A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  My head pounded. Chest burned when I breathed.

  Yet somehow I heard a sound from far off on the hill. A familiar voice. I bit into Wilkins’s wrist and called out.

  “Daddy!”

  Wilkins rolled off me, his face flushed with shock. He stumbled into the trees and disappeared from sight.

  When Joey Samples and Dad turned him in to the police at Winter Harbor that evening, his face was scratched and badly bruised. They said that when they cornered Rafe at John Milbridge’s gravel pit, the man tried to claw his own eyes out. I suspected that was Joey’s work. Dad would never lose his composure. Never get that emotional. But what I couldn’t understand was how Dad found me, or why he thought to find me. He said he’d seen my note on the refrigerator and suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of terror and doom. He’d driven the cemetery road like a demon, as he put it.

  I lay in bed that night staring out the window at the overcast that obscured the stars. Dad sat silently in the chair beside me until he fell asleep. Heat lightning ran like veins of fool’s gold through the gray cloud formations. When the real storm came, the light and sharp cracks of thunder felt like emotions sputtering out of me.

  At last, I cried.

  I turn my ankle in a pothole, but that can’t stop me. The air is suffused with light, growing brighter. My calves ache. The moment is near.

  Is it the heat behind me or my kid’s legs that propel me?

  There were times when Dad paid less than his usual inattention to life, like the evening he bought vanilla ice cream clearly labeled “with real vanilla bean specks” and drove all the way back to Winter Harbor to show the store manager there was dirt in the carton. That story pleased the inhabitants of Bunker’s Cove, perhaps because they too had been struck with such moments of blind ignorance in a world that changed too fast for them to keep pace with. They accepted him, but that acceptance did not rub off on me until I was ten, maybe eleven. I remember well the first time Dad allowed me on the wharves. Until then, he’d surmised that the locals wouldn’t want a tomboy nosing around in their business.

  The month was November, and the air had the feel of spring water as it slid across my skin. I still wore tee-shirts in defiance of the frost.

  On that Friday, Dad was long overdue from his work day as a stern man for one of the lobster boats, so I marched down the hill to the wharf. I was determined. I sat on a crate like one of the good old boys and listened to them spin yarns about rough seas and choked engine lines and empty traps. Dad flashed me a questioning look every five minutes, but I ignored him. One of the others, it may well have been Joey, noticed me when I wrinkled my nose at the odor of dead waste fish sitting in a plastic tub on the next wharf.

  “That smell’s what it’s all about. This ain’t a social club.”

  A man with a salt-and-pepper beard said, “There you are.” Rafe Wilkins grunted, his back against a piling, an orange bottle cap in the palm of his hand. Another man said, “If you can’t take the heat, get outta the kitchen.”

  I replied by standing with my hands on hips. “I can take it. I’m just used to a cleaner kitchen.”

  “Well, girl,” said Joey this time, his head wreathed in cigarette smoke. It was his bait company and his wharf next door. “You’re welcome to do a bit of cleanin’.”

  That got a round of laughs. I said nothing. I walked away, around the rocks to the other wharf, and hauled an empty trash barrel from inside the Samples’ bait shed. I proceeded to clean and hose things down. Later, they all said I could come down any time. Especially Joey.

  “No need to ask,” he said with a wink. “I’ll teach you how to clean a fresh fish.”

  But it was Dad that always missed me if I didn’t make an appearance. He wouldn’t say so, not my stoic Dad, but he showed it in little ways. When I rode my bike or ran down the road to the wharves, he’d look up the hill, knowing I was there by mysterious means, and his smile would beam. That moment, when he smiled, made me feel light and giddy inside. I remember him best that way.

  I reach the bottom of the hill. The wharves and buildings are masked in a brilliant white glare. Smoke seems to pour from the grain of the boards. I search for my father.

  I step as if through molasses, the air frothing hot and thick and sticky with humidity.

  I panic with that overwhelming sense of terror and doom, as Dad once described it. There’s no time left. I must tell him that I forgive him for the times we didn’t get along. Where is he?

  My first day in Bunker’s Cove was uneventful. I was nine. I don’t recall what Dad dressed like, or the car he drove then. I don’t remember unpacking. Just the smell of wood catching fire in the kitchen stove the evening we moved into the house. Biting to the nose. Organic matter being consumed. And giving off energy, just like Dad when he let his emotions go.

  That day he forgot to open the damper when he lit the stove. Smoke flooded the kitchen. He cursed, then we laughed.

  Dad, the tall and barrel-chested Dad of my youth, stands by the bait shed and gestures to Joey, I think. I’m happy that it’s Joey, that he’s here at the end as well. I can barely make them out as I push forward. The air smells piney, resinous. My chest bums as I breathe in. I breathe out and call to him. The syllable elongates between us. But when his face turns to me, the whole world goes blank.

  The flash of annihilation, blanching everything white and seamless as bone. The superheated rush of it all. Before the collapse to pure nothingness. Yet it happens so slow. Can this go on forever, an attenuation of your atoms? The loneliness? This last spinning of synaptic charge?

  I try to think of the event as his smile igniting the cosmos.

