Collected short fiction, p.822
Collected Short Fiction, page 822
“Madness, Jay!” Sadly, Habibula rolled his yellow eyes. “Utter madness. You know it can’t be done.”
“We’ll try it, Jay,” Samdu said. “If we must.”
Midnight past, Kalam rose and touched their shoulders. Samdu struggled into his ambulator. Habibula stifled a moan and followed them through the cots of snoring men, back down that dark tunnel into the mountain, till they came to a steel-barred barrier across it. Kalam’s headlamp found tall iron door with a massive lock. Samdu tried it and turned to Habibula.
“Giles,” he whispered, “can you get us through?”
“Must you doubt my precious skills?” Habibula wheezed. “I came here years ago for one last test of my dying skills.”
He twisted a scrap of wire in the keyhole and gestured for Samdu to try the door again. With a rusty screech, it swung open. Water drops fell and echoed in the dark ahead. They blundered on, with only Kalam’s headlamp to light the way through piles of black ruin that had been weaponry.
Deep in the mountain, Habibula yelped in alarm to stop them. Kalam tipped his head to show a wide black pit beyond a broken railing, the yelp quavering faintly back from somewhere far below. Habibula shrank back from a cold wind from below and a reek of long decay.
“A vent shaft,” he said. “If we can climb it.”
The headlamp found a rusty steel stair that spiraled around the shaft.
Kalam stepped through a gap in the railing and tipped his head to show the way. Samdu and Habibula climbed after him. They came out of the shaft into the pale light of a waning moon that fell on masses of twisted metal and missile-shattered concrete.
“The mortal bunker where I watched the missiles fall,” Habibula whispered. “Or what the bugs left of it.”
By moonlight, they found a way through the thickets and saplings grown up over the wrecked defenses and down a rocky gorge to level land. Daylight found them lost in a dense jungle of towering stalks wrapped in black leathery leaves and crowned with heavy masses of scarlet seed. It set them all to sneezing.
“A fearful reek!” Habibula wheezed. “Blackroot,” Kalam said. “Alien stuff.
Poison to us humans.”
Samdu lifted Habibula to let him look farther.
“We’re lost in a sea of what looks like a sea of mortal blood!” Habibula sneezed again. “Red seed pods waving in the wind. And a great machine roaring through them.”
“A harvester,” Kalam said. “It shreds the stalks, threshes out the seed, digs up the roots. We farm it for the Goodfellows. To pay for protection from the bugs.”
“Let me down!” Habibula cried out. “That machine is roaring straight at us.”
Samdu set him down, coughing and gasping for his breath.
“Did you see the Green Hall tower?” Kalam asked. “Off in the north?”
“With a big signal dish on top?”
“We’ve got to get there.”
“I don’t know how. It’s miles away. And the mortal harvester’s here on top of us.”
It thundered by, came back again and yet again, cutting their cover away, until they had to stumble out into sunlight. Scores of human workers were crawling on their knees where it had been, digging out the thick black roots its plows had turned up, knocking off the clinging soil, pitching them into a wagon drawn by a chuffing tractor. Men and women, little children, they were clad in grimy black. All wore white breathing masks. They rose and stared.
“Run!” Habibula yelled at Kalam. “Run for your blessed life!”
He stumbled off across the clods and staggered back when the harvester swerved turned off its last swath and swung back to face him. The driver opened a window high in the air-conditioned cab and shouted through a megaphone.
“Runaways! Escaped from the Home! Catch ‘em! Half a day free for all when we turn ‘em in.”
Kalam walked to meet the workers.
“Do it,” he called. “If you love crawling in the mud for these poison roots. If you don’t, listen to us.”
The bewildered workers stood shaking their heads, gazing at Kalam’s wide-lensed skullcap, at Samdu’s gigantic metal frame.
“Tell them, Giles,” Kalam called.
