Hugo awards the short st.., p.163
Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 1), page 163
"But . . . but I don't own a harpsichord," she whispered in bewilderment. She started forward to touch it and assure herself of its reality. She smashed into the something again, grabbed it and felt it. It was the back of a couch. She looked around frantically. This was not one of her rooms. The harpsichord. Vivid Brueghels hanging on the walls, Jacobean furniture, Linenfold paneled doors, Crewel drapes.
But . . . this is the . . . the Raxon apartment downstairs. 1 must be seeing through their eyes. I must . . . he was right. I . . : ' She closed her eyes and looked. She saw a melange of apartments, streets, crowds, people, events. She had always seen this sort of montage on occasion but had always thought it was merely the total visual recall which was a major factor in her extraordinary abilities and success. Now she knew the truth.
She began to sob again. She felt her way around the couch and sat down, despairing. When at last the convulsion spent itself she wiped her eyes courageously, determined to face reality. She was no coward. But when she opened her eyes she was shocked by another bombshell. She saw her familiar room in tones of gray. She saw Blaise Skiaki standing in the open door smiling at her. - "Blaise?" she whispered.
"The name is Wish, my dear. Mr. Wish. What's yours?"
"Blaise, for God's sake, not me! Not me. I left no death-wish trail."
"What's your name, my dear? We've met before?"
"Gretchen," she screamed. "I'm Gretchen Nunn and I have no death-wish."
"Nice meeting you again, Gretchen," he said in glassy tones, smiling the glassy smile of Mr. Wish. He took two steps toward her. She jumped up and ran behind the couch.
"Blaise, listen to me. You are not Mr. Wish. There is no Mr. Wish. You are Dr. Blaise Skiaki, a famous scientist. You are chief chemist at CCC and have created many wonderful perfumes."
He took another step toward her, unwinding the scarf he wore around his neck.
"Blaise, I'm Gretchen. We've been lovers for two months. You must remember. Try to remember. You told me about my eyes tonight . . . being blind. You must remember that."
He smiled and whirled the scarf into a cord.
"Blaise, you're suffering from fugue. A blackout. A change of psyche. This isn't the real you. It's another creature driven by a pheromone. But I left no pheromone trail. I couldn't. I've never wanted to die."
"Yes, you do, my dear. Only happy to grant your wish. That's why I'm called Mr. Wish."
She squealed like a trapped rat and began darting and dodging while he closed in on her. She feinted him to one side, twisted to the other with a clear chance of getting out the door ahead of him, only to crash into three grinning goons standing shoulder to shoulder. They grabbed and held her.
Mr. Wish did not know that he also left a pheromone trail. It was a pheromone trail of murder.
"Oh, it's you again," Mr. Wish sniffed.
"Hey, old buddy-boy, got a looker this time, huh?"
"And loaded. Dig this layout"
"Great. Makes up for the last three which was nothin'. Thanks, buddy-boy. You can go home now."
"Why don't I ever get to kill one?" Mr. Wish exclaimed petulantly.
"Now, now. No sulks. We got to protect our bird dog. You lead. We follow and do the rest."
"And if anything goes wrong, you're the setup," one of the goons giggled.
"Go home, buddy-boy. The rest is ours. No arguments. We already explained the standoff to you. We know who you are but you don't know who we are."
"I know who I am," Mr. Wish said with dignity. "I am Mr. Wish and I still think I have the right to kill at least one."
"All right, all right. Next time. That's a promise. Now blow."
As Mr. Wish exited resentfully, they ripped Gretchen naked and let out a huge wow when they saw the five-carat diamond in her navel. Mr. Wish turned and saw its scintillation too. "But that's mine," he said in a confused voice. "That's only for my eyes. I-Gretchen said she would never-" Abruptly Dr. Blaise Skiaki spoke in a tone accustomed to command: "Gretchen, what the hell are you doing here? What's this place? Who are these creatures? What's going on?"
