Collected Short Fiction, page 681
“Oh, Nicky!” Kyrie was shivering, her voice so low that I could scarcely hear. “It’s true Guy killed you back at Fairfax. Last night when the fog stopped us here I thought he—you—were dead. I thought we were done for, our lives wasted and the terminal lost. I can’t quite believe—”
“I never expected anything like this.” Nick was turning and flexing his hand, eyeing it with the dazzled wonder of a child unwrapping some fabulous toy. “I never hoped—” He stopped to nod. “But I suppose our experience here on only one planet was too limited to show us the full capacity of life.” He looked at Kyrie. “How did you do it?”
“You did it, Nicky. Though I suppose the nexode helped. Last night in the cave—it showed me that you were alive in Guy’s dead skin. It showed me what we had to do and I woke Tom to help. But with time enough—if there had been no danger from the fog—I think you might have done everything yourself.”
“You’re too good, Ky.” He was fondly teasing for an instant, before his grave eyes lifted back to the shadow-mantled terminal. “But we still have work to do. There’s our beacon, dead.”
“A roosting place for the snakes.”
He frowned at the lifeless ants piled around the white stone. “Our replicators are also dead.”
“They stopped when you died.”
“Then they ought to start again.”
Hesitantly, trembling, she picked up a small, still machine and held it before him. He thrust a red forefinger toward its silver head. Though no spark passed, the bright device came alive, stirred in her hands, rose to wheel around Nick’s head.
I heard a high mosquito-whine, which spread all around me. The dead ants below the stone began rising from the ground by twos and threes, by scores, by hundreds. They flew to join a circling swarm, which settled toward the end of the stone. I smelled hot sulphur.
“Ai-yi-yi!” Tom cowered back. “All this is too much.”
“It’s okay, Mr. Hood,” Kyrie called to him. “The replicators are no space invaders. They are ours.”
The spinning swarm poured down toward the stone. Though I saw no gesture of command, the ants began joining together, limbs interweaving, silver heads joining to form honeycomb panels which flexed and fused into a hollow ten-foot globe, a black gangway rising to its open door.
“Perhaps we weren’t born for nothing.” Nick waved Tom and Kyrie toward the ramp. “Let’s get the nexode to the terminal. If the snakes don’t object too much I think we can light the beacon after all.”
“Nicky! Nicky!” Kyrie whispered. “If we can!”
She skipped up the ramp with the tetrahedron, but Tom hung back, scowling at its surface of slick black tail-balls as if he expected them to sting him.
“Will the ants do anything you want?” He squinted shrewdly at Nick, loud and bold again, almost himself. “Could you make them find me a pack of narcorettes?” he asked.
“Come along,” Nick said. “I want to pick up Uncle Kim.”
“My yukl brother,” Tom shrugged. “Why waste time on that poor shmuck? Better leave him where he is. He’s no utopian. He’ll never be happy in our new world.”
STUNG to anger I stood up to challenge Tom. Kyrie was calling from inside the bright globe, I think defending me. Nick took Tom’s fat arm, swung him firmly toward the black ramp. I tried to shout, but something caught my voice.
Something made me giddy. Something brushed me with icy sweat. Something left me drained and swaying. I sank back behind the shelving rock, sick with a puzzled rage at myself.
Though I never knew exactly what had seized me, there was the blackness inside the hollow globe. There was the piercing stridor of the ants that formed it—and their steamy, acrid reek. There was Tom’s cautious shrewdness as he tested the black ramp and his bold swagger when he climbed it.
Then there was Nick, red with alien blood, newborn from Guy’s hide, gazing impatiently across the heaving tide of fog toward that bank of far cloud and the snake-veiled stages of the tachyon terminal. Though I had known the children all their lives, Nick was a frightening stranger now.
Sobbing miserably, bewildered at myself, I began to feel a barb of piercing truth in Tom’s scornful words. I had known and loved the children as fascinating visitors to my own familiar world, but this world was theirs. I felt a sudden sick conviction that it was not for me.
