New Writings in SF 28 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Kenneth Bulmer

  * * * *

  Big and strong, dark as the night that claimed him, Black Art came to Presavorrat while he slept. ‘Look at me, man,’ he ordered. ‘Powerful, cruel, a winner all the way. A creation destined for fictional greatness, but you shelved the idea and booked me passage on the oblivion express. Hell, baby, I would have had it made!’

  Sleeping, Presavorrat suffered the blast of raw power until it seemed he would drown in his own mattress. Art towered over him, ferocious in his anger. ‘I would have been great!’ he thundered.

  ‘But publishers don’t want written words,’ Presavorrat managed to whisper through his fear. ‘They’ll accept nothing but extracted thoughts.’

  ‘If you were good enough you’d make it. Just a hack. No talent, no courage, no nothing. You’ll never break the stranglehold of the extracters, not without a character like me to make life leap and tingle through your pages.’

  Denied even the fictional reality of his original conception, Black Art loomed malignantly over his dream trapped creator. ‘Write me, you bastard!’ he demanded. ‘Give me that much or by all that’s unholy I swear to sever the chains that bind me and enfold your existence to replace the one you dangled so tantalisingly then withdrew.’

  Presavorrat could only scream as big black hands reached out towards him. Red tinged screams that seemed to pour from a gash, a second mouth in the throat of humanity.

  Black blood spurted like demented rain, producing a rich cancer that would melt in daylight. Green sparks fusing brains that plunged towards the pit.

  Presavorrat wept and the hands that reached out made fists that shook with threatened violence. ‘You owe me!’ shrieked Black Art with impotent rage as he faded into nocturnal mists.

  The woman held him tightly, cradling him to her breast. ‘There, there,’ she cooed gently, ‘everything will be all right.’ But two hours later Piller still wept and muttered. ‘Black as the abyss,’ he said between tears. ‘After my life.’

  The woman could make no sense from any of it. Not from his non-stop crying nor his insane ramblings. ‘Hell spawned, from the depths of my mind,’ he muttered as he sobbed. The realization finally came home to her that she was powerless in every way.

  The doctor she sent for decided he was also unable to help, apart for arranging for hospitalization and expert opinion.

  Poor Piller, thought the woman, closing the door on yet another episode. Insane, they said. Completely, utterly, and with little hope of a cure. For her he was now relegated to the past, but for others he was very much the present.

  The psychiatrist in charge of his case telephoned the publisher who paid him an annual retainer. ‘Got a sure-fire smash for you this time,’ he claimed with supreme confidence. ‘A real dilly, as you will agree after reading the case notes I’m sending.’

  The publisher did agree, and wasted no time setting up a thought extraction session. This one really did have best selling potential.

  It wasn’t the way he had planned, and he no longer knew anything about it, but his life-long ambition was soon to be realized. Piller Presavorrat, wordsmith, was heading for publication.

  <>

  * * * *

  MANGANON

  Michael Stall

  Michael Stall’s vision here, incorporating the farthest reaches of the future and the farthest reaches of the past that turn out to be the day before yesterday, contains an evocative creation of the true otherness of a world that, for all Gwent knew at first, could be fact or fantasy, hell or purgatory. For George Gwent and for Hrunting, two men who came to Manganon from greatly dissimilar backgrounds, the axon gateways offered vastly different prospects, aims that they had not so far revealed. There was much more to Manganon than appeared after the enigma had been solved. Manganon, with its facetted sky, its ceramic weapons, its living armour, its vegetables artifacts and the bewildered people of another time, would, as Michael Stall effortlessly points out, be argued over in the very finest academic style by the bedazzled observers. But, then, the true Manganon was none of these things.

  * * * *

  PART ONE: THE BORROWED SWORD

  1

  There was dew on the heather. It was beginning to penetrate the leather bindings on his legs. The Traveller who was currently known as Passer by Gates noted it, and quickly suppressed an associated memory chain. The name he now carried was also beginning to accumulate too many memories, and it had not even been of his own choosing: the other names he had held dredged themselves up: Hraegl, the Aetheling, Siwardsson ... It was a long list, and he took no particular pride in it. But now, in the fruitless search for anonymity, it needed adding to, and the choice was easy: the old words were the best for such things: Hrunting, the borrowed sword.

  He looked up: the deep green tracery of the night sky was yielding to the magenta of day. The care they took of their charges, even down to maintaining the circadian rhythms! He looked about, over the plain that yielded in the direction - meaninglessly called the East - to minor mountains, beyond them the sea, and down from their maritime watershed a fair river running its once for all way with villages and hamlets dotted about its bottom lands, and a great city at the merging of the waters. Neither city nor village nor sea interested Hrunting: only the Gate that was there, somewhere, perhaps the great dream of all Travellers: an un-looped Axon Gate!

  He looked down at the now sodden leathers on his legs, and they brought to mind a sudden rain in the Morea - in primary time - and his Varangians cutting Hauteville hirelings from their horses, and for a moment his fingers half-felt the form of an axe’s haft, before the certain futility of it all recalled itself to him.

