Collected Short Fiction, page 785
“Security Command.” The man pointed. “And your own destination. The oxygen-breathers’ complex at the security academy.”
Turning, he saw an enormous mirror dome rising out of barren desolation. Inside it, he found himself in a line of oxygen-breathing bipeds shuffling down endless gray-walled corridors, following arrows of flashing light. Some looked almost humanoid, but none resembled him or his captors. Most were grotesquely different, many of them apparently new recruits, a few veterans back for retraining.
They all wore translators, but the slouching thing ahead had a scent that sickened him and the shell-cased thing behind merely stared through multiple eyes when he turned and tried to talk. He did make out scraps of talk from others, but their native worlds had been so diverse that they seemed to find little in common and less to say.
The corridors branched and branched again until he sat alone in a narrow booth. A rapid metal voice rattled out of the wall, instructing him to press his open hands to the plate in front of him and look into the lens. It asked questions he seldom understood.
“Number 850-28-3294,” it droned at last, “you are found grossly unqualified for any security service. Your earlier field assignment was a gross and inexplicable error. You will proceed to the exit and await final disposition.”
“Final? What does that mean?”
The wall did not explain. The maze of corridors led him on to a little room where the man he might call Paul sat waiting behind a bare glass desk.
“You’re out of the service?” With a sympathetic smile, he rose to offer his hand. “That tends to support the story you told us, though it does leave you in a devil of a spot. A bonanza, however, for me. At least I can get you off your feet.”
He gestured at a chair. Zelazny collapsed into it gratefully.
“Want a drink? A rum cola? My favorite drink on your planet.”
With only a stale doughnut and instant coffee for the breakfast he hardly remembered, Zelazny felt readier for nearly anything else, but he accepted the glass and waited silently.
“My informant!” Paul waved his glass expansively. “I did the research I could during the weeks it took to run you down, but I never really got to know a native. For my graduate project, I’m planning an animated exhibit of the culture of Earth, displayed through the story of your own life.”
He sipped cautiously at the rum and cola, wishing it had been steak and eggs, while he tried to answer interminable questions about his life, his family, his friends, his experience in the Ohio National Guard, his travels, his studies in school, his political interests, his poetry awards, his plans for the future.
“Back when I had a future,” he interrupted bitterly. “I’m starving. Can I have something to eat?”
“Certainly. We’ve only begun.”
Paul left him alone in the room for an anxious hour and came back with a sandwich of imitation bread with slices of imitation ham and imitation cheese, dressed with imitation margarine and imitation mustard. The imitations were less than perfect, but he ate it while Paul resumed the interrogation. When he demanded a rest, Paul showed him into an Earth-type bathroom that adjoined the room, and took him later to a high galley where he could look far across the red-lit waste landscape to another dome rising into the dead-black sky like a huge silver moon.
“The marine complex,” Paul said. “For water-breathers.”
Walking with him there, Paul continued the interrogation till he begged for a break. Back in the little room, a cot had replaced the desk, and dishes on a table beside it were filled with imitation salad and imitation mutton stew.
The room became a prison. He was sometimes left alone there, battered with never-ending questions from a machine behind the wall. His watch still ran, but Earth time meant nothing here. Paul came unpredictably to wake him for a walk or another meal, always demanding more about his planet and its peoples. He was dreaming that he was back on Earth, shuffling papers for Social Security, when Paul shook him awake.
“Come see yourself!”
Paul ushered him into a vast hall at the top of the dome.
“Your replicate!” He gestured proudly. “A splendid likeness, don’t you think, created to play the central role in my animated diorama of your culture. The grand climax of my studies! The entire faculty seems enormously impressed, and I expect it to make my career.” Any likeness was hard to see. The replicate looked too dark and too tall. Strangely garbed, with beads strung around its neck and huge rings in its ears, a long spear lifted, it stood guard at the entrance to an enclosure woven of thorny brush. Beyond it a half-naked woman, clad and jeweled just as strangely, grinned from the doorway of a mud-plastered hut. He stared at Paul. “What is that meant to be?”