My world had been the narrow ghetto flat where the heat was often off and cockroaches swarmed under the sink and the toilet overflowed. It had been the petty bickering of my parents, my father’s ugly business and my mother’s ugly death. It had been Tom’s scheming climb and my own half-honest career in promotion and publicity. I was what that gray and painful world had made me—a schlemiel, perhaps as my father used to say. Looking at myself in this cold light, I could see no useful place for me in the new world beyond the fog, in that dazzling future the children were about to usher through the tachyon terminal.
I lay silent in the grip of a sick paralysis as Nick followed Tom into the silver globe. The ramp rolled up to seal the dark opening. Sweating and trembling, uncertain of what I wanted or what to do, I watched the bright ball sail up the canyon toward the cave. It dropped beyond the cliffs. Nick or Kyrie must have left it to search the cave for me. A few minutes later it rose again, a diminishing moon gliding high above the fog toward that far tower.
Calmer after it was gone, I began to feel a remote sense of hope and joy. Whatever became of me, Nick and Kyrie were moving toward their cosmic triumph.
After sixty million years on the barren moon the black seed from the messenger missile was about to bear its destined fruit.
Impelled by an aimless curiosity, I climbed to that reddened altar stone. Its top was circular and flat, twenty feet across. White and dense, slick and oddly warm to the touch, it was hard enough to break the point of my pocket knife. Before I had solved its riddle, a new swarm of ants funneled down upon me.
Frightened and bewildered, I stumbled out of their way. They rattled on the stone like metal hail and began to knit themselves into a silver shell around it. The sun flickered and my tongue turned bitter. Their shrieking whine drilled into my brain. Staggering back, I watched them rising with the stone.
Its shape astonished me. No disk, it was a cone—the capstone, I believe, shaped to complete the onion dome of the tachyon beacon. Dropped by the ants when Nick was killed, it had fallen point down, penetrating to leave its base nearly level with the rock it shattered. Extracted, it left a yawning pit.
Blind to me, the ants soared away with it. Their shriek died, and their brimstone scent dissolved in the stagnant stench of the fog. The sun turned hot and bright again. I tossed a pebble into the pit and wandered back to the road.
I PLODDED up the canyon through a mist of gray regret, thinking wistfully of Guy’s abandoned kingdom and the warm refuge from all the terrors of space I had once found there. My dull wonder about the fate of Billie Fran and Andy Elving and our green-gartered guards became a sudden decision. I would go back to Fairfax.
The short climb had left me already puffing for breath and looking for a place to sit. My purpose wavered a little when I realized my weakness and remembered the cruel ordeal Clayton Carter had endured in his epic retreat from the ants. But as a fugitive from the terminal and the children’s new world I had nowhere else to go.
The journey might be easier for me than Carter had found it. I should find water enough after the autumn rains. With luck, I might find food plants maturing on abandoned farms and game or cattle that I could kill. By afternoon I was almost cheerful, whistling as I cleaned the deer rifle, sunned the blankets, filled the canteens from a spring I had found above the cave, repacked my slim provisions—already finding an emotional haven in the primitive simplicities of a roving hunter’s existence.
As I lay that night on my hard bed, waiting to start at dawn, I felt a curious detachment from everything, almost as if my life had already closed. Looking back at myself, with no emotion save a dull desire that things had been different, I found myself weighing all my shabby failures. If I had really been a schlemiel, where was the blame?
My flaw had been a failure to love, it seemed to me, due to a failure to understand. It was, I thought, a family fault. If my mother had ever learned to laugh at my father’s Yiddish jokes, if he had ever learned not to laugh at the ways of her Ozark kin, if Tom and I had really known each other . . .
At last I slept, plagued by dreadful dreams in which the scarlet, skinless monsters of the fog were stalking me to take my hide. I woke before dawn, aching all over, soaked with sweat and shivering. Imagining that the gamma-life was teeming in my blood again, I lay staring drearily at the dark until I saw a blood-red glow on the back of the cave.
At first I thought it must be another symptom of my space infection, distorting my senses and eroding my reason. I tried to lie still, but panic began to whisper that some new doom had come to consume the world. I crawled out of my wet blankets to find the source of the glow.