When the police arrived they found three dead bodies and a composed Gretchen Nunn sitting with a laser pistol in her lap. She told a perfectly coherent story of forcible entry, an attempt at armed rape and robbery, and how she was constrained to meet force with force. There were a few loopholes in her account. The bodies were not armed, but if the men had said they were armed Miss Nunn, of course, would have believed them. The three were somewhat battered, but goons were always fighting. Miss Nunn was commended for her courage and cooperation.
After her final report to the Chairman (which was not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth) Miss Nunn received her check and went directly to the perfume laboratory, which she entered without warning. Dr. Skiaki was doing strange and mysterious things with pipettes, flasks and reagent bottles. Without turning he ordered, "Out. Out. Out."
"Good morning, Dr. Skiaki."
He turned, displaying a mauled face and black eyes, and smiled. "Well, well, well. The famous Gretchen Nunn, I presume. Voted Person of the Year three times in succession."
"No, sir. People from my class don't have last names." "Knock off the sir bit."
"Yes s-Mr. Wish."
"Oi!" He winced. "Don't remind me of that incredible insanity. How did everything go with the Chairman?"
"I snowed him. You're off the hook."
"Maybe I'm off his hook but not my own. I was seriously thinking of having myself committed this morning."
"What stopped you?"
"Well, I got involved in this patchouli synthesis and sort of forgot."
She laughed. "You don't have to worry. You're saved." "You mean cured?"
"No, Blaise. Not any more than I'm cured of my blindness. But we're both saved because we're aware. We can cope now."
He nooded slowly but not happily.
"So what are you going to do today?" she asked cheerfully.
"Struggle with patchouli?"
"No," he said gloomily. "I'm still in one hell of a shock. I
think I'll take the day off."
"Perfect. Bring two dinners."
CATHADONIAN ODYSSEY
Michael Bishop
Then he threw back his sweaty face and looked at the imperceptibly lightening sky, where winked a thousand scornful stars.
Just before he passed out, Ethan whispered the word "Bucephalus." No one heard him. No one knew his hurt.
Cathay. Caledonia. Put the words together: Cathadonia. That was what the namer of the planet, a murderer with the sensitivity of a poet, had done. He had put the two exotic words together— Cathay and Caledonia—so that the place they designated might have a name worthy of its own bewitching beauty. Cathadonia. Exotic, far-off, bewitching, incomprehensible. A world of numberless pools. A world of bizarrely constituted "orchards," a world with one great, gong-tormented sea.
Cathadonia.
And the first thing that men had done there, down on the surface, was kill as many of the exotic little tripodal natives as their laser pistols could dispatch.
Squiddles, the men off the merchantship had called them. They called them other fanciful names, too, perhaps inspired by the sensitive murderer who had coined the planet's name. Treefish. Porpurls. Pintails. Willowpusses. Tridderlings. Devil apes.
The names didn't matter. The men killed the creatures wantonly, brutally, laughingly. For sport. For nothing but sport. They were off the merchantship Golden heading homeward from a colonized region of the galactic arm. They made planetfall because no one had really noticed Cathadonia before and because they were ready for a rest. Down on the surface, for relaxation's sake, they killed the ridiculous-looking squiddles. Or treefish. Or porpurls. Or willowpusses. Take your choice of names. The names didn't matter.
Once home, the captain of the Golden reported a new planet to the authorities. He used the name Cathadonia, the murderer's coinage, and Cathadonia was the name that went into the books. The captain said nothing about his crewmen's sanguinary recreation on the planet. How could he? Instead, he gave coordinates, reported that the air was breathable, and volunteered the information that Cathadonia was beautiful. "Just beautiful, really just beautiful."
The men of the Golden, after all, were not savages. Hadn't one of them let the word Cathadonia roll off his lips in a moment of slaughterous ecstasy? Didn't the universe forgive its poets, its name-givers?
Later, Earth sent the survey probeship Nobel, on its way to the virgin milkiness of the Magellanic Clouds, in the direction of Cathadonia. The Nobel, in passing, dropped a descentcraft toward the planet's great ocean. The three scientists aboard that descent-craft were to establish a floating station whose purpose would be to determine the likelihood of encountering life on Cathadonia. The captain of the Golden had not mentioned life. The scientists did not know it existed there. Preliminary sensor scans from the Nobel suggested the presence of botanicals and the possibility of some sort of inchoate aquatic life. Nothing sentient, surely.
