The Very Best of Barry N Malzberg

by Barry N. Malzberg

  Hawkins lay in the ship’s abscess, just inside the probes, and said to Maria, “This isn’t going to work. They’ll wipe me out as errata; we’re an unidentified flying object.”

  “I love you,” Maria said softly; “I want to hold you against me. You are the gentlest and most wonderful man that I have ever known and I want you to be mine, all mine.”

  “I have to get serious,” Hawkins said; “there’s no time for passion here.”

  “Don’t put me off, you dark fool,” Maria said. “Closer and closer. Touching in the night. You will pacify the King and return; we will meet on Ganymede and in the silence and the density we will hold one another. Oh, if we had only met earlier; none of this would ever have happened to you.”

  Hawkins said, “I don’t want to think about what it would have been like if we had met earlier. I don’t want to talk about that now.” He reached for the volume switch and lowered Maria’s voice to a soothing burble. For reasons which were quite sufficient the technicians had made it impossible for him to cut off Maria completely, but he was able at least to modulate; this made it possible for him to find some periods of sleep. In the intricate alleys of metal and wire he could still hear her voice, extract the shape of words. Lover.

  Apposite. Breasts. Hawkins felt a regret which verged on pity, but he urged himself to be strong. He could not listen to her now. He was scheduled for a confrontation with the King of the Universe shortly. The King had scheduled it all. Hawkins would be brought before him in the dock of an artificial satellite and explain his condition, offer his terms. The King had stated that he had not been surprised; he knew that it would only be a matter of time until the Inner Cluster sued for mercy. The Broadway had been tracked all the way with farsighted devices, had been under the King’s mighty surveillance since it had torn free of the sun outside the orbit of Jupiter.

  Hawkins huddled in the ship and awaited judgment. He thought of all the alleys and corridors of his life which, like the alleys and corridors of the ship, seemed to work endlessly and musically against one another, bringing him to this tight and difficult center. If he had done this then he might not, instead, have done that; if he had served his time penitentially rather than with defiance they might have sought someone else to deal with the King. But then again defiance was good because they needed a man who would take a position and most felons got broken within the early months of their confinement. Then too there was Maria who had been given to inflame and console but with whom, instead, he had fallen into a difficult kind of love. It was not her corporeality but the electron impulses themselves, the cleverness and sophistication of the device, which had hooked him in. Someday, if he lived through this, he would try to explain it all to the technicians. He doubted if they would listen; creating their wonderful devices they had come only to hate themselves because they could not be part of them. If the twenty-fourth century was for accommodation, then it was also for paradox. It was a paradoxical age. The Broadway veered and the gray abscesses colored to flame; the King of the Universe materialized before him in holographic outline. “I thought this would be easier,” the King said. “Of course I am at a good distance from this image so don’t think of anything foolish.”

  Hawkins was thinking of nothing foolish, concentrating instead upon the holograph. The King was a wondrous creature; the form was avian but like no bird that Hawkins had ever seen, and the beak was set of fierce design. The King half-turned, seemed to preen, displayed feathers. “Do you like this?” he said. “I wanted an imposing design in which to appear.”

  “Then this isn’t how you look?”

  “This is exactly how I look,” the King said, “and this is no time for conundrums. Can you give me any reason why I should not sack and destroy the Inner Cluster?”

  “I have brought priceless gems,” Hawkins said; “if you sack and destroy there will be none of them left. Also, as a creature of some sensitivity you would not want to destroy ten trillion sentient and vulnerable souls, would you?”

  The King winked. “You don’t believe me,” he said. “You think that only a lunatic would address you over the light years, threaten destruction, call himself the King of the Universe.”

  “On the contrary,” Hawkins said, “we take you very seriously or why would I be here?”

  “I can’t answer that,” the King said. “I merely run things, not try to account for them; and I must tell you that I am sore displeased. I think I’ll appropriate your gems and dematerialize you.”

  “Don’t do it so quickly,” Hawkins said. It was impossible for him to tell whether the King was serious or capable of such action, but the entire mission had been predicated on the fact that he might be, and his own condition was humbling. “Don’t do it,” he said again, pleadingly. “We’re not without a history. There are elements of our tradition which are honorable. If not science, art; if not art a certain damaged religiosity.” Why am I defending us? he thought; this was the civilization, those were the technicians who first imprisoned me and then sent me out with the simulacrum of a woman to tantalize and to die. Truly, the situation is indefensible. Perceiving this, knowing that his thoughts were moving toward hopelessness and failure, Hawkins reached out and moved the volume switch. “Tell him,” he said. “Tell him the things that you tell me, Maria.”

  “He is a good man,” Maria said. “I love him desperately.

  We talk in the night; he tells me many things. When he returns to Titan I will dwell with him in holiness and fealty forever.”

  The King fluttered. “Who are you?” he said.

  “My name is Maria and I am the lover of this man, Hawkins. He is a good man.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I walk on this ship and to and fro upon it. Where are you?”

  The King said, “That is not the issue.” His speech had slurred; he seemed to have lost that edge of high confidence with which he had threatened destruction. “Show me yourself.”