  He felt a dozen aches: this body had scarcely a good year left in it, but that was only to be expected: he had been walking it now three days with scant rest, and that was the pattern of the past year. He could not wait too long before the next Gate, though his eagerness was augmented by the rumour that this coming Gate had a Magister Portarum.

  Without thought of rest, the newly renamed Hrunting trudged forward in an empty direction, laved of hope and beyond despair.

  * * * *

  2

  The road was leading nowhere, only deeper into the Dale Country, away from the warren of cities where Gwent could mantle himself in the nondescript generality - or could have done. There was no pain now, but slowly, almost pleasantly blood oozed through the wad of handkerchiefs out on to the red plastic of the seat. He was dying. He felt little fear: his stomach was too badly torn up by police bullets to tighten, and the numbness that encircled the wound seemed somehow to have spread to his mind. Wearily, he eased off the accelerator and let the car coast to a halt, methodically turning off the ignition and easing on the hand brake. It was not his car: the very least he could do would be to leave it in good condition for its unknown owner: the blood, after all, would wash off, a flake from the snake-skin of reality, like the nine days’ wonder of its being stolen by George Gwent, the famed terrorist.

  Tiredly, he leaned to take one of the leaflets from the back seat: the bold, cheaply printed ‘Free England’ banner in red over the black, blood and soil text, stared at him, and had no meaning for him. That was someone else’s struggle now. He crumpled it, and wiped ineffectually at the stain on the seat. Then it crossed his mind that if he died in the car, the EPC Auxiliaries might suspect a booby trap and plant a charge. The French Auxiliaries were notably wary, and it was a fifty-fifty chance that they, and not the regular police, would find him first. In his dull, bemused state, the sense of obligation to the car’s unknown owner assumed huge proportions. He dropped the dirtied leaflet, and holding the wad in place over the wound, he fumbled the door open and staggered out.

  He could see the stars, haloed in his unfocussed vision, and he felt the silence of the night like a blanket held over him, a blanket that magnified the erratic beat of his heart as it relentlessly evacuated the lifeblood in him, turning his trousers into hardening cylinders that impeded knee movement. With his free hand, h
e delved into his jacket pocket, grasping the ancient Webley. He managed a few paces, out of the zone of brightness he had made opening the car door, before he fell, not in classic movie slow motion but hard on to earth and stone.

  He lay motionless for a while, minutes perhaps; it was hard to tell, but finally he noticed the inscribed slab. It had been discarded at the roadside was his first thought - an old gravestone. Appropriate. There was a time of scant consciousness again, then a dull wakefulness. In the low power light of the car interior roof light, yards away, he could make out a few words, in terrible dog latin, old and roughly carved.

  ‘Ego ... Petrus de Wyke, Magister Porte...’

  The words held him: ‘Magister Porte,’ Master of the Gate. It was no title he had ever seen before, and he had read old charters and statutes for years, dredging up pointless precedents and laws for the Movement, in the days before all sides had ceased to respect anything but the gun. Armiger, barone, miles ... they meant something, but ... He was confused, tired; he tried to make out more, but everything blurred, faded into the blackness that disguised hedgerow and distant tree, save for one phrase that penetrated the fog that was settling about his mind:’... hac porta ...’ By this gate. What gate, and what by it? He turned laboriously over, so that he could see the stars, but his eyes could make out nothing now but utter, unrelieved blackness, like the blackness before the beginning of things. He wrenched the Webley from his pocket, releasing hold of the soaked wad that pent his guts, and held the pistol in a marksman’s double grip, determined to break this blackness by gun blazes of creation, but the hammer clicked on an empty chamber.

  ‘...hac porta ...’ By this gate. His mind was wandering. Was this death, this primeval numbness that was spreading even to the extremities of his limbs? For a moment, he knew anger.

  ‘I am!’ he screamed, or imagined he screamed, and then the numbing blackness seeped finally into his mind, became a torrent, and the universe died, uncreated.

  * * * *

  3

  There was no transition. For the vision blur of the night sky, a canopy of glowing magenta substituted itself. Gwent stood stock still, observing no fear reactions in himself; this was too strange to excite fear. As he thought about it, then his heart would begin to pound, his ...

  Stood! He was standing! He hurt no more! A glance revealed his clothes still tattered, but clean, with no wounds beneath them. He had been dying, and he was alive, here! He looked hard at the new sky: there was more difference here than colour: he could make out a faint tracery of lines, as if the sky itself were faceted, and he himself stood in the very centre of an enormous jewel.

  Palpably, he did not. All around him, scarcely looking odd even in the reddish light, were the normal accoutrements of the moor, grass, bushes, the occasional tree. It was that normality amidst strangeness that finally set his heart pounding.

  How long he stood there, silent, unmoving, he didn’t know. Fear mounted in waves, beat a surf of terror over him, then scattered in froth to reveal yet more and larger waves ... With as great an effort of will as he had ever made, he broke the pattern. Whatever had happened had to have a rational explanation, not necessarily a pleasant one, but a rational one. With such thoughts he slowed the trip hammer in his chest, slowing it to a heartbeat.

