A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  Meercaths . . . what of the meercaths? If I found myself heart-torn and shaking at the sight, what of the meercaths who had to watch their own home dying like that?

  I looked around, and . . . and . . . and an incredible something else happened. With the death of the Mindpod, all of the meercaths in the cruiser disappeared. For each there was a little pop! of vacuum as they ceased to exist, and we understood at last that each was a projection, a solid projection, of a real meercath on the planet; and when they were gone, the projections were gone too.

  I mindspoke: “Thank you, Little John Five.” And the answer came back, “Can I sleep now?”

  “Sleep, my friend.”

  I dropped the shield. They looked at me, Jonna and Will, as if they did not know what to say to me.

  I said, “I know I gave you a bad time for a while. I needed to get you to the bridge without your getting killed on the way; I needed to have the commander see you and think he had you captured; it was the one thing which would make him smash the planet, and do it before he could find out what Little John Five had done.”

  “Five! Where is Five? What did he do?”

  “Something neither you nor I could have done. All the orders on a big jug like this come through the computer. The commander’s orders were meant to be: Detonate the planet. Return to Orel. Little John Five thought himself into the computer and made the orders go: Return to Orel. Detonate the planet . . . He’s asleep, down there where we left him. Let him sleep. He’s already set your course for Earth. Just touch that little light over there—yes, the green one—and off you’ll go. But don’t forget to message ahead. Earth may smash this cruiser the moment they detect it.”

  “Will you come with us?”

  “Oh my no,” I said. “I have something to do at home. Will,” I said suddenly, because I couldn’t help myself, “You learned acceptance . . . almost . . . try learning it the rest of the way. Take your time. The little green light will wait.”

  They stood looking into each other’s eyes for a long while, and I could see it happening: first his acceptance of what she felt, and the beginnings of his acceptance of what he felt. I called on the mindnet and went home. I had a story to tell.

  • • •

  He was sleek and he was furry; he was totally amphibious, and Althair the Adventurer was what he really was. However, he was known on his lovely planet Ceer, as Althair the Storyteller just because he did that better—better even than adventuring.

  Story time was over. Slithering lithe, surfing, sliding, inchworming, cracklywhiskered, beady-bright, soft and smooth and shining, went the young, back to the ocean, back to sleepy-couches in the living living-places. I’ll be Althair! they would play tomorrow: I’ll be Jonna, I’ll be Will. This is myth aborning, this, what myth is for.

  1979

  CAN THESE BONES LIVE?

  Ted Reynolds

  What would you do if you were the last human being—and were offered one wish?

  She spins in space, a mere point of view, and far away the stars wheel slowly about her. Curiosity builds, and with gathering intensity she strives to see, to pierce through those uncaring flares of silence. With effort comes strain, comes pain, mounting in linked agony with her struggle. The stars begin to shimmer and melt, the blackness coating the universe beyond them to ripple, thin, transluce . . . and then the pain mounts past endurance, she gives over in defeat; victorious night rolls back, a ponderous black drop framing meaningless lights. The pain wanders off somewhere, leaving her limp with exhaustion, and for ages she hangs bodiless in nothing, the stars sliding steadily past her vision, until once more she will be ready to try to see through . . .

  She woke.

  She lay on the soft slope of a swelling which rose gently in the middle of a wooded noplace. Sun beat down warmly on bare shoulders. She lay a while, blinking her eyes, the dream fading away as consciousness grew that something was wrong, unexpected.

  Finally she sat up and looked at herself. In sudden panic reflex she whipped herself over and burrowed belly down, as best she could in the short grass. She lay there, breathing rapidly, as minutes passed with no sound but quiet wind and distant bird, no movement but that of a small industrious ant a few inches from her eyes.

  Slowly raising her head, she scanned the horizon cautiously. Mellow dips and swells. Shrubs in flower, a few drifting cirrus high, high up. A bird flitted twittering across the sky. No one in sight.