  “That is not necessary,” Maria said. “I am faithful to this one man.”

  “Abandon him,” the King said, “and come to me instead.

  Perhaps we can work out something.”

  “I won’t do that.”

  “Maybe something can be worked out,” Hawkins said carefully. “It isn’t absolutely necessary—”

  “Offer him the diamonds, but don’t offer him me.”

  “I don’t want the diamonds,” the King said. He sounded petulant. “I can have the diamonds anyway.”

  She is a simulacrum, Hawkins thought, a memory, an instance, unpurchasable. But instead he said, “If you return with me to the Inner Cluster you can have her.”

  “Why return? I want her here.”

  “Love is impossible in space,” Hawkins said quietly. “The eternal vacuum, the interposition of organism upon the void makes love impossible. Accept my assurances on that.”

  “I cannot return with you,” the King said after some silence. “I would burn in the vastnesses of space. I am unprepared for a journey of any sort, confined to my castle.

  Leave her here.”

  “I’m afraid not,” Hawkins said. “She would perish.”

  “Yes, I would perish,” Maria said coldly. “I would most surely perish, Hawkins, if I could not have you. I am not property; I am your lover, I cannot be treated in this fashion.”

  “You can be treated in any way I want,” Hawkins said.

  “Remember the conditions. You were delivered to give me solace, not argument.

  “Nonetheless,” he said to the King, “as you see, it is quite impossible.”

  “Nothing is impossible,” the bird said, “not to the King of the Universe,” and the bird turned, opened both impenetrable eyes and clawed at the floor. “That is my demand,” he said,

  “leave her here and the diamonds and you may go. The Inner Cluster will be spared. Take the diamonds, in fact. I don’t need them.”

  Hawkins said, “For the greater good, Maria, for all circumstances, I ask you—”


  “I love you,” the simulacrum said. “I know that I was made part of the equipment merely to convenience, to give you solace, but I am quite out of control and it’s you I love. I don’t want to deal with any bird.”

  “I’m not really a bird,” the King said, “this is merely a form which I project. Actually, I can be anything at all. You would be most pleasantly surprised.”

  “Appearances mean nothing to me,” Maria said. “I’m sorry but it’s quite impossible. This wasn’t how the situation was supposed to be but it’s how matters have turned out, I’m afraid. No, Hawkins, I will not yield.”

  “Then neither will I,” the King said. “I am not a paranoid Pleiadan but the true and invincible King of the Universe, and I will make good on my threats. I tracked you from Jovian orbit, Hawkins; I had hoped that it would be for better outcome.”

  Hawkins looked at the figure of the bird, the eyes and figures glinting in the tight spaces of the cabin; he listened to the continued murmuring of Maria, now plaintive as she explained why she could not leave him. Hawkins looked at one simulacra and listened to the other as the Broadway ebbed and dipped in station, thinking I am man, I am twenty-fourth-century man, era of accommodation and paradox, felon of the twelfth order; you are in a Hell of a spot now. A Hell of a spot, for she cares.

  But he wasn’t. He really wasn’t, after all. As he heard Maria begin to shriek in passion, as he heard her say Oh, Kingo King o King he came to understand that for some dilemmas there is, after all, resolution; if not flesh, then steel is all. Oh Kingokingoking Maria cried, and as the Broadway grandly broke stasis he began to see the light of eternity open up to him. He’s wonderful! Maria cried, O King!

  There was this woman and her name was Maria; she loved Hawkins, she said, and first refused the impossible embraces of a mad Pleiadan but there was a grander design and she saw it saw it saw it okingoking.

  Hawkins felt the tumble of paradox.

  Just before the blankness, he mumbled, faithless bitch.

  O flawless faithless one.

  Blair House

  TRUMAN does not quite know what to do. Does not know how to handle this. It is a new sensation for him; he has always been a decisive man; his enemies may take him for superficial, but in a difficult world of hard choices encircled by an increasingly powerful Communist threat the only sin is inaction. He ordered the bomb. He decided to run even when his own party was ready to dump him and beat that simpering clown Dewey, fair and square. Took the gauntlet in Korea. Stayed beneath the 38th parallel. Fired that lunatic MacArthur and made it stick. In retrospect all of this was easier than it seemed at the time; he had settle on a point and stuck to it. But this is a new situation.

  This is an entirely new situation. The aliens have landed on the White House lawn and have demanded that he turn over the government to them or they will incinerate the planet. They claim they have the weapons to do it, and who would dispute them? Any group of eight-foot hanging marsupials that could travel from the Ceres system in enormous craft certainly possesses the technology to blow up a small planet near a forgotten star. At least this is what the scientists have told him. Where the hell is Ceres anyway? He cannot seem to keep this straight in his mind. Not that it matters anyway. Ceres system, spaceships, eight-foot marsupial aliens, it was all just a bunch of science fiction bosh until three days ago. Now he is up against it, though. There is no question about it.

  Harry Truman sits in his working quarters at Blair House and says to Dean Acheson, his Secretary of State, “I’d like to call their bluff. I don’t think they’ll do it.”

