The First Science Fiction Megapack

by Reginald Bretnor

  That night I dreamed of her, a dream which Tennyson might have written for me, or one of the Cavalier poets, and I had a hard time explaining my abstraction to the sweet girl I was going with. She was in my mind, and would not leave, and I began to hope I’d never find another object for her husband, no matter how profitable the find might be.

  As it turned out, during the next several months I found three things that seemed to have been made especially for him, and on each occasion he demanded that I bring them to him in New York. I justified it by telling myself that, after all, I was a dealer and could not forego such easy money, but I know now that it was far more the hope of seeing her even for a moment, of hearing her speak a few casual words. I dreamed of her time and again, and tormented myself with the thought of her embraced in her husband’s coldness.

  My second visit went much like the first, except that she was in the room when I arrived, again attired very simply in—but what she wore is of no moment. She stood up when I walked into her presence, and though again Hoogstraten did not introduce us, she thanked me for the machine—was it not a machine?—I had sold Andreas, which had pleased him. He was a genius. His mind, it demanded problems.… It was very nice of…

  I stood there tongue-tied, trapped by the magic radiating from her. Hoogstraten was already opening what I had brought him—a clock but not a clock. A thing with complicated clockwork in a case which could have been made by some exotic Faberge, which told something, but not time—at least not any time that might make sense to us. After a moment, his voice still soft, he told her to leave the room, and without demur, as I stood there grinning at her foolishly, she left. For that I hated him, and almost for spite I asked him seven thousand for the thing. He paid me seventy-five hundred, again in cash, and sent me on my way.

  Two months passed before I went again, two months during which I still dreamed of her, still thought of her, wondered at whatever power she had over me, at what her life might have been before she married Hoogstraten and, indeed, why she had married him.

  This time, again, she was in the room when I arrived, and again she spoke to me, nothing memorable, comments about the season possibly, or how very good I was to find another treasure for Andreas. Then, once more, he sent her out; and the performance was repeated. He first became wholly absorbed in what I’d brought—what was it? Half book, half Byzantine icon?-but written in a script completely alien to me, resembling none I’d seen before, which seemed to change as its pages turned, momentarily revealing illustrations that vanished almost instantly. He was delighted with it, and paid me far more than I would have dared to ask. Then, for the first time, he became almost friendly.

  “Dennison,” he said, “where do these come from? Why were they made? Was it simply as a challenge to me, to my intellect? I have no doubt that some of them came from hidden cultures, arts not permitted to the masses, lost civilizations, perhaps even other worlds! But why? Again, I ask you, is it deliberate? A continuing contest? To see if I, Andreas Hoogstraten, have a breaking point?” He stood. From a skeletal cabinet as convoluted as the last agony of an El Greco saint, he lifted a vessel, which I had seen before, but which I had taken simply for some far-out potter’s drug-dream. He handed it to me. Perhaps a foot high, almost opaque, it was enormously heavy.

  “Look at it, Dennison,” he said. “Do you know what it is?”

  Up close, it looked like grayish glass, but with a higher lustre, and it was much, much heavier. Like any vase, it tapered to a neck, but there the resemblance ceased, for the neck doubled back on itself to penetrate the body halfway down and emerge again in a mouth melding with the other side.

  “It is a Klein bottle, Dennison. Are you familiar with the Moebius Strip?”

  “You mean a strip of paper you give a sort of twist to and then join its ends so that in effect it has one side only?”

  “Exactly. Well, a Klein bottle is like that, only in three dimensions. Its inside is its outside and vice versa. Do you understand?”

  I said I understood.

  He took it from me, looked at it with an expression of mixed pride and anger. “I have drilled into it, Dennison. I have used a little instrument with which surgeons look into our bodies’ inmost secrets. Inside it is a complex of beautifully ground crystals, and what seem to be controls and things I cannot put a name to. So far, it is the only unknown thing that has defeated me. I have had it several years, and I know no more about it than when it came to me, but my getting it could not have been an accident. It was part of the test, the challenge.”

  Shocked at his megalomania, I fumbled for something innocuous to say. “I—I suppose you have a pretty large collection by this time, Mr. Hoogstraten?”

  He replaced the Klein bottle in the cabinet. “A large collection?” He said it with a sneer. “Dennison, I have always two or perhaps three. They do not defeat me for very long. Indeed, this is the only one I have had to keep for several years.”

  “But what do you do with them?” I asked. “Do you give them away or sell them?”

  “Certainly not. When I have solved them, when they have served their purpose, I destroy them. That is the only way for me perhaps to get revenge, you understand?”

  Frankly, I was horrified. I started to protest that some of them were treasures, that they exhibited superb craftsmanship, that surely scientists would be interested in them.

  He cut me off before I had three words out. “Never!” he cried. “When I have solved them, they are nothing! Nothing! They no longer have a soul!”

  He paid me even more than he had previously, and exacted a promise that I’d keep hunting for him; and I left telling myself that no matter what I found, I’d never go back again.

  It was five months before I did, just after I returned from my annual trip to England, and then it was because I knew I had to see her one more time. In a sense, she had never left me. I would wake at night from my Pre-Raphaelite dreams of her, despairing, wondering how ever she could have married him-not for his money, certainly. But why, why, why?

