A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  The old man’s laugh slowed to a soft chuckle, then coughed to a stop. He thought he’d indulge the kid a little and try to salvage some of the fun for the aftershocks back at the station. It may not be too late to get serious, and play it straight he thought as he reached for the artifact. He would examine it convincingly and offer some plausible explanation that would preserve a sense of wonder.

  It was a metallic object, obviously man-made, circular in design, like a dish. A shallow bowl-shape was formed in the middle. Around the rim, on two sides, were indentations—apparently rests for some sort of instruments. On the other two sides of the rim, the metal had been sculpted to resemble a natural formation. It depicted what appeared to be a lava flow pouring over into the bowl, or a waterfall.

  “I figure it must be some kind of primitive religious object. You know, a libation bowl for drink offerings!” Then the kid pointed out what looked like badly worn print carved into the side of the bowl.

  The old man pursed his lips and thought for a moment. If I didn’t bring it here, then who did? He speculated for a moment as to its possible origins, maybe it was a strangely misshapen part broken off of the satellite.

  He wiped away some of the carbon, revealing in finer detail the unusual characters etched in the metal around the rim. Could it be some kind of schematic code’? The old man had never seen a language like this before.

  N-I-A-G-A-R-A F-A-L-L-S

  What-the-hell is this? The old man faced the end of a long tradition. The kid had found a real artifact!

  EMBODIED IN ITS OPPOSITE

  John M. Landsberg

  CARIGA COMES TO ME TODAY, AS ALWAYS, JUST AS RAGIGARA RISES. I have learned little enough, but I know this: Cariga will come in the light of Ragigara. I understand little enough, but I understand this: Cariga responds to the pull of this little moon as if he were an ocean rising. I grasp at this vapid fragment of knowledge as if it could save my life, even though I have no idea why it is as it is, any more than I know why anything is as it is in this place.

  “Cariga gara ra-agiga Ragigara aririri.”

  I could answer him in his language, but it wears on me. After twenty years it still wears on me. I know there are subtleties that are beyond the human voice, the human ear, and it irritates me to know that after twenty years I still sound like this to Cariga: “Me think moon good not good too.” It is amazing, in fact, that I can make this much sense with the five sounds I can discern, and lacking even a beginner’s grasp of the sixty-eight qualifying tonalities.

  Ah, Whiting, get a grip. Don’t let pettiness slip in now. You have carried yourself with dignity these hundred days. You have shown them that you have nothing about which to be ashamed, that you deserve, by the integrity with which you have accepted your punishment, to be acquitted. Don’t hang it up in the last hour.

  “The moonlight is charming, and yet cold, Cariga. I like it not quite as well as you do.”

  He makes a kind of a snort. The wide, curving nostril flares. It is not insulting, I think.

  “You are bitter, Charles.”

  “I am not bitter, Cariga. Why should I be bitter?”

  “Now you jest. Do you imagine your irony is beyond me?”

  This sounds a bit belligerent, but it isn’t. I think it is a syntactical formulation meant to belittle the speaker for the benefit of the one addressed.

  “Thank you, Cariga.” In this way I absolve him.

  Now he unlocks the door, steps just inside, and intones:

  “You are here.”

  There it is. Again. One of the simplest yet most baffling constructs, three elementary words capable of a thousand meanings. I hear it every day, yet I am seldom capable of taking it at more than its minimal intention, which is a form of acknowledgement that everything is all right now.

  “Cariga, may we dispense with the small talk? This is the one hundredth day.”

  “Yes. The one hundredth day. But you are here!”

  “Of course I’m here. Where else could I be but behind these damn bars?”

  Cariga folds the hearing cone that occupies most of his midsection in upon itself.

  “I’m sorry, Cariga.”

  “Charles, my good friend, you are here.”

  “You know, I’m da—” I stop myself and start again. “I have to admit I’m quite sick of hearing ‘You are here.’ What I want to know is, when am I getting out of here?”

  Cariga hunches the base of his eye stalks into a sort of volcano-like shape, and the stalks themselves quiver for a moment, looking not unlike lava spraying upward from the top of his head. I recognize it as a reaction of extreme sadness.

  “What pains you, Cariga?”

  “Your death is not as I expected.”

  “What the bloody hell did you—? Cariga, this is nonsense. I have to be acquitted.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Damn it all!!” I grab my dinner plate and fling it against the far wall. It clangs annoyingly. “Then get me acquitted!”

  Now, that’s far too much. Unquestionably my nerves are beginning to crack. I have steadfastly refused, and I still refuse, to believe that they seriously intend to execute me, and yet there is only one hour left! A last-minute reprieve is, of course, the stuff of legend, but I can’t help thinking my acquittal would have occurred long ago if it had ever been meant to happen.

  “You can’t do this, Cariga! Where is your sense of justice? I can’t be put to death for such a triviality!”

  Stupid words. Cariga does not deserve to hear them; he is not my jailer. He, in fact, seems to be the only one who cares. And I’m sure—although it’s more than ironic to say I’m sure about anything at this point—that he doesn’t have the power to have me released.