  Thank God. And she lying here in the open, stark naked . . .

  Squirming on her stomach like a celluloid Indian, she negotiated her way to the nearest bush, where she squatted for a longer look around. Not a soul anywhere. How did she ever get herself into this! Well, first things first. Times enough to think of reasons after she’d found herself something to wear.

  She reached the top of the rise; the world spread about her lovely, lonely, bare as herself. No house; no road. An opossum curled under a bush, ignoring her. She sat there in bewilderment, and gradually another thought grew in upon her, something else that didn’t make sense, that wasn’t quite right.

  She had died. She clearly remembered her death.

  By late afternoon, fear that someone would see her was being supplemented by fear that no one would. Still unclothed, but bearing a large portion of bush before her, she moved down the slope of a hill towards the rivers, lying beneath her in leisurely looping swaths which gleamed in the sunlight.

  Anywhere in her part of the world, she thought, there would be some sort of town at the confluence of two rivers of this size. Here was nothing but the grassy slopes, studded with isolated groves of slender trees, slurring off along the river borders into marshes and mudflats where waterbirds splashed and fed. No river traffic; no jet trails; no.

  It was now clear she was heading west, at least if the sun kept to the old path . . . if that were the old sun. At this point, she wasn’t laying any odds.

  When the moon rose, its familiar face told her she was on Earth after all. But wasn’t it a shade too large? No, don’t think about that one! It’s just the right size.

  Perhaps, she thought vaguely, she was Eve? Was Adam around the next bend? No, far more likely she was around the bend.

  That night she huddled beside a fallen trunk; not for warmth, (she discovered for the first time, emotionally, that trees are not warm-blooded) but for the rough contact with something solidly actual. Staring blankly up into the featureless night, she retreated into her memories, recalling the tubes and needles and pains, the fading lights and voices and her dying. The last things she could recall were those instants of observing the operation from outside of her own body, and realizing even then this was only her mind’s final defense mechanism to soften the inevitable annihilation—and she had known it was for keeps. So why hadn’t it been? Why was she here? And why wasn’t anybody else?

  I can’t hold a Jehoshaphat, she thought, all by myself, can I?

  The night was warm, the trees stoically silent. The largest animal she had seen all day was a badgery or woodchuckish thing looking out of a hole in a clay bank. That kind of fear didn’t touch her now. Just the one cry filled her mind as she fell asleep. How am I here at all; why aren’t I still dead?

  She didn’t really expect a reply. She got one.

  She was standing on the slope where she had first awakened, and was looking out across the world when the Roanei appeared, quite abruptly, as their habit always and everywhere is. She watched them as they debarked themselves and spread out for picnicking, and she understood them, as one will in a dream, and at the same time knew that neither the way they had arrived nor the way they looked would make the least bit of sense to her when she awoke. She couldn’t even be sure if the Roanei were many, or was one.

  One of them, or part of it, appeared at her side. A truly lovely little world, it indicated somehow, and, oh, my, it went on in exaggerated surprise as if an adult condescending to a child’s make-believe, what have we here? It signified the ground at her feet where a mi
nute gleam sparked the soil. It uncovered the gleam and withdrew a shining bone. The Roanei totality flowed around the spot to contemplate the discovery.

  The one turned to her and waved the bone gently. So there was once a species of some accomplishment on this world, it rendered cheerfully, and now there are no more of it. How interesting. Reconstruction is in order. It tossed the bone on the earth, where it lay as the Roanei resurrected it, in that unique way of theirs, which they make appear so simple, and which perhaps really is simple, only they never let on how it’s done. In a gradual, perhaps mildly obscene process the bone became her own unclad unconscious form.

  One aspect of the Roanei turned to her dream portion and conveyed, you know we are nothing like this, but it will serve you well enough as symbol, all of this is metaphor, it chanted, is metaphor, is metaphor, all of this is metaphor for a somewhat complex reality.