Whatever the situation down there, the scientists aboard the floating station would unravel it.
Unfortunately, something happened to the descentcraft on its way down, something that never happened to survey descentcraft and therefore something the NobePs crew had made no provision for. In fact, the Nobel, as was usual in these cases, went on without confirming touchdown; it went on toward the Magellanic Clouds. And some odd, anomalous force wrenched the controls of the descentcraft out of the hands of its pilots and hurled it planetward thousands of kilometers from the great ocean.
It fell to the surface beside a sentinel willow on the banks of one of Cathadonia's multitudinous pools. There it crumpled, sighed, ticked with alien heat.
This, then, becomes the story of a survivor—the story of Maria Jill Ian, a woman downed on an out-of-the-way world with no hope of immediate rescue, with no companions to share her agony, with no goal but the irrational desire to reach Cathadonia's ocean. A woman who did not wholly understand what had happened to her. A woman betrayed by her own kind and ambivalently championed by a creature carrying out a larger betrayal.
—For Cathadonia.
/ am standing on Cathadonia, first planet from an ugly little star that Arthur called Ogre's Heart. I am writing in a logbook that is all I have left of the materials in our descentcraft. God knows why I am writing.
Arthur is dead. Fischelson is dead. The Nobel is on its way to the Magellanic Clouds. It will be back in three months. Small comfort. I will be dead, too. Why am I not dead now?
The "landscape" about me is dotted with a thousand small pools. Over each pool a single willowlike tree droops its head. The pools are clear, I have drunk from them. And the long slender leaves of the willows—or at least of this willow—contain a kind of pulp that I have eaten. Trees at nearby pools appear to bear fruit.
But drinking and eating are painful exercises now, and I don't know why I do it. Arthur and Fischelson are dead.
The light from Ogre's Heart sits on the faces of a thousand pools as if they were mirrors. Mirrors. Mirrors wherein I might drown and rediscover the painlessness of who I was before . . .
Maria Jill Ian did not die. She slept by the wreck of the descentcraft. She slept two of Cathadonia's days, then part of a third. The silver lacery of the pulpwillow shaded her during the day, kept off the rains at night.
When she finally woke and began to live again, she "buried" Arthur and Fischelson by tying pieces of the descentcraft's wreckage to their mangled bodies and dragging them to the edge of the pool. Then she waded into the mirror surface and felt the slick pool weeds insinuate themselves between her toes. A strong woman well into middle age, she sank first Fischelson's body and then that of Arthur, her husband. She held the men under and maneuvered the weights on their corpses so that neither of them would float up again. She was oblivious to the smell of their decaying bodies; she knew only that it would be very easy to tie a weight about her own waist and then walk deeper into the pool.
The day after accomplishing these burials, Maria Jill Ian looked away to the western horizon and began walking toward the pools that glimmered there. Just as she had not known why she bothered to eat and drink, she did not now understand why the horizon should draw her implacably toward the twilight baths of Ogre's Heart.
Later she would rediscover her reasons, but now she simply did what she must.
Today I walked a distance I can't accurately determine. My feet fell on the pliant verges of at least a hundred ponds.
A small thing has happened to keep me going.
The trees over the pools have begun to change. Although their long branches still waterfall to the pools' surfaces, not all these trees are the pulpwillows that stand sentinel in the region where Arthur, Fischelson, and I crashed. Some have brilliant scarlet blossoms; some have trunks that grow in gnarled configurations right out of the pools' centers; some are heavy with globular fruit; some are naked of all adornment and trail their boughs in the water like skeletal hands.
But I've eaten of the trees that bear fruit, and this fruit has been sweet and bursting with flavor, invariably. It's strange that I don't really care for any of it. Still, it's nourishment.
The sky turns first blazing white at twilight, then yellow like lemons, then a brutal pink. And at night the trees stand in stark tableaux that hail me onward.
I still hurt. I still hurt terribly, from the crash, from my loss—but I'm beginning to heal. After sleeping, I'll continue to walk away from Arthur and Fischelson—in the direction of falling, ever-falling Ogre's Heart. . . .