“Don’t you like it?” Paul looked hurt. “I have designed it to portray you as the symbolic prototype of your culture.” He shook his head. “Your own life story! I present you as a Masai warrior. The Masai, as you know, are magnificent runners. As the narrative unfolds, your extraordinary abilities are recognized by an American professor who has been searching Kenya for fossil relics of your evolutionary origins. He takes you back to America and obtains an athletic scholarship for you at his university. You win great races. You excel in scholarship. You lecture to share the history and folkways of your people. You win influential friends. You become rich and famous, and finally return to a happy reunion with the woman you had loved when you were children. “Please say you like it.”
“It’s interesting.” He nodded reluctantly. “But that’s not me. It has nothing to do with me.”
“Just open your eyes! You must recognize the star role I have given you in the basic myth shared by nearly all your tribes? The mythic hero leaves his home, faces great dangers and crippling handicaps, endures severe ordeals, learns profound truths and discovers new strengths, defeats powerful enemies, creates the genius of his people, and returns at last to enjoy his due rewards. The diorama reveals you as the spirit of your world! Dramatized, of course, but you must recognize that fiction can convey more truth than bare fact can. Don’t you see?”
Paul waited impatiently for him to nod again.
“I knew you would! You would share my elation if you could stay to see the whole diorama in motion. Unfortunately, however, you are leaving. My superior, whom you remember as Lil, has admitted her terrible blunder. She mistook you for an actual agent, a man she thought had been assigned to the warning station on your satellite. He was given another duty post instead, from which he has just come home.”
“You mean—”
“A matter of transposed digits in the designation of Agent 850-28-3294. His number should have been 3249. As a result, your satellite station has never been manned at all. Lil’s career is in grave jeopardy unless she is able to correct the error at once.”
“Correct?”
“It can be done.”
“How?”
“Simply enough.” Paul grinned at his anxiety. “Technology exists for very severely limited navigation into the past. So long as we create no paradoxical interruptions in established sequences of cause and effect, we can return you to the space-time coordinates where we found you. Lil has arranged for us to leave immediately.”
Waiting for them in the sky-blue Ford, she nodded at him with no apology, and took them up at once, diving back into the transit tube and emerging over the Moon. He napped again during the flight back to Earth, but he was wide awake before she pulled them to the curb on his Cleveland street.
Nearly an hour late to work that morning, he never tried to explain the delay, but as time went on he found that his philosophy of life and art had changed. Poetry had been his first great love. He returned with a new language: his far-ranging and often mythic fiction.
AFTERWORD
I met Roger at SunCon in 1977. He later moved to New Mexico and became a loyal friend, but New Mexican roads are long and I knew him best from teaching his work. That changed in a remarkable way. “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” and other early stories are finely crafted works of art, brilliantly imagined, full of poetry and literary allusion. The later novels, such as the Amber series, have the same daring originality, the same poetic imagination, but they flow almost in the easy-seeming manner of a chanting epic bard.
“The Story Roger Never Told” story was suggested by that shift, which revealed a second side of Roger’s genius. In these latter days, nobody makes a living writing great short stories. Novels are generally more profitable. The shift may have been commercially impelled, but this story presents an alternative explanation.
Terraforming Terra
Planet Earth has been destroyed. Your job is to bring it back to life.
(1)
We are Clones the last survivors of the great impact. The bodies of our parents have lain a hundred years in the cemetery on the nibble slope below the crater rim. I remember the day my robot-father brought the five of us up to see the Earth, a hazy red-spattered ball in the black Moon sky.
“It looks—looks sick.” Looking sick herself, Dian raised her face to his. “Is it bleeding?”
“Bleeding red-hot lava all over the land,” he told her. “The rivers all bleeding iron-red rain into the seas.”
“Dead.” Arne made a face. “It looks dead.”
