Hugo awards the short st.., p.197
Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 1), page 197
The brick rumbled, fell. Dust came up, thick for a moment, obscuring everything.
She stood still, hands at her sides, then wiped her sooty face and turned and started walking, keeping to the center of the dead streets.
Overhead, clouds gathered, heavy with rain.
She wandered at peace now, seeing the rain spot the pavement, not yet feeling it.
In tine the rain did fall, and the ruins became chill and cold. She visited the dead. lake and the burned trees, the ruin of Graben's, out of which she gathered a string of crystal to wear.
She smiled when, a day later, a looter drove her from her food supply. He had a wraith's look, and she laughed from a place he did not dare. to climb and told him so.
And recovered her cache later when it came true, and settled among the ruined shells that held no further threat, no other nightmares, with her crystal necklace and tomorrows that were the same as today.
One could live in ruins, only so the fires were gone.
And the ghosts were all in the past, invisible.
giANTS
Edward Bryant
Paul Chavez looked from the card on the silver plate to O'Han-Ion's face and back to the card. "I couldn't find the tray," she said. "Put the thing away maybe twelve years ago and didn't have time to look. Never expected to need it." Her smile folded like parchment and Chavez thought he heard her lips crackle.
He reached out and took the card. Neat black-on-white printing asserted that one Laynie Bridgewell was a bona fide correspondent for the UBC News Billings bureau. He turned the card over. Sloppy cursive script deciphered as: "Imperitive I talk to you about New Mexico Project." "Children of electronic journalism," Chavez said amusedly. He set the card back on the plate. "I suppose I ought to see her in the drawing room—if I were going to see her, which I'm not."
"She's a rather insistent young woman," said O'Hanlon.
Chavez sat stiffly down on the couch. He plaited his fingers and rested the palms on the crown of his head. "It's surely time for my nap. Do be polite."
"Of course, Dr. Chavez," said O'Hanlon, sweeping silently out of the room, gracefully turning as she exited to close the doors of the library.
Pain simmerfed in the joints of his long bones. Chavez shook two capsules from his omnipresent pill case and poured a glass of water from the carafe on the walnut desk. Dr. Hansen had said it would only get worse. Chavez lay on his side on the couch and felt weary —seventy-two years' weary. He supposed he should have walked down the hall to his bedroom, but there was no need. He slept better here in the library. The hardwood panels and the subdued Mondrian originals soothed him. Endless ranks of books stood vigil. He loved to watch the wind-blown patterns of the pine boughs beyond the French windows that opened onto the balcony. He loved to study the colors as sunlight spilled through the leaded DNA double-helix pane Annie had given him three decades before.
Chavez felt the capsules working faster than he had expected. He thought he heard the tap of something hard against glass. But then he was asleep.
In its basics, the dream never changed.
They were there in the desert somewhere between Albuquerque and Alamogordo, all of them: Ben Peterson, the tough cop; the FBI man Robert Graham; Chavez himself; and Patricia Chavez, his beautiful, brainy daughter.
The wind, gusting all afternoon, had picked up; it whistled steadily, atonally, obscuring conversation. Sand sprayed abrasively against their faces. Even the gaunt stands of spiny cholla bowed with the wind.
Patricia had struck off on her own tangent. She struggled up the base of a twenty-foot dune. She began to slip back almost as far as each step advanced her.
They all heard it above the wind—the shrill, ululating chitter.
"What the hell is that?" Graham yelled.
Chavez shook his head. He began to run toward Patricia. The sand, the wind, securing the brim of his hat with one hand; all conspired to make his gait clumsy.
The immense antennae rose first above the crest of the dune. For a second, Chavez thought they surely must be branches of windblown cholla. Then the head itself heaved into view, faceted eyes coruscating with changing hues of red and blue. Mandibles larger than a farmer's scythes clicked and clashed. The ant paused, apparently surveying the creatures downslope.
"Look at the size of it," said Chavez, more to himself than to the others.
He heard Peterson's shout. "It's as big as a horse!" He glanced back and saw the policeman running for the car.