“Remember—” Choked with the thick black dust, Habibula had to blow his nose. “Do you remember the blessed Legion and how we fought to stop the hell-born bugs? Look at the fearful price we paid!” He pointed. “Look at Captain Hal Samdu, who lost three limbs. Look at Commander Kalam, blinded—”
“But still alive.” Kalam stepped closer to the workers. “And fit for one more battle. Your last chance at liberty.” He gestured. “If you will help us reach that tower—”
“Back to work, you idle idiots!” The driver was a beefy man with a bulldog jaw, a huge crimson Goodfriend heart on the breast of his white coveralls. “Hear that!” They heard the whine of sirens. “The Goodlife Guard. Back to the job, or they’ll make you sorry.”
“For sweet life’s sake!” Habibula fell to his knees, wheezily pleading. “Give yourselves a mortal chance!”
“Knock ‘em down!” the driver bawled. “Sit on ‘em till the guard gets here.”
“Hold everything!” A stooped, white-bearded man slid off the tractor and ripped off his breathing mask. “My father served in the Legion. He died at Pluto Station. Mom gave me his medals when I was a kid. If this is Commander Kalam, I say we trust him. If he needs wheels, I say we give him wheels.”
He tossed the tractor keys to Samdu.
Habibula and Kalam dived into the wagon and crouched down on the roots. The harvester roared and lumbered toward them. Samdu shook his metal fist at it and drove them jolting across the furrows. The harvester followed close. Habibula clung with one hand to the side of the rocking wagon and held the green stone to his lips until the harvester fell behind.
They reached a highway that took them past blood-red fields of uncut blackroot, past blackroot mills that poured dense black dust into the sky, past scores and hundreds of workers creeping on their knees behind the lumbering machines. A Goodlife patrol car was suddenly howling behind them.
“Better kiss your ring again.” Kalam grinned at him. “We need all your luck.”
“I don’t know, Jay.” Habibula sighed. “If you want the mortal truth, I lost the last of my trust when Elega LeChark swore at her trial that you’d been the leader of her plot with the bugs. Elega—a.” Whispering, he shook his head at the ring. “She had the look and body of a holy angel. A night with her was blessed heaven, till she showed me the black snake in her heart.”
He cringed from the screaming siren.
“Don’t grieve, Giles.” Kalam gripped his shoulder. “Our luck is what we make it. We’ve got to make it now.”
The patrol car screamed past them, veered off the road, and parked in the scarlet glow of a huge red heart above a blazing sign, GOODTIMES BAR. Habibula drew a long breath and kissed the ring.
“Every little helps.” Grinning, Kalam shaded his lenses to study a great black moon rising out of the blood-colored fields ahead. “A space freighter,” he said. “Loading a blackroot cargo.”
A few miles toward it, Samdu turned toward the lone green tower at the old starport.
“Remember?” Habibula nodded at a row of spacecraft standing behind a high steel fence. “Remember the silver towers they used to be, skipping from star to star in the time of one heart beat. Look at them now! Dead as the mortal Legion! Streaked with rust like drying blood, buried under all the years of weeds and brush.”
He shook his head at Kalam.
“Remember how we used to fly the starways? I went once with the Keeper’s guard when she toured the Legion forts on half a dozen secret planets. Her sacred sisters welcomed us like kings, feasting us, with meats and wines I won’t forget.”
Kalam shrugged and looked ahead at the freighter, an enormous dead-black globe. Tractor wagons in an endless line were halted on the road beneath it, waiting to dump their blackroot loads into loading conveyors.
Samdu drove on around the ship, and stopped beside a patrol car standing on the lot at the foot of the tower. His titanium fist seized a heavy blackroot root. They jumped out of the wagon and ran toward a massive metal door.
“Watch that mortal monster, Jay—”
The door was sliding open. A huge, red-shelled Goodfellow bounced out to meet them, its stalked eyes bent to study them, its silver signal dish tilted down.
“Sir!” Habibula bowed and raised a shaking hand. “Please forgive our intrusion. We intend no harm. We’ve come to report disorder—”
Its boneless arm swung a gleaming laser weapon at Samdu. The weapon flashed. His metal legs buckled. Shouting something incoherent, he crashed to the pavement. The weapon swung to Habibula.
“I loved you, Hal!” he wailed. “I knew we had no blessed chance.”