  Acheson says, “I’ll support you in a hard line if you want to take it.” He stubs out his cigar. “on the other hand, they seem to have the capability to do what they threaten.” The secretary’s hand trembles slightly. The situation is upsetting him, there is no question about it. Acheson was the rock of his cabinet; he would have planted a bomb on Moscow at any time since 1945, Truman knows, and it has taken all of his force of personality to keep the man in place. Nonetheless he appears to be crumbling. It is a testimony to the power of the aliens, eight of them in three enormous spaceships. In the statements they have given to the world, wearing llife-support gear, standing outside their ships, they have succeeded in throwing quite a shock into everyone. Even Stalin has had no official comment on the episode. Sources deep within the network report that old Uncle Joe is gibbering.

  “Did you contact Einstein?” Truman asks. “What did he say?”

  Acheson shrugs. I certain postures, Truman thinks, he bears a discomfiting resemblance to Dewey. “He says that he’s a physicist, not an astronomer, a sociologist or an exobiologist. He doesn’t have anything to say at all.”

  “Coward,” Truman says.

  “Can you blame him?” Acheson takes out another cigar, look at his watch. “We’ve only got another three hours until their deadline,” he says.

  “I know that as well as you do,” Truman says. He feels his famous temper about to explode. The situation is infuriating. He is the President of the United States, and yet he is being humiliated by a group of grotesque creatures with translator gear who look like inflated raccoons and who nest in the trees surrounding the White House lawn while they make threatening statements about the future of the planet. “Don’t you think I know that I’ve got three hours? The Joint Chiefs want me to call their bluff. They’re of the opinion that they don’t have the armament, and anyway we can always incinerate them; they’d never achieve escape velocity.”

  “We know about the Joint Chiefs,” Acheson says cautiously.

  “MacArthur has offered to come out of retirement to lead the attack.” Truman says. He slams the desk top. “Godamn it,” he says, “at least I said I wouldn’t run again before this happened. Otherwise the press would have said that it’s some kind of stunt.”

  “I should go back to the war room,” Acheson says.

  “Don’t want to be on the spot, eh?”

  “There’s no telling what the generals will do,” Acheson says. “There’s a great deal of panic.”

  “Go on,” Truman says, “go on, get the hell back. I’m not asking you for advice anyway. I know I’m in this one alone.’

  “I don’t think they’d blow us up.” Acheson whispers. “Besides, it may be a stunt. Maybe the Russians sent them over. Maybe they came from Hollywood. How do we know? We’re just looking at a bunch of ships and raccoons.”

  “Go away,” Truman says. Acheson stands, flicks cigar ash, leaves the office. Truman picks up the phone and tells the appointments secretary that he does not want to be disturbed for half an hour; then he goes to the couch and lies on his back, draws up his knees and stares at the ceiling. Sometimes he gets some of this best idea after awakening from one of his well-known cat-naps. He finds them as bracing as his morning constitutionals.

  But there is no rest for him this time. The events of the last days waver across his consciousness: the landing, the panic, the ringing of the capital by Washington police and then army troops, the arrogant pronouncements in English which the aliens broadcast through loudspeakers. Then the insane press conferences with the aliens emerging from the ship to hang from branches and harangue the press on the corruption and instability of all Terran life, their decision that they must land and civilize the planet by running it. The cabinet meetings, the all night conferences. Fortunately he has been insulated from the impact this has had upon the country. The impact has been terrible, he gathers; most of the cities are being abandoned by millions heading for the mountaintops, and there is shooting, fasting and prayer on the farmlands. It is a damned good thing that he declared out a few months ago because whatever the outcome of this he is going to get the worst of it for sure. Even if he stands up to the aliens at the end, he has lost a great deal of ground by capitulating up to this point. Perhaps he should have let the Joint Chiefs us the atom bomb. But everything would have to have been evacuated through a radius of 500 miles, and that would make a terrible situati
on even worst.

  Truman thinks of his political career. Up until three days ago it has been a remarkable adventure, unsullied by any feeling of doom. He had never expected to be put in a position like this; everything has worked out so nicely for him up until this point. The top of his ambition had been to sit in the Senate; even though he knew Roosevelt was failing, he had never viscerally expected to be President until the moment that he had gotten the terrible news. After that everything had fallen into place. He would have been beaten for sure this time out; everyone knew that the Republicans were going to get Eisenhower, but seven years of this was enough for any sane man. He had been looking forward to an honorable retirement, maybe even going back and serving in Congress after a couple of years back in Independence. Now this. It left him simply without a position, and this had never happened to him before. As long as you could make a decision, kick a critic, drop a bomb, hold fast on the Yalu, you could get through, but what were you supposed to do when you were confronted by a situation like this? No American President, not even Lincoln, had ever had to contend with a mess like this. The aliens might be clowns, all of this might be a Soviet plot rigged to make him appear foolish, but how could you take the risk? How could you put the lives of everyone on the planet at stake even if there was only a small chance that these marsupials from Ceres could do what they threatened?