Graham's reflexes were almost as prompt. He had pulled his .38 Special from the shoulder holster and swung his arm, motioning Patricia to safety, yelling, "Back, get back!" Patricia began to run from the dune all too slowly, feet slipping on the sand, legs constricted by the ankle-length khaki skirt. Graham fired again and again, the gun popping dully in the wind.
The ant hesitated only a few seconds longer. The wind sleeked the tufted hair on its purplish-green thorax. Then it launched itself down the slope, all six articulated legs churning with awful precision.
Chavez stood momentarily frozen. He heard a coughing stutter from beside his shoulder. Ben Peterson had retrieved a Thompson submachine gun from the auto. Gouts of sand erupted around the advancing ant. The creature never hesitated.
Patricia lost her race in a dozen steps. She screamed once as the crushing mandibles closed around her waist. She looked despairingly at her father. Blood ran from both corners of her mouth.
There was an instant eerie tableau. The Tommy gun fell silent as Peterson let the muzzle fall in disbelief. The hammer of Graham's pistol clicked on a spent cylinder. Chavez cried out.
Uncannily, brutally graceful, the ant wheeled and, still carrying Patricia's body, climbed the slope. It crested the dune and vanished. Its chittering cry remained a moment more before raveling in the wind.
Sand flayed his face as Chavez called out his daughter's name over and over. Someone took his shoulder and shook him, telling him to stop it, to wake up. It wasn't Peterson or Graham.
It was his daughter.
She was his might-have-been daughter.
Concerned expression on her sharp-featured face, she was shaking him by the shoulder. Her eyes were dark brown and enormous. Her hair, straight and cut short, was a lighter brown.
She backed away from him and sat in his worn, leather-covered chair. He saw she was tall and very thin. For a moment he oscillated between dream-orientation and wakefulness. "Patricia?" Chavez said.
She did not answer.
Chavez let his legs slide off the couch and shakily sat up. "Who in the world are you?"
"My name's Laynie Bridgewell," said the young woman.
Chavez's mind focused. "Ah, the reporter."
"Correspondent."
"A semantic distinction. No essential difference." One level of his mind noted with amusement that he was articulating well through the confusion. He still didn't know what the hell was going on. He yawned deeply, stretched until a dart of pain cut the movement short, said, "Did you talk Ms. O'Hanlon into letting you up here?"
"Are you kidding?" Bridgewell smiled. "She must be a great watchdog."
"She's known me a long while. How did you get up here?"
Bridgewell looked mildly uncomfortable. "I, uh, climbed up."
"Climbed?"
"Up one of the pines. I shinnied up a tree to the balcony. The French doors were unlocked. I saw you inside sleeping, so I came in and waited."
"A criminal offense," said Chavez.
"They were unlocked," she said defensively.
"I meant sitting and watching me sleep. Terrible invasion of privacy. A person could get awfully upset, not knowing if another human being, a strange one at that, is secretly watching him snore or drool or whatever."
"You slept very quietly," said Bridgewell. "Very still. Until the nightmare."
"Ah," said Chavez. "It was that apparent?"
She nodded. "You seemed really upset. I thought maybe I ought to wake you."
Chavez said, "Did I say anything."
She paused and thought. "Only two words I could make out. A name—Patricia. And you kept saying 'them.' "
"That figures." He smiled. He felt orientation settling around him like familiar wallpaper in a bedroom, or old friends clustering at a departmental cocktail party. "You're from the UBC bureau in Billings?"
"I drove down this morning."
"Work for them long?"
"Almost a year."
"First job?"
She nodded. "First real job."
"You're what—twenty-one?" said Chavez.
"Twenty-two."
"Native?"
"Of Montana?" She shook her head. "Kansas."
"University of Southern California?"
Another shake. "Missouri."
"Ah," he said. "Good school." Chavez paused. "You're here on assignment?"
A third shake. "My own time."
"Ah," said Chavez again. "Ambitious. And you want to talk to me about the New Mexico Project?"
Face professionally sober, voice eager, she said, "Very much. I didn't have any idea you lived so close until I read the alumni bulletin from the University of Wyoming."
