Collected Short Fiction, page 772
Calm enough by then to look for a bathroom, I found it beyond that open doorway, the fixtures new and shining. Clean bath mats outside the shower, clean towels on the rods, clean garments on the dressing table. After all my years of rationed and recycled water, this should have been sheer luxury. It wasn’t. I took a long time there, blankly groping for answers I never found.
Out of the shower, I got into the garments, pajamas cut from some soft blue stuff. Beyond the other door, I discovered a little kitchen that would have delighted my mother, the table set, a hot platter of ham and scrambled eggs ready for me, the toast crisp and hot, a steaming urn filling the air with a coffee fragrance I had almost forgotten.
Jittery when I sat at the table, I found a sudden appetite. Ham and eggs struck me as omens of better things to come. If normal pigs and chickens still existed in some island of survival, could it also be the human haven I still hoped for? Could Zorch and Neidra be waiting for me there, somehow still alive?
A little relaxed, I sipped a second cup of coffee, rinsed my dishes, put them in the washer, and tried the farther door. It let me outside, to a roofed portico. I saw no bars, no prison wall, but I recalled that aircraft diving past me and those exploding puffs of greenish smoke that must have knocked me out.
What did the litlins plan for me?
Unnerved with a sudden dread, I darted out across the scrap of lawn and collided with something that bloodied my nose. Something like invisible glass. Yelling senseless curses, I hammered at it with my fists till spatters of blood hung in the empty-seeming air and nausea doubled me over.
Yet I kept my breakfast down. Whatever the little people wanted, I must find Zorch and Neidra, beg them for the truth. I stood leaning weakly back against that queer barrier until my breath had slowed and I found the will to examine it. Something hard and slick as glass, it rose out of the turf and bent overhead to form a seamless dome with no trace of any opening.
I turned at last to inspect the building. A neat brick bungalow, it might have belonged on any suburban street in the world I had known. Here, contained like a clock under a jar, it seemed grotesquely enormous, a surreal riddle.
My sanctum sanctorum, if the litlins had taken me for a god? My test tube, if I was a specimen giant captured for study? My cage, for public exhibition? My jail, if they meant to hold me as a dangerous trespasser?
Groping for any hint, I followed the wall around it. Still I saw no little men anywhere near, though a toy ship had appeared on the lake. Nearer, a score of red-spotted, kitten-sized cattle were peacefully grazing that green velvet turf, just outside the barrier, I found a rectangle of empty gray pavement almost as long as the house.
Narrow roads and railways converged on it, and a string of neat little freight cars stood on the brink of a deep square pit. A bright metal cylinder taller than the house rose out of the pit. Equipment installed to construct and maintain the building? Certainly a monumental achievement of the Lilliputian engineers, though I found their cleverness hard to admire.
I stood there forever, with no will to move. The toy trains passed and passed again. The ship disappeared. The little cattle grazed out of view beyond a grove of tiny trees. The dust on Mars had ruined my watch, but the hot white sun climbed to the zenith. Suddenly tired and hungry, I went back inside.
Music came on as I entered. The Martian Symphony, commissioned by the mission planners to celebrate our expected conquest of the planet. I drank a glass of water at the kitchen sink, faintly grateful that it had no recycled taint. I used the bathroom and started back toward the kitchen. Abruptly, the music gave way to a squeaky chittering. Lights came on. The top of the bookcase had become a miniature stage. A little man stood behind a lectern there, chirping into a tiny microphone.
“Hello!” I froze where I stood, blinking at him. “Hello?”
He looked up to listen, bowed deeply toward me, and waved me toward the chair. I sat stiffly, braced for another jolt, while he twittered again into the microphone and then stood aside to listen through tiny headphones.
“The people greet you, Mr. Giant. We wish you well.” His words came deliberate and loud from speakers on the shelf beneath him. “Be patient, I beg you.”
“Patient?” I gasped. “For what?”
That dull thunder rolled on as if I hadn’t spoken.
“. . . because your speech must be recorded and accelerated to let me understand you, as my own is slowed and amplified for you. I am Leonardo Galen, honored to be chosen as our ambassador to you. I believe your name was Kellahin?”