  It touched her forehead. Your questions will be answered, it remarked. Forever farewell. And they were gone.

  At least that was as near as she could reconstruct the dream when she woke by the fallen log.

  The dream stayed solidly with her as she wandered down the way of the river. It had been very real, had spoken with authority, not as one of the scribes. Either it was a message, a real answer to the question she had fallen asleep with, or her dreaming self now had resources of imagination she’d certainly never had her first time through life. She would rather have dreamed of frustrating cocktail parties and ominous taxicabs the way she’d used to.

  An authentic dream? She wished there were some around (among other reasons) to ask whether this fell within their range of experience. It might well be one of those numerous everybody-else-knows-it-happens-but-no-body-thought-to-tell-me phenomena.

  She went on, and the further she went, the more people she didn’t find, nor their leftovers. She found and munched berries, drank from the river, and didn’t die a second time on the spot, though the diet hardly excited her. She went to some lengths to find something to wear at first, with the dogged persistence of an Edison trying electric light filaments. Eventually she found a kind of tree, from which the bark came off in fairly large slices, and lashed herself up in some of it with creepers. She called the tree ‘birch’ provisionally, and thought there might never be anyone to tell her if she had guessed right.

  The vestments were rather unpleasant to wear, and already seemed a waste of time and modesty. She could no longer really believe there was anyone left to see or to know or to care.

  It appeared a beautiful world, if one cared about such things. Summer, she supposed, nature at its most prodigal expansiveness. Nothing hovering here of Man, not even a dwindling fond memory. I wonder, she wondered, how they finally managed to do us all in, but she soon found she’d rather not think about that.

  For several nights she carefully kept that, and all other questions, out of her mind as she composed herself to sleep. She wasn’t ready for any more answers just yet.

  Sometime during the second week of her second life she gave up on her leggings completely. They seemed quite superfluous. She decided to carve a diary on the bark instead.

  She scratched with the sharp end of a stick.

  “Dear Diary:

  “In order to preserve my sanity, in case I’ve still got it, I shall write what occurs in proper order. Or in case, in my lonely senile years, I forget the earlier days of this second fleshy incarceration. Or rather, that I may inscribe the relevant facts within which lie the clues I may be someday able to decipher, as to the reason for my improbable situation. Or maybe for the hell of it. Anyway, I write.

  “Item: what we used to call humanity is gone, extinct, obliterated. There’s just me, alone, at a time seemingly long after the close of man’s gory story. I have found some suspicious mounds, but within them, as deep as I’ve cared to dig, no paper, wood, or metal, nor plastic nor ceramic. A couple of bones. But for all I know, not even human bones.

  “So I linger on, long after the multitudes have passed from off the stage of life. This, then, is a posthumanous diary.

  “Ouch. That wasn’t very successful.

  “Hell, one tries to write pretty, even to a private diary, in the vague feeling that someone sometime will read the words. Even when I was a girl, locking my personal diary in my desk, screaming in wrath if my brother entered while I was writing, somehow I wrote for everybody, for posterity maybe. I winced at a grammatical lapse, an awkward phrase . . .

  “What does it matter now? I’m everybody else’s posterity, and they’ve left nothing for me to read.

  “But I do seem to have strayed from the subject . . .”

  Thus far took many hours, and endless pieces of bark. She realized she couldn’t lug all that bark around with her. She also found she couldn’t even make out a lot of what she’d just written. She gave up her diary.

  A little later, threading through breast-high wild grasses down a shallow valley, her dream recurred to her, bound up somehow with trappings of guilt. She tried half-heartedly to dismiss it. So what if she couldn’t remember dreams with such authentic auras from her earlier existence? Hadn’t she been absolutely convinced by other auras, that afterwards, to her sorrow, had proved quite meretricious?

  Still, she couldn’t pass it off as just another dream. For one thing, if it was more than a dream, if it somehow embodied honest-to-God’s-sake truth, then it was probably very important.