"I wondered how you found me out." Chavez sighed. "Betrayed by my alma mater ..." He looked at her sharply. "I don't grant interviews, even if I occasionally conduct them." He stood and smiled. "Will you be wanting to use the stairs, or would you rather shinny back down the tree?"
"Who is Patricia?" said Bridgewell.
"My daughter," Chavez started to say. "Someone from my past," he said.
"I lost people to the bugs," said Bridgewell quietly. "My parents were in Biloxi at the wrong time. Bees never touched them. The insecticide offensive got them both."
The pain in Chavez's joints became ice needles. He stood—and stared.
Even more quietly, Bridgewell said, "You don't have a daughter. Never had. I did my homework." Her dark eyes seemed even larger. "I don't know everything about the New Mexico Project— that's why I'm here. But I can stitch the rumors together." She paused. "I even had the bureau rent an old print of the movie. I watched it four times yesterday."
Chavez felt the disorientation return, felt exhausted, felt— damn it!—old. He fumbled the container of pain pills out of his trouser pocket, then returned it unopened. "Hungry?" he said.
"You better believe it. I had to leave before breakfast." "I think we'll get some lunch," said Chavez. "Let's go downtown. Try not to startle Ms. O'Hanlon as we leave."
O'Hanlon had encountered them in the downstairs hall, but reacted only with a poker face. "Would you and the young lady like some lunch, Dr. Chavez?"
"Not today," said Chavez, "but thank you. Ms. Bridgewell and I are going to eat in town."
O'Hanlon regarded him. "Have you got your medicine?"
Chavez patted his trouser leg and nodded.
"And you'll be back before dark?"
"Yes," he said. "Yes. And if I'm not, I'll phone. You're not my mother. I'm older than you."
"Don't be cranky," she said. "Have a pleasant time."
Bridgewell and Chavez paused in front of the old stone house. "Why don't we take my car?" said Bridgewell. "I'll run you back after lunch." She glanced at him. "You're not upset about being driven around by a kid, are you?" He smiled and shook his head.
"Okay."
They walked a hundred meters to where her car was pulled off the blacktop and hidden in a stand of spruce. It was a Volkswagen beetle of a vintage Chavez estimated to be a little older than its
driver.
As if reading his thoughts, Bridgewell said, "Runs like a watch —the old kind, with hands. Got a hundred and ten thousand on her third engine. I call her Scarlett." The car's color was a dim red
like dried clay.
"Do you really miss watches with hands?" said Chavez, opening
the passenger-side door.
"I don't know—I guess I hadn't really thought about it. I know I don't miss sliderules."
"/ miss hands on timepieces." Chavez noticed there were no seatbelts. "A long time ago, I stockpiled all the Timexes I'd need for my lifetime."
"Does it really make any difference?"
"I suppose not." Chavez considered that as Bridgewell drove onto the highway and turned downhill.
"You love the past a lot, don't you?"
"I'm nostalgic," said Chavez.
"I think it goes a lot deeper than that." Bridgewell handled the VW like a racing Porsche. Chavez held onto the bar screwed onto the glove-box door with both hands. Balding radial tires shrieked as she shot the last curve and they began to descend the slope into Casper. To the east, across the city, they could see a ponderous dirigible-freighter settling gracefully toward a complex of blocks and domes.
"Why," she said, "are they putting a pilot fusion plant squarely in the middle of the biggest coal deposits in the country?"
Chavez shrugged. "When man entered the atomic age he opened a door into a new world. What he may eventually find in that new world no one can predict."
"Huh?" Bridgewell said. Then: "Oh, the movie. Doesn't it ever worry you—having that obsession?"
"No," said Chavez. Bridgewell slowed slightly as the road became city street angling past blocks of crumbling budget housing. "Turn left on Rosa. Head downtown."
"Where are we eating? I'm hungry enough to eat coal byproducts."
"Close. We're going to the oil can."
"Huh?" Bridgewell said again.
"The Petroleum Tower. Over there." Chavez pointed at a forty-storey cylindrical pile. It was windowed completely with bronze reflective panes. "The rooftop restaurant's rather good."