“Was.” I shuddered at the tense. “I am Jeff Kellahin. Are Herman Zorch and Neidra Norn—”
Not listening, he was already squeaking into his little microphone. I sat staring at him. Except for size, he looked as human as I was. A slender, darkhaired man in a neat dark suit. He seemed warily cautious, as if I might be dangerous, yet intent on his business. He stepped away from the lectern, and the speakers boomed again.
“Mr. Giant, the people are happy to welcome your unexpected return. We shall serve you in every way we can. We have done our utmost to prepare an adequate shelter for you. Though we found no infection in you, hazards still exist and you must remain inside. You have seen the remains of your fellow beings who were exposed.”
“Exposed to what?” He ducked as if my shout was deafening. “What killed them?”
“I beg you, sir, to calm yourself.” He raised tiny hands in protest. “You’re in no danger now, not in this sterile space. Certainly not from any of us. We are too grateful for our creation to let you suffer any harm.”
“Grateful to us? When you’ve murdered millions—”
He was shrilling again, shaking his head.
“We pity you, sir. Evolution can be ruthless to an elder species when it must give way to the younger, but we shall ease the life left to you in every way we can. At least you should feel pride in us.”
Cold horror choked my unbelieving laugh.
“Sir, please!” the speakers rumbled to reprove me. “You appear to have reached a false conclusion. We are a peaceful folk, created free of the vestigial jungle drives that led to all your fatal aggressions.”
“If that’s so, what hap—”
His speakers squalled and went silent. He ran to fuss with them, and I saw that the holograph had changed again. Zorch and Neidra and even the little family were all staring at me now, so real that I shuddered.
“What happened to us?”
“Extinction.” He had chirped like a bird and the speakers pealed again, almost in Zorch’s booming voice. “The tragic culmination of your history of violence.”
“Neidra?” Whispering hoarsely now, I gestured at the picture. “Neidra Nom? Herman Zorch? Are they—are they dead?”
“Mother Nom? Father Zorch?” His rumble paused, and I caught a tremor of awe. “They were our creators. They left the best of themselves in our genes, to live forever.”
“You—you little rat!” A burst of anger choked me when I thought I understood. “If you claim—”
He twittered and dashed aside.
“Forgive me, sir.” With an apologetic smile, he bowed and spread his hands. “Our size may deceive you, but Mother Nom edited our genome to make us truly superior, deleting the unfortunate animal survivals that led to your extinction. If we are smaller than you, or even your giant rats, that is because our smaller body cells are therefore more efficient.
“With nerve paths only a tenth as long, we react in a tenth the time. We live faster, a dozen generations to one of yours. We think faster, learn faster. We are kinder to the environment, each needing less than one percent of the living space you did, and a tinier fraction of the energy and mass.”
“Which made you able to exterminate us?”
He chirked indignantly.
“Never, Mr. Giant! Please try to contain your savage impulses.”
He stopped to shake his head at the fists I didn’t know I’d clenched. I opened them and simply sat there, stunned and staring, till he resumed.
“Sadly, sir, your people never accepted us for what we were, designed to shield you from yourselves and your suicidal destruction of the planet. Our first generations helped perfect our own genome. The next set out to save you. In your factories, our dexterities allowed us to excel in the production of the improved electronic and robotic devices and new plant species that might have enabled your survival. We became researchers, inventors, engineers. We toiled in every way we could to bring peace, to teach altruism, to end your famines, to avert calamity.
“Yet you hated us. You accused the creators of blasphemous trespass into the dominion of your God, and spread false rumors that they were using us to seize world dominion. You burned the factories and laboratories that employed us. You attacked us on the streets and killed us in our homes. You enacted laws against us—laws that made us less than your monster rats. You hunted us with dogs and guns. You forced us to live in hiding and paid bounties for our dead bodies.”
“Till you struck back?”
“Mr. Giant, please!” With a sharp little squeal of indignation, he bent back to his microphone. “The creators deleted the genes that drove your cruel competitions for survival. We do not kill. Instead, with never a thought of turning your own savagery against you, we dug deeper tunnels. We destroyed your traps, sabotaged your detectors and alarms, immunized ourselves against your viruses. We built our own aircraft—flight comes easy for the small—and fled to new colonies where you never found us.”