  The thought continues, like a runner who has crossed the finish line . . .

  ALIEN PLOT

  Piers Anthony

  It was a desolate region. What pollution hadn’t stunted, the drought had wilted. Duff turned his eyes away from the dreary scene and snoozed as the taxi carried him on.

  He imagined a melange of the great realms of fantasy, where magic worked and fantastic creatures roamed and swords were the state of the art in weaponry. Where wizards cast horrendous spells, and maidens were not only beautiful but innocent. He had used fantasy settings in role-playing games, and had tried many fantasy computer games, but none of them were quite enough. Mostly he just read and reread the wonderful adventures; they were his main escape from dullness.

  For Duff had long since resigned himself to the fact that though he had the aspirations of an adventurer, he had the body and mind of a nonentity. He wasn’t handsome or brilliant; about all he could claim was decency, and decency didn’t carry much weight in the military life. Or the civilian life, he knew. So he longed for the realms where magic could supply what he lacked.

  Soon he achieved his desire: He dreamed he was in such a land. He didn’t have a quest; he was just walking through a world he knew was magic. He was sure that if he walked far enough, he would encounter both dragons and sweet maidens. He didn’t even want to hurt the dragons; he just wanted to be in the same world with them. For in such a place, he would have some kind of magic ability that would make him a person of note. Not of great reputation, just someone to be respected for himself, that one woman would find intriguing.

  He woke as the car slowed, approaching the project grounds. Here, at least, there was greenery, and the main building looked like an old hotel. It probably was just that, converted to military use. Behind it was a tall wire fence with the top angled, the kind used to contain dangerous men or animals. But all that was visible within that compound was a forest, with a hill in the background.

  A portly man in civilian clothing was waiting as the taxi stopped. Duff climbed out, and hesitated. “Sir?” he inquired.

  “Colonel Clelland, but don’t salute,” the man said, proffering his hand.

  “Sergeant Duff Van Dyke, sir,” Duff said, taking the hand.

  “Come in. Leave your things; you won’t be using them.” The Colonel drew him on into the
lobby.

  “Sir?”

  “We have less than an hour to get you into action,” the Colonel said. “Keep your mouth shut and listen while we get you ready.”

  Duff obeyed, knowing better than to argue with an officer. But he was beginning to doubt his wisdom in accepting this mysterious assignment. He had admitted to being bored with military life, and to the consideration of letting his hitch lapse so he could return to civilian life. But he still had three months to go, and his commander had made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: finish out his hitch with this special assignment, and if thereafter he wished to re-enlist he would receive a jump promotion. If he elected to leave the service, he would be given an equivalent civilian job in any region he chose. The commander was a man of honor; Duff could trust the deal. So he agreed, without knowing anything about it. In fact, he had been flattered that his re-enlistment was so strongly sought; he had been no more than a quiet, hardworking paper-pusher. He hadn’t figured they would miss him.

  He still did not know the nature of his assignment. It was evidently secret. But strange.

  The Colonel brought him to a private chamber. A middle-aged woman was there. “Dress him,” the Colonel told her.

  She approached Duff immediately and began to remove his clothing. “Sir—” Duff protested, surprised.

  “Stand still; there’s no time for that.” The Colonel flashed a momentary glare that showed that he had indeed had decades of command, and Duff was cowed. He tuned out the woman as well as he could, and listened.

  “As you know, we have been exploring alternate aspects of reality,” the Colonel continued after a pause. Duff hadn’t known that, but masked his surprise. The military cult of secrecy was one of the things that had made him yearn for civilian life. Evidently the Colonel assumed he had been briefed. “Most of the alternates we have discovered are similar to our own culture, with distressingly similar problems of overpopulation, depletion of resources, and fouled-up political systems. There really is no point in establishing relations with them; they can’t help us and we can’t help them. We have been looking for rich wilderness worlds to colonize and exploit; we could solve all our problems with a few of those.”

  “Yes, sir,” Duff said. But he remembered how the Western Hemisphere had represented such a solution for crowded Europe. He was something of a fan of medieval Europe, because that was the implied setting for much of heroic fantasy. It was even said that Middle Earth was merely a map of Europe turned sideways. But in real life, Europe had destroyed most of its heroic natural resources. All too soon the New World had been fully colonized and exploited, and now had problems just like the old ones. Was it really good to have man laying waste pristine lands for short-term benefits?

  Meanwhile, the woman was undressing him. She was perfectly businesslike, but it was hard to tune it out completely.

  “A year ago, we discovered an ideal world,” the Colonel said. “Phenomenal resources of wood, coal, oil, gold, diamonds, pure water—everything this Earth of ours ever had, because it is this world, but with all its assets untouched. There are people there, but they do not use these things. They do not seem to amass wealth. They do not practice war. They seem to live in absolute peace and harmony with nature. It’s uncanny, and of course suspicious.”

  “Of course, sir,” Duff agreed. Oh, to live in such a culture! He was tired of the rat race that was daily existence. He had enlisted in the military life because of the security of money, housing and health care it offered, but felt stultified by its lack of adventure. It would not be better in war time, he knew; then there would be excitement of a sort, but it could kill him. He wanted ultimate security and ultimate freedom, and it didn’t seem to exist.