  “This is the final hour. You will now experience your life on Ranaag.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In the final hour, the condemned are shown their lives. Some find an answer.”

  “You mean—a way to make amends?”

  “An answer can be many things, Charles.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When you awake from your life, you will be in the chamber.”

  Whiting hesitated in the doorway of the shuttle, then stepped down, his boot pressing the soil of Ranaag for the first time. It gave under his weight only as much as the soil of Earth would have. He turned toward the shuttle, but it was backing away, its wake whisking the dust around him. The little craft scurried up into the red clouds; in minutes it would meet the ship and be gone forever.

  A whispering noise—he turned to see the welcoming committee gliding towards him. They seemed to be in a constant state of flux, absorbing and extruding three or four appendages every minute or so. When they encircled him, and he gazed up into those cavernous brown mouths, he marveled. My companions. For life.

  They made noises. He had no understanding. They waited. He waited. Then one of them said: “Charles Whiting.”

  It startled him, even though he was expecting it.

  “I am he. Thank you for your greeting.” He pondered further: Would it be rude . . .? Well, give it a try. “May I begin by asking how you speak so many human languages so well?”

  Their bodies seemed to sway ever so slightly. Whiting stared at their pebbly brown skin and multicolored robes, and felt himself sway as well. After a moment, the group began to move. Whiting felt a warm touch at his back, startling him out of his reverie. He walked.

  Was it the wrong question? What question would have brought a response? In time, he would learn. And someday he would give what he had learned back to his own world.

  He kept a journal. On the first evening he wrote: “I wonder if I will learn all that I possibly can learn, at some time before my tour is up. It is difficult to imagine grasping everything there is to know about a race of beings and their planet in as brief a span as twenty years, but I mean all that I, specifically I, am capable of learning. Will I be twiddling my thumbs one year from now, agonizing over the fact th
at this planet is too far off the beaten track and too economically unimportant to warrant more than a single junior ambassador who can expect no planned contact for nineteen additional years?”

  The first night, he slept surprisingly well, and when he woke, and realized how good a sleep it had been, he knew he had been exhausted both from the long trip and from his prolonged anticipation, an anticipation which had found its release in his being on the job at last.

  On his first full day, he walked among them. They made no move to stop him from going where he pleased, nor did they make any overtures of expecting anything from him. He wondered at their silence, but clung to one basic assumption, that the indigenous people must be allowed to deal with the intruder in their own way, in their own time. His first question had been a failure. Now, no matter how much he longed to pose question after question, he would not approach them until they made some show of being ready.

  He waited. He watched.

  The city resembled adobe, all of a uniform reddish gray color. The interiors were decorated simply, with projections that descended from the ceilings like stalactites twisted into remarkable constructs—what appeared to Whiting to be free-form designs. Most of the buildings were pyramidal, with fewer and fewer rooms on each floor. In time he discerned that not only were there fewer total inhabitants on each higher floor of the residential buildings, but there were also fewer inhabitants per unit volume of space. In the places of business, the same rule applied. It seemed an obvious indication of social status. Perhaps he had learned something, but then again, he cautioned himself, he should never jump to conclusions.

  On the third day, he was quite convinced that his meals would always appear at regular times, no matter where he was in the city. The food was, astonishingly, exactly like what he ate on Earth. He did not understand how this could be, but on the third day it was this simple puzzle that drove him to break his own silence and approach one of them in the street.

  “Forgive me for speaking before being spoken to, but I am in great confusion. May I ask one simple question?”

  “I am Cariga,” the creature replied. “Thank you.”

  “Why do you thank me?”

  “I am honored to be chosen.”

  “But I only want a bit of information.”

  “Anything.”

  If it was this easy, why had they not spoken to him earlier?

  “How can you make food exactly like what I am used to on Earth?”

  “Food is.” Cariga inclined his head slightly.

  “Food is what?”

  Cariga glided away.

  Before long, he found himself, by choice, retracing his own steps of days before. In the mornings, he would walk among the Ranaagans, then take breakfast, and then hike into the barren hills surrounding the city. The perspective from atop some of the higher promontories afforded him a chance to see just how isolated this group of beings really was.

  Many Ranaagans spoke to him, but only Cariga made sure to talk with him every single day. To his great frustration, portions of every conversation seemed quite intelligible, while other portions were more baffling than the most subtle Zen paradox.

  For example:

  “How do you build these buildings?”

  “A basic system of clay blocks. They range in size from the span of your hand up to the size of twenty of you in your entirety.”

  “What kind of device do you use to lift such large blocks?”

  “Machines.”

  “What kind of machines?”

  “Blocks can be lifted.”

  “Where are these machines?”

  “They are not here.”

  “Then where are they?”

  “Never can they be.”

  “If they can never be, how can you use them to lift blocks?”

  At this point, his companion would quietly leave his presence. Whiting found this exit would occur whenever he made a direct question to any statement which seemed a non sequitur, a paradox, or a simple impossibility. If he did not question such a statement—such as when Cariga offered the non sequitur “blocks can be lifted” and Whiting did not pursue it—the conversation would continue. After six months, he clung to this observation as if it represented a true understanding of these conversations; in fact, however, two years later he still had no clue to the meaning of this simple piece of information.

