at Simon Kress’ estate, with dormant sandkings and a work crew to take charge of the installation. Wo’s assistants were aliens unlike any Kress was familiar with – squat, broad bipeds with four arms and bulging, multifaceted eyes. Their skin was thick and leathery, twisted into horns and spines and protrusions at odd spots upon their bodies. But they were very strong, and good workers. Wo ordered them about in a musical tongue that Kress had never heard.

  In a day it was done. They moved his piranha tank to the center of his spacious living room, arranged couches on either side of it for better viewing, scrubbed it clean, and filled it two-thirds of the way up with sand and rock. Then they installed a special lighting system, both to provide the dim red illumination the sandkings preferred and to project holographic images into the tank. On top they mounted a sturdy plastic cover, with a feeder mechanism built in. ‘This way you can feed your sandkings without removing the top of the tank,’ Wo explained. ‘You would not want to take any chances on the mobiles escaping.’

  The cover also included climate control devices, to condense just the right amount of moisture from the air. ‘You want it dry, but not too dry,’ Wo said.

  Finally one of the four-armed workers climbed into the tank and dug deep pits in the four corners. One of his companions handed the dormant maws over to him, removing them one by one from their frosted cryonic traveling cases. They were nothing to look at. Kress decided they resembled nothing so much as a mottled, half-spoiled chunk of raw meat. With a mouth.

  The alien buried them, one in each corner of the tank. Then they sealed it all up and took their leave. ‘The heat will bring the maws out of dormancy,’ Wo said. ‘In less than a week, mobiles will begin to hatch and burrow to the surface. Be certain to give them plenty of food. They will need all their strength until they are well established. I would estimate that you will have castles rising in about three weeks.’

  ‘And my face? When will they carve my face?’

  ‘Turn on the hologram after about a month,’ she advised him. ‘And be patient. If you have any questions, please call. Wo and Shade are at your service.’ She bowed and left.

  Kress wandered back to the tank and lit a joystick. The desert was still and empty. He drummed his fingers impatiently against the plastic, and frowned.

  On the fourth day, Kress thought he glimpsed motion beneath the sand, subtle subterranean stirrings.

  On the fifth day, he saw his first mobile, a lone white.

  On the sixth day, he counted a dozen of them, whites and reds and blacks. The oranges were tardy. He cycled through a bowl of half-decayed table scraps. The mobiles sensed it at once, rushed to it, and began to drag pieces back to their respective corners. Each color group was very organized. They did not fight. Kress was a bit disappointed, but he decided to give them time.

  The oranges made their appearance on the eighth day. By then the other sandkings had begun to carry small stones and erect crude fortifications. They still did not war. At the moment they were only half the size of those he had seen at Wo and Shade’s, but Kress thought they were growing rapidly.

  The castles began to rise midway through the second week. Organized battalions of mobiles dragged heavy chunks of sandstone and granite to their corners, where other mobiles were pushing sand into place with mandibles and tendrils. Kress had purchased a pair of magnifying goggles so he could watch them work, wherever they might go in the tank. He wandered around and around the tall plastic walls, observing. It was fascinating. The castles were a bit plainer than Kress would have liked, but he had an idea about that. The next day he cycled through some obsidian and flakes of colored glass along with the food. Within hours, they had been incorporated into the castle walls.

  The black castle was the first completed, followed by the white and red fortresses. The oranges were last, as usual. Kress took his meals into the living room and ate seated on the couch, so he could watch. He expected the first war to break out any hour now.

  He was disappointed. Days passed; the castles grew taller and more grand, and Kress seldom left the tank except to attend to his sanitary needs and answer critical business calls. But the sandkings did not war. He was getting upset.

  Finally, he stopped feeding them.

  Two days after the table scraps had ceased to fall from their desert sky, four black mobiles surrounded an orange and dragged it back to their maw. They maimed it first, ripping off its mandibles and antennae and limbs, and carried it through the shadowed main gate of their miniature castle. It never emerged. Within an hour, more than forty orange mobiles marched across the sand and attacked the blacks’ corner. They were outnumbered by the blacks that came rushing up from the depths. When the fighting was over, the attackers had been slaughtered. The dead and dying were taken down to feed the black maw.

  Kress, delighted, congratulated himself on his genius.

  When he put food into the tank the following day, a three-cornered battle broke out over its possession. The whites were the big winners. After that, war followed war.

  Almost a month to the day after Jala Wo had delivered the sandkings, Kress turned on the hologram projector, and his face materialized in the tank. It turned, slowly, around and around so his gaze fell on all four castles equally. Kress thought it rather a good likeness – it had his impish grin, wide mouth, full cheeks. His blue eyes sparkled, his gray hair was carefully arrayed in a fashionable sidesweep, his eye-brows were thin and sophisticated.

  Soon enough, the sandkings set to work. Kress fed them lavishly while his image beamed down at them from their sky. Temporarily, the wars stopped. All activity was directed towards worship.

  His face emerged on the castle walls.