With a last convulsive effort, Samdu’s titanium arm hurled the heavy root. It hit the signal dish and carried it away. The crimson cylinder toppled to the pavement. Something inside it thudded, squalled, and ceased. Something hissed. The eyestalks threshed and went limp. The weapon clattered out of its grasp.
“For life’s precious sake—”
A door had fallen open in the side of tire cylinder when it fell. Habibula gasped and staggered back from a shapeless mass of thick blackjelly that quivered around long red fangs. A faint red gleam faded from the glassy bubbles that had been its actual eyes. Habibula bent double, sick from its fetid reek.
“A mortal bug!” he gasped when he could speak. “And a fearful trick on us. The Goodfellows saying they’d saved us. And all of them dragon bugs, ruling us out of their red tin cans!”
Kalam had bent over Samdu.
“Go—!” The whisper came faintly out of his crumpled frame. “Go on!”
Kalam patted the human shoulder and ran on into the tower. Habibula snatched the fallen laser weapon and followed him into a long dim hall. Nausea doubled him again.
“Bug stink,” Kalam said. “Don’t let it get you.”
He ran across the hall and stopped to punch at strange red characters glowing on a panel.
“Bug script,” he muttered. “On our own elevator.”
He turned his head to listen. Habibula heard a hollow hooting that seemed to come from somewhere below.
“A job for you, Giles.” He pointed to an archway at the end of the hall. “We’ve got surprise. Use it! There’s a stair. Take it to the top. Knock out that big signal dish.”
“Me?” Habibula blinked at the weapon. “All alone? Armed with only this mortal gadget I never saw before? Life knows I can’t—”
“Move it Giles, while you can. I’ve got another errand.”
“Jay, I never was never born to be a lone hero—”
The door snapped open. Kalam stepped inside. It snapped shut. Habibula was left alone, wheezing for breath. Something hooted, closer. Clutching the laser gun, he stumbled down the hall and through the arch. Beyond was a spiral stair. He kissed the green stone and stumbled up it. The hooting echoed behind him, louder and louder.
Gasping for breath, he reached the top landing and blundered though a doorway into interstellar space. A starry sky arched overhead, curving down into a starry void with no support beneath him. For an instant the illusion was perfect. He reeled with a vertigo that eased when the felt the comfort of a solid floor under his feet.
The stars were simulated, set in a web of thin bright lines in a dozen colors tracing the spaceways between them. The control room was a huge hollow globe. He was high on the side of it, standing on a transparent bridge that led to a tiny island of instrument consoles.
An air jet thundered.
He saw a huge red cylinder in the air overhead, soaring toward him from the consoles. It hooted. He saw a weapon in its serpent grasp. Its signal dish tipped toward him. He raised the captured laser gun, shaking in his clammy hands, and found the firing button. Its scarlet flash stabbed the dish.
The thunder ceased The cylinder fell past him, into the gulf of stars beneath. After a moment of silence, its crash rang against the walls around him.
Dazed with dread, he stumbled on to the consoles.
They were set in a tiny circle. He kissed the green stone and crouched down inside the circle, wheezing for his breath.
“I knew it, Jay!” he moaned. “I knew it when Elega duped me. I remember when we thought we thought we had it all. Our blessed colonies thriving on a thousand planets and the seven sister Keepers ready with all the power of AKKA safe in their seven might forts. I thought we were invincible.
“But the bugs were too much for us.” Crouching lower, he shook his head at the ring. “The mortal bugs and that witch Elega. I knew it. Jay. I knew we had no precious sliver of a chance—”
The stars were gone. Brightness blinded him. Thunder crashed, the roar of air jets. He blinked and found Goodfellow cylinders swarming into the room. The foremost came plunging straight at him. He aimed the laser gun and hit the trigger button. It failed to fire. Shrinking down from the deafening roar and the diving cylinder, he kissed the lucky stone. He knew nothing else to do.
The thunder stopped. The room went dark. The falling cylinder crushed him to the floor. He lay a long time there, dazed and aching from its weight on his legs. The fetid reek of the bugs grew strong around him. His throat grew dry. He longed for a drink, and dreamed of Goodsister Joylander taking his flask away.