  Through the years, his routines bore him along like the steady flow of a great river.

  On many days he thought, “I do this for you,” an image of a woman filling his mind. She was the emblem of his task, the symbol of his determination to fathom the Ranaagans, to make the connection across the stars; in the depth of his loneliness he made a connection against the soft sheets, striving to bring what would some day be his hard-won understanding back to his beloved, his Earth, she of the flaxen hair and heavy breasts. He stroked himself; he strained in the intensity and severity of his mission until at last he fell into her arms, and spent his seed into the Ranaagan linen. He had chosen this. He would see it out.

  Three years into his mission, he wrote in his journal, “Sometimes I think I would give my life to uncover a key that would unlock these mysteries—if I could only find a Rosetta Stone!—although I suppose the analogy is bad, because after all it’s not language that’s the barrier. The barrier has more to do with something like—I want to say a fundamental difference in outlook, but that seems ridiculously simple. When one doesn’t even understand what it is one doesn’t understand, well—I don’t know how to get beyond that.”

  In a year that may have been his sixth, seventh, or eighth on Ranaag, a day came on which Cariga took him to an open field. Ranaagans of all ages frolicked about. Some of the younger ones played a game in which a suspended hoop of stone was battered by sticks, to no apparent purpose, although once in a while a cheer would rise from the group.

  “What are they doing?” he asked Cariga.

  “Playing.”

  “Why are they hitting the hoop with sticks?”

  “The hoop sees more than the stick.”

  Whiting found he could, very easily, leave it at that.

  “Do you enjoy watching them?” Cariga said.

  “Yes,” Whiting replied. “I enjoy it.”

  “Cariga, I have been here for eleven years now.”

  He spoke in Earth years, because Cariga always did so when speaking to him, even though, due to the length of the Ranaagan year, only four of them had passed since he had arrived.

  “You are here,” Cariga said.

  “I think I understand less now than I did when I arrived.”

  “Are you not happy?”

  “The strange thing is, I am happy. I have become so accustomed to pondering your race and not feeling that I understand you in the slightest, that it is almost a comfort to me to be in this perpetual confusion.”

  “Socrates said he was the wisest of men because he alone knew that he knew nothing.”

  “Cariga, you never cease to astound me.”

  “And you me.”

  One day Cariga came to him, dressed in a way he had never seen. His robes seemed to rise up against the pull of gravity; for the first time in twenty years, Whiting saw the legs of a Ranaagan. They were like a thicket of brambles, with hundreds of tiny endings where they caressed the ground.

  “This is the year of twenty.”

  Twenty years, Whiting thought with sudden awareness. Can it be that long?

  “Cariga,” he said, gathering his wits, “I see you.”

  “Charles, you are here. Now be with me.”

  Cariga turned and glided quickly away. Whiting, frozen by astonishment, hesitated a moment before racing after his friend.

  “Where are we going?” he asked breathlessly. “It’s a special event, isn’t it?”

  “It must be.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “I do know.”

  “Can you tell me where we’re going?”

  “The Palace.”

/>   Whiting stopped. “The Palace?”

  Cariga moved on a few meters before stopping and returning. This, too, was astounding. Never had any Ranaagan responded to his choice of whether to move or not, or which direction to take.

  “What is wrong?”

  “Cariga, is something wrong?”

  “Now you puzzle me, Charles. It is imperative that you come.” Cariga turned and resumed his march.

  Whiting had seen the Palace many times, but had never entered, if only because of his upbringing. It was silly, he knew; on Ranaag he was never barred from any building, but as a child, he had viewed Buckingham Palace as a place of mystery and privilege, and even as an adult, he would never have dreamed of setting foot inside without a special invitation from the King himself, or at the very least an invitation issued under the King’s personal direction. And yet, although he had been imposing a standard of his own on the Ranaagans, he had gradually put the Palace out of his mind, had settled into a life of bemusement and routine, and not since his early months here had he ever given any thought to speaking with the rulers of this place. It was his sudden awareness of this failure of duty that so deeply shocked him now, more than even the abrupt summons to the Palace after so many years of being ignored.

  Ranaagans in all manner of gaily colored finery lined the route. Whiting couldn’t help being embarrassed by the attention, but it seemed best to say nothing to Cariga about it. He would simply carry himself with the dignity befitting an ambassador of Earth.

  “Cariga!”

  “What is it, Charles?” He did not slow down.

  “I—I’m the ambassador.”

  “You are the ambassador.”

  “No, I mean, I’m supposed to be the ambassador, but I have no idea of protocol here. I—my God, I can’t believe it—but I’ve been here twenty years and I feel I barely understand how to say hello.”

  “This is the year of twenty.”

  “Cariga, for God’s sake, that doesn’t help me. Can’t you at least give me a clue what I’m supposed to say in greeting?”

  Cariga hurried on in silence.