“The impact killed it.” His plastic head nodded. “You were born to bring it back to life.”
“Just us kids?”
“You’ll grow up.”
“Not me,” Arne muttered. “Do I have to grow up?”
“So what do you want?” Tanya grinned at him. “To stay a snot-nosed kid forever?”
“Please.” My robot-father shrugged in the stiff way robots have, and his lenses swept all five of us, standing around him in the dome. “Your mission is to replant life on Earth. The job may take a lot of time, but you’ll be born and born again till you get it done.”
We knew OUR NATURAL PARENTS FROM their letters to us and their images in the holo tanks and the robots they had programmed to bring us up. My father had been Duncan Yare, a lean man with kind gray eyes and a neat black beard when I saw him in the holo tanks. He had a voice I loved, even when he was the robot.
The dome was new to us, big and strange, full of strange machines, wonderfully exciting. The clear quartz wall let us see the stark earth-lit moonscape all around us. We had clone pets. Mine was Spaceman. He growled and bristled at a black-shadowed monster rock outside and crouched against my leg. Tanya’s cat had followed us.
“OK, Cleo,” she called when it mewed. “Let’s look outside.”
Cleo came flying into her arms. Jumping was easy, here in the Moon’s light gravity. My robot-father had pointed a thin blue plastic arm at the cragged mountain wall that curved away on both sides of the dome.
“The station is dug into the rim of Tycho—”
“The crater,” Arne interrupted him. “We know it from the globe.”
“It’s so big!” Tanya’s voice was hushed. She was a spindly little girl with straight black hair that her mother made her keep cut short, and bangs that came down to her eyebrows. Cleo sagged in her arms, almost forgotten. “It—it’s homongoolius!”
She stared out across the enormous black pit at the jagged peak towering into the blaze of Earth at the center. Dian had turned to look the other way, at the bright white rays that fanned out from the boulder slopes far below, spreading to the pads and gantries and hangars where the spacecraft had landed, and reaching on beyond, across the waste of black-pocked, gray-green rocks and dust to the black and starless sky.
“Homongoolius?” Dian mocked her. “I’d say fractabulous!”
“Homon-fractabu-what?” Pepe made fun of them both. He was short and quick, as skinny as Tanya was, and just as dark. He liked to play games, and never combed his hair. “Can’t you speak English?”
“Better than you.” Dian was a tall pale girl who never wanted a pet. The robots had made dark-rimmed glasses for her because she loved to read the old paper books in the library. “And I’m learning Latin.”
“What good is Latin?” Cloned together, we were all the same age, but Arne was the biggest. He had pale blue eyes and pale blond hair, and he liked to ask questions. “It’s dead as Earth.”
“It’s something we must save.” Dian was quiet and shy and always serious. “The new people may need it.”
“What new people?” He waved his arm at the Earth. “If everybody’s dead—”
“We have the frozen cells,” Tanya said. “We can grow new people.” Nobody heard her. We were all looking out at the dead moonscape. The dome stood high between the rock-spattered desert and the ink-black shadow that filled the crater pit. Looking down, I felt giddy for an instant, and Arne backed away.
“Fraidy cat!” Tanya jeered him. “You’re gray as a ghost.” Retreating farther, he flushed red and looked up at the Earth. It hung high and huge, capped white at the poles and swirled with great white storms. Beneath the clouds, the seas were streaked brown and yellow and red where rivers ran off the dark continents.
“It was so beautiful,” Dian whispered. “All blue and white and green in the old pictures.”
“Before the impact,” my father said. “Your job is to make it beautiful again.”
Arne squinted at it and shook his head. “I don’t see how—”
“Just listen,” Tanya said.
“Please.” My robot-father’s face was not designed to smile, but his voice could reflect a tolerant amusement. “Let me tell you what you are.”
“I know,” Arne said. “Clones—”
“Shut up,” Tanya told him.
“Clones,” my robot-father nodded. “Genetic copies of the humans who got here alive after the impact.”