The westward sky was turning strangely scarlet above the black canyon rim, as if a dying sun were rising in the wrong direction. I staggered out in bare feet and went back to get my shoes. That red glare was bright enough to help me find them.
Shaking with cold and dread, I crept down the road to get a better view. The glow in the west grew brighter as I went. Slowly changing color, it had washed the stony cliffs with gold before I came in sight of the tachyon terminal.
A dazed comprehension stopped me there, my terror fading into awe. The light in the sky shone from the onion dome that topped the tallest tower—no doubt completed now with that conic altar stone on which Nick had been reborn. Relieved, yet still appalled before all the unknowns of the transgalactic universe, I knew that Nick and Kyrie already had the beacon calling across the light-years to their mysterious progenitors.
I stood there a long time, watching the beacon change. The shroud of snakes was gone. Dazzling in the crystal air, the tower looked near enough to touch. The tall cone bathed the barren landscape in an eerie green, which faded slowly through midnight blue into a dying violet dusk. I waited, shivering in the wind, until the red was born again.
The actual tachyon signal was invisible of course, leaping across its own strange domain beyond the limited velocity of light. This visible signal must have been meant only to guide a, decelerating starship through its final homing approach to the landing stage. Even as I thought of that, the changing splendor of the beacon brushed me with a vain regret.
I might have been part of all this. I might have called out to Nick and Kyrie and followed them into their flying globe. I might have been with them in that wondrous tower now, waiting for their star-born creators. Instead . . .
Whimpering and miserable, I stumbled back to the cave. As I lay there shivering through the rest of the night, staring at the changing glow on the smoke-stained rock, I decided to wait, to watch for the tachyon ship to come in.
But as the gray dawn came a cold west wind drowned me in the fetid muskmelon-sweetness of the fog and suddenly I knew I couldn’t stay. I had no way of knowing when that tachyon signal might reach the unknown powers of the messenger missiles or whether it ever would. Even if the signal should bring a starship to earth, I had no way of guessing the time a tachyon flight might take. I did know that the handful of dried beef and parched corn left in my pack would keep me going for only a few days.
Sick with the breath of the fog, I struggled stiffly into my gear and began the long climb out of the valley, toward the snake-haunted summit and the abandoned lands beyond. The rainbow glow of the beacon was still washing the cliffs above me with colors of wonder when I set out, but the gray daylight soon erased it.
HERE my recollections blur.
Whether from starvation and exhaustion or from that recurrent gamma-form infection—or from sheer depth of hope—my awareness shattered into disconnected fragments. Sun, dust, rocks, frost, hail. Mountain wall and desert mirage. The blinding blaze of thirst, the crazy fever buzz in my head, the black laughter of despair. Days of slogging on when all I wanted was to lie down. Nights of paralyzing cold in cheerless camps where I was afraid to make a fire because I thought the snakes might come.
Those cruel trials were real They are tangled in my memory with stranger impressions in which hard reality seems to blend into fantastic dreams. I recall one moonless night when I lay on flat high ground, with not even a rock or a bush to break the icy wind. I couldn’t sleep. I was following the wheeling constellations, wondering dully what sort of creature might come from the stars to answer the tachyon signal—if anything did—when I thought I saw a new star in the east.
Or a planet, perhaps, for it didn’t twinkle. Yet, cobalt-blue, it was the wrong color for any planet, and it was soon too bright. Its color slowly changed, to an unbelievable green, to ocher and orange, to a redder red than Mars. It went out and winked back again, indigo-blue.
Faster than any possible planet, it climbed toward the zenith. In the green and yellow phases its unearthly light tinted the dead landscape around me with a frosty, moonlike strangeness, so bright I trembled with an irrational terror that the snakes might discover me.
Sailing overhead, it swelled into a visible globe. I put down the mad urge to look for a hiding place and stood to watch it sinking toward the west. The cycle of its changing hues had begun accelerating and now I began to notice a sort of echo that must have come from the tachyon beacon.