  At first all four carvings looked alike to him, but as the work continued and Kress studied the reproductions, he began to detect subtle differences in technique and execution. The reds were the most creative, using tiny flakes of slate to put the gray in his hair. The white idol seemed young and mischievous to him, while the face shaped by the blacks – although virtually the same, line for line – struck him as wise and beneficent. The orange sandkings, as ever, were last and least. The wars had not gone well for them, and their castle was sad compared to the others. The image they carved was crude and cartoonish, and they seemed to intend to leave it that way. When they stopped work on the face, Kress grew quite piqued with them, but there was really nothing he could do.

  When all the sandkings had finished their Kress-faces, he turned off the hologram and decided that it was time to have a party. His friends would be impressed. He could even stage a war for them, he thought. Humming happily to himself, he began to draw up a guest list.

  The party was a wild success.

  Kress invited thirty people: a handful of close friends who shared his amusements, a few former lovers, and a collection of business and social rivals who could not afford to ignore his summons. He knew some of them would be discomfited and even offended by his sandkings. He counted on it. Simon Kress customarily considered his parties a failure unless at least one guest walked out in high dudgeon.

  On impulse he added Jala Wo’s name to his list. ‘Bring Shade if you like,’ he added when dictating
her invitation.

  Her acceptance surprised him just a bit. ‘Shade, alas, will be unable to attend. He does not go to social functions,’ Wo added. ‘As for myself, I look forward to the chance to see how your sandkings are doing.’

  Kress ordered them up a sumptuous meal. And when at last the conversation had died down, and most of his guests had gotten silly on wine and joysticks, he shocked them by personally scraping their table leavings into a large bowl. ‘Come, all of you,’ he told them. ‘I want to introduce you to my newest pets.’ Carrying the bowl, he conducted them into his living room.

  The sandkings lived up to his fondest expectations. He had starved them for two days in preparation, and they were in a fighting mood. While the guests ringed the tank, looking through the magnifying glasses Kress had thoughtfully provided, the sandkings waged a glorious battle over the scraps. He counted almost sixty dead mobiles when the struggle was over. The reds and whites, who had recently formed an alliance, emerged with most of the food.

  ‘Kress, you’re disgusting,’ Cath m’Lane told him. She had lived with him for a short time two years before, until her soppy sentimentality almost drove him mad. ‘I was a fool to come back here. I thought perhaps you’d changed, wanted to apologize.’ She had never forgiven him for the time his shambler had eaten an excessively cute puppy of which she had been fond. ‘Don’t ever invite me here again, Simon.’ She strode out, accompanied by her current lover and a chorus of laughter.

  His other guests were full of questions.

  Where did the sandkings come from? they wanted to know. ‘From Wo and Shade, Importers,’ he replied, with a polite gesture towards Jala Wo, who had remained quiet and apart through most of the evening.

  Why did they decorate their castles with his likeness? ‘Because I am the source of all good things. Surely you know that?’ That brought a round of chuckles.

  Will they fight again? ‘Of course, but not tonight. Don’t worry. There will be other parties.’

  Jad Rakkis, who was an amateur xenologist, began talking about other social insects and the wars they fought. ‘These sandkings are amusing, but nothing really. You ought to read about Terran soldier ants, for instance.’

  ‘Sandkings are not insects,’ Jala Wo said sharply, but Jad was off and running, and no one paid her the slightest attention. Kress smiled at her and shrugged.

  Malada Blane suggested a betting pool the next time they got together to watch a war, and everyone was taken with the idea. An animated discussion about rules and odds ensued. It lasted for almost an hour. Finally the guests began to take their leave.

  Jala Wo was the last to depart. ‘So,’ Kress said to her when they were alone, ‘it appears my sandkings are a hit.’

  ‘They are doing well,’ Wo said. ‘Already they are larger than my own.’

  ‘Yes,’ Kress said, ‘except for the oranges.’

  ‘I had noticed that,’ Wo replied. ‘They seem few in number, and their castle is shabby.’

  ‘Well, someone must lose,’ Kress said. ‘The oranges were late to emerge and get established. They have suffered for it.’

  ‘Pardon,’ said Wo, ‘but might I ask if you are feeding your sandkings sufficiently?’

  Kress shrugged. ‘They diet from time to time. It makes them fiercer.’

  She frowned. ‘There is no need to starve them. Let them war in their own time, for their own reasons. It is their nature, and you will witness conflicts that are delightfully subtle and complex. The constant war brought on by hunger is artless and degrading.’

  Simon Kress repaid Wo’s frown with interest. ‘You are in my house, Wo, and here I am the judge of what is degrading. I fed the sandkings as you advised, and they did not fight.’

  ‘You must have patience.’

  ‘No,’ Kress said. ‘I am their master and their god, after all. Why should I wait on their impulses? They did not war often enough to suit me. I corrected the situation.’

  ‘I see,’ said Wo. ‘I will discuss the matter with Shade.’

  ‘It is none of your concern, or his,’ Kress snapped.

  ‘I must bid you good night, then,’ Wo said with resignation. But as she slipped into her coat to depart, she fixed him with a final disapproving stare. ‘Look to your faces, Simon Kress,’ she warned him. ‘Look to your faces.’