“I know all that,” Arne said. “I saw it on my monitor. We were born down in the maternity lab, from the frozen cells our real parents left.
And I know how the asteroid killed the Earth. I saw the simulation on my monitor.”
“I didn’t,” Tanya said. “I want to know.”
“Let’s begin with Calvin DeFalco.” Our robot-parents were all shaped just alike, but each with a breastplate of a different color. Mine was bright blue. He had cared for me as long as I remembered, and I loved him as much as my beagle. “Cal was the man who built the station and got us here. He died for your chance to go back—” Stubbornly, Arne pushed out his fat lower lip. “I like it better here.”
“You’re a dummy,” Tanya told him. “Dummies don’t talk.”
He stuck his tongue out at her, but we all stood close around my robot-father, listening.
“Calvin DeFalco was born in an old city called Chicago. He was as young as you are when his aunt took him to a museum where he saw the skeletons of the great dinosaurs that used to rule the Earth. The bones were so big that they frightened him. He asked her if they could ever come back.
“She tried to tell him he was safe. They were truly dead, she said, killed by a giant asteroid that struck the coast of Mexico. That frightened him more. She told him not to worry. Big impacts came millions of years apart. But he did worry about how anybody could survive another impact.
“His first idea was a colony on Mai’s. He trained to be an astronaut and led the only expedition that ever got there. It turned out to be unfriendly, unfit for any self-sustaining colony. Most of the crew was lost, but Cal returned so famous he was able to persuade the world governments to set up Tycho Station.
“Live men and women worked here to build it, but they went home when the humanform robots were perfected. They left the robots to run the observatory and relay observations. If they ever saw trouble coming they were to call a warning to Earth—”
“But the killer did hit!” Arne broke in. “Why didn’t they stop it?”
“Shhh!” Tanya scolded him. “Just listen.”
He rolled his eyes at her.
“Everything went dreadfully wrong.” My robot-father’s voice fell with my real father’s sadness. “The asteroid was mostly iron and bigger than the one that killed the dinosaurs. It came fast, on an orbit close around the Sun that hid it from the telescopes. Nobody saw it till there was no time to steer it away. But still they had a little luck.”
“Luck?” Arne made a snarly face. “When the whole world was killed?”
“Luck for you,” my robot-father told him. “Your father wasn’t on what Cal called his survival squad. That was the little handful of people picked for essential skills and chosen to form a sturdy gene pool. He was Arne Linder, a geologist who had written a book about terraforming Mars—changing it to make it fit for people. Cal had wanted him on the Mars expedition, but he didn’t like risk. Without the odd stroke of luck that got him to the Moon, you wouldn’t exist.”
Arne gulped and blinked.
“Cal had been flying a supply plane out to the station every three months. The impact caught it on the ground in New Mexico, partly loaded for the next flight, but it was not yet fueled. The survival team was scattered everywhere. Linder was in Iceland, thousands of miles away. And your mother—”
His lenses turned and his voice wanned for Tanya “She was Tanya Wu, the team biologist. Her job was installing the maternity lab. The warning caught her in Massachusetts, far across the continent, gathering frozen cells and embryos for the cryonics vault. She got here just in time to save herself and her cat Your Cleopatra is its second clone.” Cleo was purring in Tanya’s arms, her yellow eyes blinking sleepily at the blazing Earth.
“And you, Pepe—” The lenses swung to him. “Your father was Pepe Navarro, an airplane pilot. On that last day, he was in Iceland with Linder on a seismic survey. They just barely got back to White Sands.” The lenses gleamed at Arne. “That’s why you’re here.”
“Me!” Dian begged him. “What about me?”
“You?” My robot-father’s face showed no feelings, but his voice laughed at her eagerness in a kind but teasing way. “Your clone mother was Diana Lazard. She was curator of the hall of humanities in a big museum till Cal picked her to help him select what they must plan to save. Our museum level is filled with her books and artifacts. Sealed now, but you’ll all study there when you are older.”