“The last of us gone,” he was whispering. “The last of the mortal Legion.” He heard a rustle like rats in the dark. “Poor Hal gone. And Jay.” He tried to lift his head. “I don’t know where—”
“We’re right here with you.”
Kalam’s voice was like a dream, but the weight on his legs was gone. Samdu’s titanium arm was lifting him. It seemed another dream till he saw that the room was bright again, saw Samdu bending over him, heard Samdu’s booming voice.
“If you can stand up, Giles, we’re okay now.”
On his feet, he clung to the corner of the console and blinked at Samdu.
“Hal, I thought you were done for.”
“Bruises.” Samdu’s human shoulder shrugged. “A scratch on my good arm. The laser hit my knee and knocked me down, but I owe a debt to the Legion medics that build my suit before the bugs shut the center down. It was able to fix itself.
“And Jay has killed the bugs.”
“Killed them?” He shook his head at Kalam. “How?”
“Or let them kill themselves.” Kalam grinned. “They made one great mistake.”
“Tell us, Jay,” Samdu urged him. “Tell us what it was.”
“They had grown too big,” Kalam said. “They had reached too far.
When they captured my flagship, they thought they had us down. Their great blunder was to penetrate our interstellar computer system. They was easy for them, because their own common mind functions through the same quantum entanglement effect.
“That effect was the secret of their power, but also their Achilles’ heel. They had to use our computer systems to communicate with us. That gave us the chance to study their great hive mind. And write a vims to disable it. The problem was to plant the vims. They struck before we got that done. Giles, you gave us the break.” He clapped Habibula’s shoulder. “Climbing the stair, you led the bugs off their duty stations and let me reach to the computer room and send the vims into the bug’s neural web.”
Habibula blinked again. “It killed them all?”
“When the mind shut down, the bodies stopped.” Kalam gestured the cylinders piled below them, at the bottom of the pit, many of them burst and oozing black jelly. “These look dead enough.”
Habibula leaned to peer into the pit, and kissed the green stone. “They were a nightmare,” Samdu said. “Now it’s over.”
“Then let’s get out of their fearful stink.” Habibula’s pale eyes brightened. “Let’s head back to the Goodtimes Bar and drink our fill to the glory of the Legion.”
“Not yet, Giles.” Very soberly, Kalam shook his head. “The quantum signal system is ours again. We must call everybody, our own people here and out across the stars. Tell them what happened what happened to the bugs, and help them organize to rule themselves again.”
“And don’t forget.” Samdu grinned at him. “We’re none of us so young as we used to be. You still have all your natural limbs, but I believe the medics have advised you to avoid alcohol.”
“Aye, Hal.” Habibula sighed. “The Elega’s mortal stone has brought better luck to the Legion than it ever did to me.”
2003
The Man from Somewhere
Now ninety-five. Jack Williamson spent his first three years high in the Sierra Madre of Sonora, Mexico, living in a stone ranch house with a grass roof and dirt floor. The year he was seven, the family moved by covered wagon from Pecos, Texas, to an insolated ranch in eastern New Mexico. He grew up there, learning to live in his own imagination. Dr. Williamson’s first story sold in 1928. An Army weatherman in World War II, he flew on bombing raids over Bougainville and Rabaul. With a Ph.D. in English literature, he still teaches a class every spring semester at Eastern New Mexico University. His latest novel is Terraforming Earth. A section of it, “The Ultimate Earth,” was published as a novella in Analog’s December 2000 issue, and won the Hugo and the Nebula. The author is at work on The Stonehenge Cate for Tor. Looking back, he’s happy with his life and grateful for good genes, good friends, and good luck.
1.
The naked man came limping along the sidewalk in the face of a brisk north wind, holding a ragged scrap of cardboard to hide his privates. He was shaking, his teeth chattering so loud I heard them a dozen yards away. He stopped in front of the house and stood peering at the old elm beside it, one hand raised to shade his eyes It was a peaceful Sunday morning, with no traffic noise. My wife was setting the breakfast table. I’d thrown an old dressing gown over my pajamas and walked out to look for the paper. The air had a smoky tang of fall, and I’d stopped on the walk to catch a long breath of it before I saw him.