  Am I dreaming? he thought suddenly, but the answer supplied itself: every dream he could recall always had a saving air of unreality that either frustratingly shadowed its joys or thankfully diminished its horrors - an element of conscious reality intruding. Here, sense, feeling, intuition all shouted at him: this is for real!

  An alternate world? Another planet? But the facetted sky! Insanity seemed the best bet; but didn’t the insane never even consider that possibility, or was that just folk-lore? It didn’t matter; he wasn’t seriously considering it as a possibility. The truth was he had insufficient data for a useful judgment, so - gather more. He walked.

  And as he walked, normalcy enveloped him, words formed themselves in sequential order in his mind - sequential, for causality seemed still to be valid here. He tried to think about it; but his thoughts merely fitted themselves to the old grooves. He noticed a clump of bushes surmounted by a tree, a miniature copse. He sat down on the grass, his back to the copse and wondered what time of day it was. As there was no sun—

  The breath came out of him in a single, lung emptying gasp. He’d realized it before, but even in his mind he’d been afraid to verbalize it. Now it was out. He had not stumbled by accident on some bizarre warp or fissure in space-time: his new environment was artificial. This was not elsewhere ... it was a made thing. He-

  There was a rustling behind him. He came to his feet, twisting about to see a short, wild figure, all beard and eyes, in a leather jack and russets thonged to mid calf, and all topped by a battered but still serviceable plain helmet. Gwent did not fail to notice the scramasax the newcomer clutched in his right hand.

  ‘What do you want?’ he rapped out, without thinking whether the newcomer could understand English.

  The warrior twisted his face under the beard: ‘I’m going to carve you a little, brother.’

  ‘Why?’ Gwent replied, with a dispassionate calm that surprised him.

  The warrior looked him over with an appraising eye. ‘Good clothes, and jewellery concealed beneath, I’ll wager.’ He wagged the knife. ‘Your effects should buy me a good baked byrnie and sword, and make a gentleman of me.’ He began to move forward, menacingly.

  And Gwent’s calm broke: the huge anticlimax of being robbed and killed at this point was an impertinence he didn’t intend to let the universe get away with: he leapt forward, brushing aside a tentative lunge, and then the in-fighting techniques he had been taught in the Movement took over. It was all too much for the warrior, who had obviously expected abject behaviour on the part of his victim; in seconds, Gwent’s fingers tightened about his throat, clutching with a wild pressure. Gwent found himself longing to strangle the life of his man, as if to work off the fears and frustrations of the time he had spent in this new world. Instead, when the eyeballs seemed on the point of starting from the head, he unceremoniously dumped the would-be thief on the turf. The other still held the knife, and Gwent bent to take it from him. It was some kind of ceramic, he noted, and as he stood there, examining it, he realized that the language he had been answered in hadn’t been English. Nor, for that matter, the language he himself had used. He scowled with annoyance. Was life under the magenta facetted sky to be an interminable procession of double-takes?

  ‘Your name?’

  ‘Wulf, sir.’

  ‘Nationality?’

  ‘English.’

  Gwent made a wild guess: ‘The year?’

  ‘The Year of Our Lord One Thousand and Sixty Nine.’

  Gwent tried to put time travel into the melange of events and make a pattern, but none came. This new world became stranger the more one learned of it. This language they were both using with perfect familiarity - to his mind, it seemed like English, and it was a good bet that to Wulf it seemed like late Anglo Saxon: it fitted both like a perfect semantic glove. Wulf moved, and Gwent moved the knife forward.

  ‘Go on,’ Wulf said, fearfully. ‘It’s what we’re here for.’

  Gwent backed off a pace, still holding the knife out.

  ‘You know what we’re here for?’

  ‘It’s obvious.’

  ‘Not to me.’

  Wulf looked quite surprised, but volunteered no further information. Gwent felt himself growing impatient: this could go on all day, if that was the right word. He leant forward, almost jabbing the other in the face with the knife.

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘In Hell, of course,’ the beaten man said, as if shocked at having to say it. ‘Where else?’

  * * * *

  4

  It was night, of a sort. And there were stars, of a sort. The vertices of the milliard facets glowed balefully out of the green; it was as bright as a new moon night. Wulf slept
soundly; he was happy enough, now; he had refound his true vocation. He had been a thane’s servant, dispossessed of his master in the New England, and mortally wounded in the Harrowing of the North. How he had come here was a little vague to him.

  Gwent smiled to himself. He had met a real, live Anglo Saxon, and he found himself with particular interest in the fact. There was no question on that score he wanted to ask: the differences were small, human, accidental, of no account. The only important question was on the nature of this ... device, that they both occupied. Wulf could believe it to be Hell, if he chose; but his new servant was hardly well informed. He would have brooded more, but he fell asleep.

  * * * *

  Morning came with a tropical suddenness. The green spotted grey of the fell was brighter than it should be under the red arch of the facetted heavens. Wulf called it the Fell of Transfiguration, a hard place, and advised against seeking help in the houses whose smoke floated wispily to the sky every half mile or so. ‘It’s too easy to die under someone else’s roof.’ Although he was the willing servant, in the question of their destination he had been the master. ‘There’s nowhere else to go.’