  She sat down where she was amid the grasses and tried to work it out. If one quite impossible thing had happened—she had come back to life—then why not think of other impossible things? Like maybe the whole human race could be brought back.

  If me, she thought, why not anybody else? Why not everybody else?

  And then there would be plenty of people to read my diary. Isn’t that worth something?

  She lay on her back where she was. It was a moist day, and she stared up past the long stalks gratefully condensing droplets from the hazy air, to the heavy blade tips far above her, and thought hard. She thought all the afternoon, and finally fell asleep in the same spot with a single question, cut and hewed and placed upright in the forecourts of her mind.

  “Can everybody be brought back to life the way I’ve been?”

  And answer came, of a sort.

  She stands on the Moon, on the harsh dead lunar soil, and watches the Earth in the sky, so beautifully smeared in its streaky whites, blues, browns, greens that her throat throbs with longing. It hangs up there in the black, unmoving, unwinking, and she watches it in the cold and the silence.

  A speck of red, tiny but fluid, appears at the rim of the sphere, out of tune, oddly malignant. It grows, flings out extended filaments across the globe, which coalesce, puddle together, as the Earth slowly becomes tinged with crawling, hideous with roiling, bloated with loathsome red, until the last touch of green is extinguished; and at that moment the whole creeping cancerous red Earth . . . opens up . . . into a . . . perfect white blossom floating serene and still and beautiful on the face of darkness . . .

  Do you really want it back the way it was, ask the lunar rocks in their barren silent idiom.

  It’s not clear why you’d want the whole race back, blazes the sun, shining down eternally, up top left center, but you can always ask; not promising any reply.

  Ask once only, that is, tinkle the constellations, strewn endlessly across forever. It is tedious to consider invalid requests. One individual per species is usually quite sufficient.

  And the Earth, silent blossom, silently whispers, be very sure before you ask. Cannot unwish wishes once wished. Remember . . .

  And just before she wakes, one very brief glimpse of a withered hag, creeping under the weight of a string of sausages firmly welded to the tip of her nose.

  That last touch might account for the intense irritation with which she awoke. It seemed to be rubbing it in a little too much!

  She had been around long enough that the season seemed to be changing. With an abrupt memory of what winte
r would mean without civilized amenities, she headed south.

  A few months of utter solitude, and she was about ready to take the Roanei up on their offer, or challenge, and ask for the return of humanity. But the terms in which the matter had been couched had somehow kept her up till now from requesting a total species regeneration. She hadn’t been able to bring herself, quite, to fall asleep with that demand in the forefront of her thoughts.

  She headed south, wondering if she were on the North American continent, or if that geographical distinction didn’t mean anything any longer. She had no idea how long it had been since the Age of Man. Some animals and constellations were quite familiar to her, others she felt she should surely have been aware of it they’d existed before. But maybe not. There were no large animals, predatory or otherwise; she ate randomly, things bland but sustaining; she never grew ill. She passed various flora, fauna, and geography, and paid little attention, existing most often by choice in the world of her own thoughts. She played there-are-other-people-somewhere games till it hurt too much.

  She wished she were a logical thinker, a scientist or something, rather than an ordinary nobody-special. Here they brought back one person, and perhaps the future existence of the whole race hung on the person’s decisions, and it was only her. It didn’t, somehow, seem very fair. She wasn’t all that bright, why didn’t they bring back Einstein or von Neumann or somebody, who could figure out what to do in these really rather unprecedented circumstances? I mean, she thought, if I’ve virtually got to decide whether to ask for the resurrection of the whole human race, hadn’t I ought to be a better representative of the species? Why couldn’t they have snagged Gandhi or Schweitzer?

  She knew what she should do, she thought—ask them for the whole human race back. Then she wandered off into wondering if that included the ancient Romans and Egyptians, or just the last generation that went defunct. There’d be population problems again. She wondered if she’d be allowed to pick and choose . . . “no Albanians or Victorians, please” . . . and realized she was off the track again.