One morning Maria Jill Ian came to a pond beside which grew a huge umbrellalike tree of gold and scarlet. The tree bore a kind of large thick-shelled mahogany-colored nut rather than the commonplace varieties of fruit she had been living on for the past two or three days.
She decided to stop and eat.
The nuts, however, hung high in the branches of the tree. Its twisted bole looked as if it might allow her to climb to the higher entanglements where she could gather food as she liked. Her simple foil jumpsuit did not impede her climbing. Leaves rustled and flashed. She gained a place where she could rest, and stopped.
All about her the pools of Cathadonia lay brilliant and blinding beneath their long-fingered sentinel trees.
Ogre's Heart was moving up the sky.
Maria Jill Ian turned her head to follow the sun's squat ascent. In the whiteness cascading through the branches overhead, she saw a shape—a shape at least as large as a small man, a form swaying over her, eclipsing the falling light, a thing more frightening than the realization that she was light-years from Earth, stranded.
Not thinking, merely reacting, she stepped to the branch below her and then swung out from the willow. She landed on the marshy ground beside the pond, caught herself up, and scrabbled away.
Something vaguely tentacular plunged from the scarlet-and-gold umbrella of the tree and disappeared noiselessly into the pool.
Maria Jill Ian began to run. She ran westward, inevitably toward another pool, struggling in ground that squelched around her boots, looking back now and again in an effort to see the thing that had plunged.
She saw the silver water pearl-up, part, and stream down the creature's narrow head. It was going to pursue her, she knew. Although it came on comically, it flailed with a deftness that demolished the impulse to laugh. Maria Jill Ian did not look back again.
All of Cathadonia breathed with her as, desperately, she ran.
I call him Eracero. It's a joke. He has no arms; he swims like the much-maligned "wetbacks" of another time. I don't know what sort of creature he is.
A description?
Very well. To begin: Eracero has no arms, but in other respects he resembles a man-sized spider monkey—except his body is absolutely hairless, smooth as the hide of a porpoise, a whitish-blue like the surfaces of Cathadonia's pools.
To continue: He is arboreal and aquatic at once. He uses his feet and his sleek prehensile tail to climb to the uppermost branches of any poolside willow. Conversely, his armlessness has streamlined his upper torso to such an extent that he can slide through the water like a cephalopod. Indeed, he moves with the liquid grace of an octopus, although one who is five times over an amputee.
To conclude: What disarms even me is Eracero's face. It is small, expressive, curious, and winning. The eyes are an old man's (sometimes), the mouth a baby's, the ears a young girl's. The trauma of our first meeting has slipped out of our memories, just as Ogre's Heart plunges deathward at twilight.
We are friends, Bracero and I.
The creature had caught up with her when she could run no more. Halfway between two of the planet's glimmering pools Maria Jill Ian collapsed and waited for the thing to fall upon her.
Instead, it stopped at a small distance and regarded her almost sympathetically, she thought. Its body put her in mind of a small boy sitting on a three-legged stool, his arms clasped behind his back as if desirous of looking penitent. She lay unmoving on the marshy earth, staring at the creature over one muddied forearm.
Blinking occasionally, it stared back.
Finally she got up and went on to the next pool, where she leaned against the trunk of an especially blasted-looking tree. The naked creature with two supple legs and a lithe tail—or another leg— followed her, almost casually. It made a wide arc away from Maria Jill Ian and came in behind the willow she was leaning upon. Stoic now, she didn't even look to see what it was doing.
To join Arthur, to join Fischelson, to join the centuries' countless dead, would not be unpleasant, she thought.
The eel-beast hoisted itself into the willow and climbed silently to the highest branches. Then it hung there, looking down at her like a suddenly sullen child swinging by his knees.
That evening, her fear gone, she named the creature Bracero. On the second day beside this pond she saw how it fed.
Ogre's Heart gave them a characteristically magnesium-bright dawn. Sentinel trees cast shadows like carefully penned lines of indigo ink. A thousand mirror pools turned from slate to silver. Lying on her back, Maria opened her eyes and witnessed something she didn't entirely believe.