“So you say!” I shouted at him. “But I’ve seen the murdered city—”
“Wait, Mr. Giant! Let the Mother speak before you condemn us.”
He scurried off the bookcase. Left there alone with the holograph, I found that it had changed again. Zorch and Neidra were kneeling now. He watched the little family as they ran toward me out of that pink nimbus. She smiled down at the red rosebud the child had left in her hand. Still somehow happy, even now, among these Lilliputian killers?
Wondering dully at the little man’s excuses, I recalled my first boyhood summer with my Uncle Clint, roving his ranch with a spotted mongrel named Tige. To keep me entertained when I got homesick, Uncle Clint hired me to get rid of the rats in his barn. Tige loved the sport as much as I did, and we had grand fun. There were rats enough, living under the floor and hiding behind the sacks of grain and bales of hay. They were shy and quick and clever, but we kept after them. We dug them from under the trash. Tige ran them down. I set traps and shot them with my .22. When the hunts were over, I laid them out on the barn floor to be counted and paid for. The bounty was fifty cents a rat. I’d earned twenty-eight dollars and felt great about it then, though the recollection gave me an odd feeling now.
The little man was suddenly back at his lectern on the bookcase.
“Hear the Mother!” his speakers thundered.
Glancing at the holograph, I found the little people gone. Zorch and Neidra still knelt on that little hill. She seemed to look straight at me. No longer smiling, she was tense and white as I remembered her the day I left for Mars.
“Call this my last—last confession.” Her voice caught unsteadily, but only for an instant. “The decision is made. History now, gone beyond erasing. The best I can do is set things straight, at least for our inheritors. A cruel choice, but events left us no other. Quarrels over the stumps and stubble of our wasted world had brought us to the brink of Armageddon. Ultimatums. Terror bombs. Sneak attacks. Raid alerts. Wars declared.
“In those final desperate days, people blamed us. Blamed Homo novus. Out of ignorance, out of the old tribal hated of the alien, out of sheer hysteria. We were arrested, Dr. Zorch and all of the genetic staff. Under threat of a firing squad or worse, we were ordered to create a counter-weapon, an airborne virus quick and deadly enough to wipe novus out forever.
“Impossible, we told them. Too risky for any attempt. Our genomes were so closely kin that a small error could kill both races. They learned, however, that the computer code for such a virus already existed, written as a safety measure to put a period to novus if they’d gone wrong. Under desperate pressure as the nation mobilized, one of our top biochemists revealed it. A hard decision, he told us, but made to save humanity. He didn’t know we’d foreseen the crisis months ago, and made our own harder choice. The choice to save the best of the brave race we had been.
“We’d rewritten the killer code.”
Her solemn voice ceased. The holograph flickered. She and Zorch were gone. The little people had come closer, and the smiling child seemed to offer me a huge yellow bloom like none I had ever seen. When I looked back at the bookcase, the little man had vanished with his lectern. The holograph flashed and faded to a dead flat blank. I sat alone in the silent room.
1994
The Ice Gods
1
His mother christened him Carlos Corales Carbajal Santiago Mondragon.
“A large name, Carlito,” his father told him when he was old enough to echo it all, “for a very small niñito. You must grow to fit it.”
They lived in a poor pueblito called Cuerno del Oro in the Chihuahua Mountains a few hundred kilometers southwest of the smoggy sprawl of Juarez. Cuerno del Oro meant horn of gold, but any the barren hills had ever hid was dug and gone two hundred years ago. The thin soil now gave more rocks than wealth.
He saw no way to earn that great name till he began to hear Don Ignacio Morelos speak of the stars. Don Diego had gone north and found employment at the nest of the starbirds called White Sands. He came home on holidays with gifts for his family and tales of the roaring birds that carried men off the Earth.
One year there was even a gift for Carlos, a postcard picture of a great metal thing that climbed over bright rocks under a dead black sky on long lever-legs with fat-tired wheels for feet. La araña de la luna,” he called it. The spider of the Moon.