  So I went back. The thing I’d found was simple—a crude tool, mysterious only in the fact that it had no discernible function. This time, when the man-servant admitted me, I saw that she wasn’t in the room, and all the while Hoogstraten examined what I’d brought him, I kept looking at the door through which she had come and gone, wishing, hoping.

  Finally he rose. “I will take the tool,” he told me, “even though it is not of so high a quality. I shall pay four hundred only.”

  I could control myself no longer. “I haven’t see Mrs. Hoogstraten,” I said, I hoped casually.

  He stopped counting money. For moments, those cold, glistening pupils stared at me. Then, “No,” he said, ever so gently. “You see—” he smiled, “—I found out what she was.”

  CAPTIVES OF THE FLAME, by Samuel R. Delany

  PROLOGUE

  The green of beetles’ wings…the red of polished carbuncle…a web of silver fire. Lightning tore his eyes apart, struck deep inside his body; and he felt his bones split. Before it became pain, it was gone. And he was falling through blue smoke. The smoke was inside him, cool as blown ice. It was getting darker.

  He had heard something before, a…voice: the Lord of the Flames.… Then:

  Jon Koshar shook his head, staggered forward, and went down on his knees in white sand. He blinked. He looked up. There were two shadows in front of him.

  To his left a tooth of rock jutted from the sand, also casting a double shadow. He felt unreal, light. But the backs of his hands had real dirt on them, his clothes were damp with real sweat, and they clung to his back and sides. He felt immense. But that was because the horizon was so close. Above it, the sky was turquoise—which was odd because the sand was too white for it to be evening. Then he saw the City.

  It hit his eyes with a familiarity that made him start. The fam
iliarity was a refuge, and violently his mind clawed at it, tried to find other familiar things. But the towers, the looped roadways, that was all there was—and one small line of metal ribbon that soared out across the desert, supported by strut-work pylons. The transit ribbon! He followed it with his eyes, praying it would lead to something more familiar. The thirteenth pylon—he had counted them as he ran his eye along the silver length—was crumpled, as though a fist had smashed it. The transit ribbon snarled in mid-air and ceased. The abrupt end again sent his mind clawing back toward familiarity: I am Jon Koshar (followed by the meaningless number that had been part of his name for five years). I want to be free (and for a moment he saw again the dank, creosoted walls of the cabins of the penal camp, and heard the clinking chains of the cutter teeth as he had heard them for so many days walking to the mine entrance while the yard-high ferns brushed his thighs and forearms…but that was in his mind).

  The only other things his scrambling brain could reach were facts of negation. He was some place he had never been before. He did not know how he had gotten there. He did not know how to get back. And the close horizon, the double shadows…now he realized that this wasnot Earth (Earth of the Thirty-fifth Century, although he gave it another name, Fifteenth Century G.F.).

  But the City.… It was on earth, and he was on earth, and he was—had been—in it. Again the negations: the City was not on a desert, nor could its dead, deserted towers cast double shadows, nor was the transit ribbon broken.

  The transit ribbon!

  No!

  It couldn’t be broken. He almost screamed. Don’t let it be broken, please.…

  The entire scene was suddenly jerked from his head. There was nothing left but blue smoke, cool as blown ice, inside him, around him. He was spinning in blue smoke. Sudden lightning seared his eyeballs, and the shivering after-image faded, shifted, became … a web of silver fire, the red of polished carbuncle, the green of beetles’ wings.

  CHAPTER I

  Silent as a sleeping serpent for sixty years, it spanned from the heart of Telphar to the royal palace of Toromon. From the ashes of the dead city to the island capital, it connected what once had been the two major cities, the only cities of Toromon. Today there was only one.

  In Telphar, it soared above ashes and fallen roadways into the night.

  Miles on, the edge of darkness paled before the morning and in the faint shadow of the transit ribbon, at the edge of a field of lava, among the whispering, yard-high ferns, sat row on row of squat shacks, cheerless as roosting macaws. They stood near the entrance of the tetron mines.

  A few moments before, the light rain had stopped. Water dribbled down the supporting columns of the transit ribbon which made a black band on the fading night.

  Now, six extraordinarily tall men left the edge of the jungle. They carried two corpses among them. Two of the tall men hung back to converse.

  “The third one won’t get very far.”

  “If he does,” said the other, “he’ll be the first one to get through the forest guards in twelve years.”

  “I’m not worried about his escaping,” said the first. “But why have there been such an increase in attempts over the past year?”

  The other one laughed. Even in the dull light, the three scars that ran down the side of his face and neck were visible. “The orders for tetron have nearly doubled.”

  “I wonder just what sort of leeches in Toron make their living off these miserable—” He didn’t finish, but pointed ahead to the corpses.

  “The hydroponic growers, the aquarium manufacturers,” answered the man with the scars. “They’re the ones who use the ore. Then, of course, there’s the preparation for the war.”

  “They say that since the artificial food growers have taken over, the farmers and fishermen near the coast are being starved out. And with the increased demand for tetron, the miners are dying off like flies here at the mine. Sometimes I wonder how they supply enough prisoners.”