  Which reminded him: He was now standing naked, the woman having stripped him completely. The Colonel didn’t seem to notice.

  “So we sent in an armed party to subdue them, naturally. And it disappeared. So we sent in planes and tanks—and they disappeared. Obviously the natives have some kind of weapon we don’t know about. We don’t dare try to colonize and exploit that world until we have pacified those dangerous aliens. But we can’t pacify them until we nullify their weapon, and we can’t do that until we know what it is.”

  “That makes sense, sir,” Duff said. But in his private heart, he was rooting for the folk of the other world. Let them remain undespoiled!

  Now the woman was dressing him in odd clothing. Strange thick underwear, and a winding around the waist. The dress of the otherworld folk?

  “So six months ago we set up a special project,” the Colonel said. “We constructed a village just like one we had photographed in the alternate world, and made costumes like those of the natives, and instituted a life-style just like theirs. It is medieval, actually; it most resembles our society of a thousand or so years ago. But patterned on what we know of the aliens. We copied their icons and their architecture, as far as we know it. We managed to get one of their books, and translate it; it’s a book of spells and rituals. So these are required of the inhabitants. Then we populated it with volunteers. We gave them drugs and electroshocks to disorient them and erase their recent memories, and put them into that model village. Fifty-two people, evenly divided in sex, ranging in age from ten to fifty. We made an instant functioning alien community. People who believe in magic, and think they are in a land of dragons and sorcerers.”

  “That must have been quite a trick, sir.” In fact, Duff doubted that it would work; strangers could not simply be dumped into a setting and made to operate like clockwork dolls. He himself longed to be in just such a world, but he would not be fooled for a moment. He did know the difference between reality and fantasy. But the military mind didn’t know that people weren’t automatons. Nevertheless his interest was intensifying. This was a fantasy setting!

  The clothing, too, was fantastic. Now he was being garbed in a robelike wrapping with an attached hood, bright green.

  “Of course we have pickups throughout the village. We can see and hear everything that goes on. We have everything on tape: every conversation, every bodily function, every sexual encounter. The idea is that by watching this community, we may learn how the aliens think. Then we hope to introduce our villagers into that other world, after teaching them as much as we can of the other language, and with luck they will get along well enough to find out where and what that secret weapon is.”

  “Smart ploy, sir.” Trust the military mind to care nothing about any of the other culture; all it wanted was to nullify a weapon, so the conquest could proceed. And how much of a thrill were the voyeurs getting, watching the villagers have sex?

  Meanwhile, the woman had finished the job of dressing him. All that remained was the shoes, which turned out to be soft green slippers with pointed toes that tapered into lengths of cord which flopped as he moved his feet. They were comfortable, but he would hate to be seen in public in them.

  “But there’s a problem. We can see that the members of this community are honoring the prescribed rituals. They make obeisance to the symbolic statues we installed. They seem to be truly accepting the life-style established for them. They have, to a remarkable extent, become aliens. But in the process, they have become too strange for us to fathom. That’s why we need to send in a normal man to investigate.”

  Now it came clear. “Me. Because I read fantasy and am available for something unusual.” It hadn’t been his record or his dedication, it had been his weirdness. He should have known.

  The Colonel nodded. “You. For those reasons. And because you’re not one of our regular personnel. They wouldn’t accept one of us; they know who we are, somehow, even when our number changes. But it takes at least an hour for them to pick up on a new member, so we must move you through within that time.” He paused for a deep breath. “All the volunteers were fantasy addicts; we felt we would succeed better if they had a predisposition. The aliens seem to believe in magic, so our community believes in magic. We fear the people will not accept a perso
n who isn’t sympathetic.”

  “I’m not volunteering to be given shock treatments and memory loss!” Duff protested.

  “No, of course not. You must remain one of us. That is the point. You must pass as one of them, but retain your objectivity.”

  Thus the costume: evidently what the members of this artificial community wore. He surely looked the part, now! “But sir, I am perplexed. If you have visual and sonic monitors throughout the village, surely you already know what’s going on there.”

  “We thought we did. But the villagers seem to have developed types of communication we aren’t aware of. They act with an uncanny unity we can’t fathom. They have make-believe children that they evidently believe in—and when a ‘child’ goes from one family to another, the second family greets it though there has been no communication between the two families. They go up a hill to placate a dragon-god. We do have a mock-dragon there, but they—” The Colonel shook his head. “Sometimes I think I’m going crazy myself.”

  “Why should I see anything the sensors don’t?”

  “I don’t know. But it seems that they see what the sensors don’t, and we hope they will show you what that is. When you find that out, you will return to report to us. We expect it to take two weeks or a month; you will need that long to be accepted by them. A lot depends on the woman.”

  “Woman?”

  “You are single. All of the villagers have paired. That was one of the earliest surprises.”

  “Well, sir, isn’t it natural for men and women to get together?” He spoke as if this was routine, but it wasn’t; he had spent his adult life longing for a woman who would love him. She wouldn’t have to be beautiful, just adequate. Just so long as she cared.