They left Scarlett in an underground lot and took the highspeed exterior elevator to the top of the Petroleum Tower. Bridge-well closed her eyes as the ground level rushed away from them. At the fortieth floor she opened her eyes to stare at the glassed-in restaurant, the lush hanging plants, the noontime crowd. "Who are these people? They all look so, uh, professional."
"They are that," said Chavez, leading the way to the maitre d'. "Oil people. Uranium people. Coal people. Slurry people. Shale people. Coal gasification—"
"I've got the point," Bridgewell said. "I feel a little under-dressed."
"They know me."
And so, apparently, they did. The maitre d' issued orders and Bridgewell and Chavez were instantly ushered to a table beside a floor-to-ceiling window.
"Is this a perk of being maybe the world's greatest molecular
biologist?"
Chavez shook his head. "More a condition of originally being a local boy. Even with the energy companies, this is still a small town at heart." He fell silent and looked out the window. The horizon was much closer than he remembered from his childhood. A skiff of brown haze lay over the city. There was little open land to be seen.
They ordered drinks.
They made small-talk.
They ordered food.
"This is very pleasant," said Bridgewell, "but I'm still a correspondent. I think you're sitting on the biggest story of the decade."
"That extraterrestrial ambassadors are shortly to land near Albuquerque? That they have picked America as a waystation to repair their ship?"
Bridgewell looked bemused. "I'm realizing I don't know when
you're kidding."
"Am I now?"
"Yes."
"So why do you persist in questioning me?"
She hesitated. "Because I suspect you want to tell someone. It might as well be me."
He thought about that awhile. The waiter brought the garnish tray and Chavez chewed on a stick of carrot. "Why don't you tell me the pieces you've picked up."
"And then?"
"We'll see," he said. "I can't promise anything."
Bridgewell said, "You're a lot like my father. I never knew when he was kidding either."
"Your turn," said Chavez.
The soup arrived. Bridgewell sipped a spoonful of French onion and set the utensil down. "The New Mexico Project. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with New Mexico. You wouldn't believe the time I've spent on the phone. All my vacation I ran around that state in Scarlett."
Chavez smiled a long time, finally said, "Think metaphorically. The Manhattan Project was conducted under Stagg Field in Chicago."
"I don't think the New Mexico Project has anything to do with nuclear energy," she said. "But I have heard a lot of mumbling about DNA chimeras."
"So far as I know, no genetic engineer is using recombinant DNA to hybridize creatures with all the more loathsome aspects of snakes, goats, and lions. The state of the art improves, but we're not that good yet."
"But I shouldn't rule out DNA engineering?" she said.
"Keep going."
"Portuguese is the official language of Brazil."
Chavez nodded.
"UBC's stringer in Recife has it that, for quite a while now, nothing's been coming out of the Brazilian nuclear power complex at Xique-Xique. I mean there's news, but it's all through official release. Nobody's going in or out."
Chavez said, "You would expect a station that new and large to be a concern of national security. Shaking down's a long and complex process."
"Maybe." She picked the ripe olives out of the newly arrived salad and carefully placed them in a line on the plate. "I've got a cousin in movie distribution. Just real scutwork so far, but she knows what's going on in the industry. She told me that the U.S. Department of Agriculture ordered a print from Warner Brothers dubbed in Portuguese and had it shipped to Brazilia. The print was that movie you're apparently so concerned with—Them! The one about the ants mutating from radioactivity in the New Mexico desert. The one about giant ants on the rampage."
"Only a paranoid could love this chain of logic," said Chavez.
Her face looked very serious. "If it takes a paranoid to come up with this story and verify it," she said, "then that's what I am. Maybe nobody else is willing to make the jumps. I am. I know nobody else has the facts. I'm going to get them."
To Chavez, it seemed that the table had widened. He looked across the linen wasteland at her. "The formidable Formicidae family . . ."he said. "So have you got a conclusion to state?" He felt the touch of tiny legs on his leg. He felt feathery antennae tickle the hairs on his thigh. He jerked back from the table and his water goblet overturned, the waterstain spreading smoothly toward the woman.