  “They don’t,” said the other. Now he called out. “All right. Just drop them there, in front of the cabins.”

  The rain had made the ground mud. Two dull splashes came through the graying morning. “Maybe that’ll teach them some sort of lesson,” said the first.

  “Maybe,” shrugged the one with the scars.

  Now they turned back toward the jungle.

  * * * *

  Soon, streaks of light speared the yellow clouds and pried apart the billowing rifts. Shafts of yellow sank into the lush jungles of Toromon, dropping from wet, green fronds, or catching on the moist cracks of boulders. Then the dawn snagged on the metal ribbon that arced over the trees, and webs of shadow from the immense supporting pylons fell across the few, gutted lava beds that dotted the forest.

  A formation of airships flashed through a tear in the clouds like a handful of hurled, silver chips. As the buzz from their tetron motors descended through the trees, Quorl, the forest guard, stretched his seven-foot body and rolled over, crushing leaves beneath his shoulder. Instinctively his stomach tensed. But silence had returned. With large, yellow-brown eyes, he looked about the grove in which he had spent the night. His broad nostrils flared even wider. But the air was still, clean, safe. Above, the metal ribbon glinted. Quorl lay back on the dried leaves once more.

  * * * *

  As dawn slipped across the jungle, more and more of the ribbon caught fire from beneath the receding shadows, till at last it soared above the yellow crescent of sand that marked the edge of the sea.

  Fifty yards down the beach from the last supporting pylon whose base still sat on dry land, Cithon, the fisherman, emerged from his shack.

  “Tel?” he called. He was a brown, wiry man whose leathery face was netted with lines from sand and wind. “Tel?” he called once more. Now he turned back into the cottage. “And where has the boy gotten off to now?”

  Grella had already seated herself at the loom, and her strong hands now began to work the shuttle back and forth while her feet stamped the treadle.

  “Where has he gone?” Cithon demanded.

  “He went out early this morning,” Grella said quietly. She did not look at her husband. She watched the shuttle moving back and forth, back and forth between the green and yellow threads.

  “I can see he’s gone out,” Cithon snapped. “But where? The sun is up. He should be out with me on the boat. When will he be back?”

  Grella didn’t answer.

  “When will he be back?” Cithon demanded.

  “I don’t know.”

  Outside there was a sound, and Cithon turned abruptly and went to the side of the shack.

  The boy was leaning over the water trough, sloshing his face.

  “Tel.”

  The boy looked up quickly at his father. He was perhaps fourteen, a thin child, with a shock of black hair, yet eyes as green as the sea. Fear had widened them now.

  “Where were you?”

  “No place,” was the boy’s quietly defensive answer. “I wasn’t doing anything.”

  “Where were you?”

  “No place,” Tel mumbled again. “Just walking.…”

  Suddenly Cithon’s hand, which had been at his waist jerked up and then down, and the leather strap that had been his belt slashed over the boy’s wet shoulder.

  The only sound was a sudden intake of breath.

  “Now get down to the boat.”

  Inside the shack, the shuttle paused in Grella’s fist the length of a drawn breath. Then it shot once more between the threads.

  * * * *

  Down the beach, the transit ribbon leapt across the water. Light shook on the surface of the sea like flung diamonds, and the ribbon above was dull by comparison.

  Dawn reached across the water till at last the early light fell on the shore
of an island. High in the air, the ribbon gleamed above the busy piers and the early morning traffic of the wharf. Behind the piers, the towers of the City were lanced with gold, and as the sun rose, gold light dropped further down the building faces.

  On the boardwalk, two merchants were talking above the roar of tetron-powered winches and chuckling carts.

  “It looks like your boat’s bringing in a cargo of fish,” said the stout one.

  “It could be fish. It could be something else,” answered the other.

  “Tell me, friend,” asked the portly one, whose coat was of cut and cloth expensive enough to suggest his guesses were usually right, “why do you trouble to send your boat all the way to the mainland to buy from the little fishermen there? My aquariums can supply the City with all the food it needs.”

  The other merchant looked down at the clip-board of inventory slips.

  “Perhaps my clientele is somewhat different from yours.”

  The first merchant laughed. “You sell to the upper families of the City, who still insist on the doubtful superiority of your imported delicacies. Did you know, my friend, I am superior in every way to you? I feed more people, so what I produce is superior to what you produce. I charge them less money, and so I am financially more benevolent than you. I make more money than you do, so I am also financially superior. Also, later this morning my daughter is coming back from the university, and this evening I will give her a party so great and so lavish that she will love me more than any daughter has ever loved a father before.”

  Here the self-satisfied merchant laughed again, and turned down the wharf to inspect a cargo of tetron ore that was coming in from the mainland.

  As the merchant of imported fish turned up another inventory slip, another man approached him. “What was old Koshar laughing about?” he asked.

  “He was gloating over his good fortune in backing that hairbrained aquarium idea. He was also trying to make me jealous of his daughter. He’s giving her a party tonight to which I am no doubt invited; but the invitation will come late this afternoon with no time for me to reply properly.”