“Muchas gracias, Don Ignacio.” He bowed politely. “When I become a man, I will learn to guide the starbirds and ride the iron spiders over the rocks of the Moon.”
“Aie, muchachito. ¡Qué tonteria!” Don Ignacio raised his scrawny shoulders and spat the brown juice of tobacco into the dusty street. “No esposible.”
The Moon had no room for los peónes pobres. The vaqueros of space were men of courage and learning, chosen for machismo. Don Ignacio himself had been allowed to touch the Moon spiders only when he searched for insects in the computers that were their brains. Carlos tried to boast no more, but he saw that he must master the skills of those fortunate vaqueros gringos and become a man of machismo.
He worked hard at his lessons in the village school, even harder when Don Ignacio came home again to speak of a new and swifter starbird that could vanish with a lightning flash and alight in an instant somewhere far off among the stars. He told of the great Mission Starseed, which was to build a hundred such phenomenal machines. They would carry colonists farther than telescopes could see, to inhabit new worlds too strange to be imagined.
Kneeling with his mother at mass, Carlos prayed that the saints might aid his escape from the dust and mud and want of Cuerno del Oro, to explore those miraculous lands among the stars. Mission Starseed became to him a holy thing, and he was saddened when Don Ignacio told of men who condemned it.
“¡Locos!” The Don drowned a fly. “Fools who name themselves Fairshare and create difficulties for the Mission. They wish to preserve the stars for the people of the stars.”
Truly, did people inhabit the stars? He had to herd his father’s goats, and when he lay with them, shivering through dark winter nights, he used to watch the stars and wonder about those dwellers in the sky. Would they be angels? Or devils, waiting to capture invaders for the flames of hell? Troubled, he asked Father Francisco.
The father smiled and advised him to think more of his catechism and less of riddles that had no answer. When he asked his mother, she begged him to forget the birds of space and all such devices of Satan. She feared that his dreams of them had become a hazard to his soul. born a simple campesino, he must content himself to die a simple campesino.
His father was gone by then, wading the river to find employment in el norte. Preparing to follow when he had grown to fit his name, Carlos was the best student in his classes at the village school. When money began to come back from his father, his mother promised that it could pay for his studies at the university in Chihuahua.
But the money stopped.
“¡Que lástima!” his mother moaned, praying for news that never came. “¡Que lástima!”
When Don Ignacio returned for the next fiesta, he spat at an ant and observed that men too hungry for money sometimes involved themselves unwisely in the hazardous traffic forbidden by gringo law. A warning Father Francisco advised Carlos to heed.
His mother wept and took to her bed.
Suffering from a malady of the heart the curandera could never heal, she did not walk again. For all her prayers and tears, the saints never brought his father back, and he stayed to care for her. Yet, even through the years he spent toiling among the rocks to grow the matz and frijoles that kept them alive, he searched for Don Ignacio at every fiesta to ask for news of those remarkable starbirds, now flashing out of their nesting pits in the launch complex, so the Don said, two or three every year.
Pájaros maravillosos, birds of wonder, they were said to lift the chosen few away from the sins of Earth to live forever on those new and more abundant lands among the infinities of stars. Each departure made a sound louder than thunder and a flash bright enough to blind any who watched with open eyes.
What was known of those islands of paradise?
Nada. Nothing. Don Ignacio shook his lean-boned head. No ships returned with men who had seen them. Yet still the clever evangelistas of Mission Starseed found more dollars to build another ship and more hopeful dreamers to ride it away. And Carlos, plodding back to toil on his stony hill, always longed to be among them.
He sat late by his kerosene lantern, studying books of science and space. Don Ignacio let him play with an old computer which the vaqueros of space had discarded because it was too slow for those new starbirds, and gave it to him when a bug disabled it. When he read its documents and learned to defeat the bug, the computer became his teacher and his friend. Its memory files were filled with more than he could learn, and it spoke a language that he loved for its purity and beauty. A simple language of words that were only one and zero, yet it was a tongue of truth, allowing neither doubt nor duplicity.