The terminal was below my horizon here, but I could see its remote glow against the sky, a red explosion as the red globe winked out, a race through the spectrum while the globe was dark, a blue dusk dying behind the black mountain ridge as the globe burned blue again. Always alternating, those cycles of light ran faster, faster, until the flicker hurt my eyes. Yet I watched until the globe had set like a flashing moon behind the far peaks and the night was abruptly black again.
I don’t remember wondering what that luminous object could have been or why the terminal had answered its flashes or where it might have fallen. Rolled in my blanket again, I lay numbly waiting for the snakes. I must have slept, for I remember thinking they had found me. Turned to ribbons of raw red flesh, they stank with the suffocating foulness of the fog and sang to me in Kyrie’s voice while they licked my skin away.
Again, in an endless nightmare that must have been at least partly real, I thought I saw the fog. Drenched and shivering from a thin fall rain, I had nerved myself to climb one last hill. In the valley beyond, instead of the firewood and shelter I longed for, I found a flood of heaving whiteness, invisibly stirred from beneath and reaching as far as I could see.
I slept under the road in a concrete pipe, sweating through dreadful dreams in which the fog had risen over me and trapped me in the pipe. I lay too weak to move or even breathe. When I crawled out at dawn that evil sea had somehow drained away, leaving its red slime to mark the level it had reached. My real dreams are still haunted with the figments of the strange daymare that followed, in which I was struggling to cross that fearful valley where the fog had lain.
Sick with its lingering musk-melon fetor, I slipped and toppled and crept through the blood-colored muck. I saw animal bones coated with it. Once I heard a dreadful mewing sound and saw a quivering strip of naked redness trying to hide itself in a reddened human skull.
The highway bridge at the bottom of the valley was missing. I was trying to cross the rocky gorge, splashing and staggering through a shallow river of that clotted slime, when I heard the shrilling of the ants and caught their sulphuric scent and saw a silver-colored ball dropping toward me.
I tried to wave it away. When it came on I raised the deer rifle and fired. The only result was a flicker of darkness and a bitter tang on my tongue. The globe dropped to the brink of that red river. A long strip of honeycombed ants folded down to make a black-lined gangway.
KYRIE stepped out upon it.
Dream or not—I was not certain. Her nude beauty clashed against the horror of that red-walled valley in a way that dazed me. The daylight washed her marble flesh with swift pink and gold, as if she had been a stone Venus touched with instant life. Not quite sane, I brought up the rifle.
“Get away!” I gasped. “I can’t endure anything else.”
“Uncle Kim—” Pain choked her gentle voice. “Don’t you know who I am?”
“You’re a space alien.” I listened to my own hoarse voice with a dull astonishment. “You’re like the snakes. Like the things that make the fog. Like the gamma-forms in my blood. Like whatever creatures the beacon will bring from the stars—”
“But the ambassadors are already here, Uncle Kim.” Her quick voice and her anxious dark-eyed smile tried hard to comfort me. “They arrived on the tachyon ship, but you don’t need to fear them. They’ve come to bring the transgalactic culture. To help everybody. I think you need help—”
“No.” The rifle rose. “I’ve had enough from space—”
“The snakes are gone.” She glanced into the sky. “They never liked it here. Our air has too much water and oxygen for them. They prefer to meet visitors out in space—in the vicinity of Jupiter—where they feel more at home.”
“But there’s the fog.” I waved the rifle at the red-slimed cliffs above us and the blood-colored river lapping at my knees. “The things from space that make the fog—”
“We asked for them—”she tossed back her flowing hair—“when we invaded Venus. You remember the color changes our manned probes observed? They were caused by blights that spread from the garbage we dumped—spread somewhat faster than the gamma infections ever spread on Earth. Those blights killed half the aerobic life in the upper air of Venus. The more intelligent flying things down in the temperate middle levels found their food supplies depleted. They struck back in self-defense. The fog covers a military expedition composed of special mutant creatures bred to survive in our biocosm and sent to stop us from polluting their planet. It was a force from Venus, by the way, that trapped our men on Mercury.”