  Puzzled, he wandered back to the tank and stared at the castles after she had taken her departure. His faces were still there, as ever. Except – he snatched up his magnifying goggles and slipped them on. Even then it was hard to make out. But it seemed to him that the expression on the face of his images had changed slightly, that his smile was somehow twisted so that it seemed a touch malicious. But it was a very subtle change, if it was a change at all. Kress finally put it down to his suggestibility, and resolved not to invite Jala Wo to any more of his gatherings.

  Over the next few months, Kress and about a dozen of his favorites got together weekly for what he liked to call his ‘war games.’ Now that his initial fascination with the sandkings was past, Kress spent less time around his tank and more on his business affairs and his social life, but he still enjoyed having a few friends over for a war or two. He kept the combatants sharp on a constant edge of hunger. It had severe effects on the orange sandkings, who dwindled visibly until Kress began to wonder if their maw was dead. But the others did well enough.

  Sometimes at night, when he could not sleep, Kress would take a bottle of wine into the darkened living room, where the red gloom of his miniature desert was the only light. He would drink and watch for hours, alone. There was usually a fight going on somewhere, and when there was not he could easily start one by dropping in some small morsel of food.

  They took to betting on the weekly battles, as Malada Blane had suggested. Kress won a good amount by betting on the whites, who had become the most powerful and numerous colony in the tank, with the grandest castle. One week he slid the corner of the tank top aside, and dropped the food close to the white castle instead of on the central battleground as usual, so that the others had to attack the whites in their stronghold to get any food at all. They tried. The whites were brilliant in defense. Kress won a hundred standards from Jad Rakkis.

  Rakkis, in fact, lost heavily on the sandkings almost every week. He pretended to a vast knowledge of them and their ways, claiming that he had studied them after the first party, but he had no luck when it came to placing his bets. Kress suspected that Jad’s claims were empty boasting. He had tried to study the sandkings a bit himself, in a moment of idle curiosity, tying in to the library to find out to what world his pets were native. But there was no listing for them. He wanted to get in touch with Wo and ask her about it, but he had other concerns, and the matter kept slipping his mind.

  Finally, after a month in which his losses totaled more than a thousand standards, Jad Rakkis arrived at the war games carrying a small plastic case under his arm. Inside was a spiderlike thing covered with fine golden hair.

  ‘A sand spider,’ Rakkis announced. ‘From Cathaday. I got it this afternoon from t’Etherane the Petseller. Usually they remove the poison sacs, but this one is intact. Are you game, Simon? I want my money back. I’ll bet a thousand standards, sand spider against sandkings.’

  Kress studied the spider in its plastic prison. His sandkings had grown – they were twice as large as Wo’s, as she’d predicted – but they were still dwarfed by this thing. It was venomed, and they were not. Still, there were an awful lot of them. Besides, the endless sandking wars had begun to grow tiresome lately. The novelty of the match intrigued him. ‘Done,’ Kress said. ‘Jad, you are a fool. The sandkings will just keep coming until this ugly creature of yours is dead.’

  ‘You are the fool, Simon,’ Rakkis replied, smiling. ‘The Cathadayn sand spider customarily feeds on burrowers that hide in nooks and crevices and – well, watch – it will go straight into those castles, and eat the maws.’

  Kress scowled amid general laughter. He hadn’t counted on that. ‘Get on
with it,’ he said irritably. He went to freshen his drink.

  The spider was too large to cycle conveniently through the food chamber. Two of the others helped Rakkis slide the tank top slightly to one side, and Malada Blane handed him up his case. He shook the spider out. It landed lightly on a miniature dune in front of the red castle, and stood confused for a moment, mouth working, legs twitching menacingly.

  ‘Come on,’ Rakkis urged. They all gathered round the tank. Simon Kress found his magnifiers and slipped them on. If he was going to lose a thousand standards, at least he wanted a good view of the action.

  The sandkings had seen the invader. All over the castle, activity had ceased. The small scarlet mobiles were frozen, watching.

  The spider began to move toward the dark promise of the gate. On the tower above, Simon Kress’ countenance stared down impassively.

  At once there was a flurry of activity. The nearest red mobiles formed themselves into two wedges and streamed over the sand toward the spider. More warriors erupted from inside the castle and assembled in a triple line to guard the approach to the underground chamber where the maw lived. Scouts came scuttling over the dunes, recalled to fight.

  Battle was joined.

  The attacking sandkings washed over the spider. Mandibles snapped shut on legs and abdomen, and clung. Reds raced up the golden legs to the invader’s back. They bit and tore. One of them found an eye, and ripped it loose with tiny yellow tendrils. Kress smiled and pointed.

  But they were small, and they had no venom, and the spider did not stop. Its legs flicked sandkings off to either side. Its dripping jaws found others, and left them broken and stiffening. Already a dozen of the reds lay dying. The sand spider came on and on. It strode straight through the triple line of guardians before the castle. The lines closed around it, covered it, waging desperate battle. A team of sandkings had bitten off one of the spider’s legs, Kress saw. Defenders leaped from atop the towers to land on the twitching, heaving mass.