“That we still have mail delivery?” David said. “Should we be glad about that too?” He went outside and shut the door behind him.
“When I didn’t hear from them, I should have called or something,” Mom said.
Dad was still looking at the ruined plastic. I took the letter over to him. “Do you want to keep it or what?” I said.
“I think its served its purpose,” he said. He wadded it up, tossed it in the stove, and slammed the door shut. He didn’t even get burned. “Come help me on the greenhouse, Lynn,” he said.
It was pitch dark outside and really getting cold. My sneakers were starting to get stiff. Dad held the flashlight and pulled the plastic tight over the wooden slats. I stapled the plastic every two inches all the way around the frame and my finger about every other time. After we finished one frame, I asked Dad if I could go back in and put on my boots.
“Did you get the seeds for the tomatoes?” he said, as if he hadn’t even heard me. “Or were you too busy looking for the letter?”
“I didn’t look for it,” I said. “I found it. I thought you’d be glad to get the letter and know what happened to the Clearys.”
Dad was pulling the plastic across the next frame, so hard it was getting little puckers in it. “We already knew,” he said.
He handed me the flashlight and took the staple gun out of my hand. “You want me to say it?” he said. “You want me to tell you exactly what happened to them? All right. I would imagine they were close enough to Chicago to have been vaporized when the bombs hit. If they were, they were lucky. Because there aren’t any mountains like ours around Chicago. So they got caught in the fire storm or they died of flashburns or radiation sickness or else some looter shot them.”
“Or their own family,” I said.
“Or their own family.” He put the staple gun against the wood and pulled the trigger. “I have a theory about what happened the summer before last,” he said. He moved the gun down and shot another staple into the wood. “I don’t think the Russians started it or the United States either. I think it was some little terrorist group somewhere or maybe just one person. I don’t think they had any idea what would happen when they dropped their bomb. I think they were just so hurt and angry and frightened by the way things were that they lashed out. With a bomb.” He stapled the frame clear to the bottom and straightened up to start on the other side. “What do you think of that theory, Lynn?”
“I told you,” I said. “I found the letter while I was looking for Mrs. Talbots magazine.”
He turned and pointed the staple gun at me. “But whatever reason they did it for, they brought the whole world crashing down on their heads. Whether they meant it or not, they had to live with the consequences.”
“If they lived,” I said. “If somebody didn’t shoot them.” “I can’t let you go to the post office anymore,” he said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“What about Mrs. Talbots magazines?”
“Go check on the fire,” he said.
I went back inside. David had come back and was standing by the fireplace again, looking at the wall. Mom had set up the card table and the folding chairs in front of the fireplace. Mrs. Talbot was in the kitchen cutting up potatoes, only it looked like it was onions from the way she was crying.
The fire had practically gone out. I stuck a couple of wadded-up magazine pages in to get it going again. The fire flared up with a brilliant blue and green. I tossed a couple of pine cones and some sticks onto the burner paper. One of the pine cones rolled off to the side and lay there in the ashes. I grabbed for it and hit my hand on the door of the stove.
Right in the same place. Great. The blister would pull the old scab off and we could start all over again. And of course Mom was standing right there, holding the pan of potato soup. She put it on top of the stove and grabbed up my hand like it was evidence in a crime or something. She didn’t say anything. She just stood there holding it and blinking.
“I burned it,” I said. “I just burned it.”
She touched the edges of the old scab, as if she was afraid of catching something.
“It’s a burn!” I shouted, snatching my hand back and cramming David’s stupid logs into the stove. “It isn’t radiation sickness. It’s a burn!”
“Do you know where your father is, Lynn?” she asked. “He’s out on the back porch,” I said, “building his stupid greenhouse.”
“He’s gone,” she said. “He took Stitch with him.”
“He can’t have taken Stitch,” I said. “Stitch is afraid of the dark.” She didn’t say anything. “Do you know how dark it is out there?”
“Yes,” she said, and looked out the window. “I know how dark it is.”
I got my parka off the hook by the fireplace and started out the door.
David grabbed my arm. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
I wrenched away from him. “To find Stitch. He’s afraid of the dark.”
“It’s too dark,” he said. “You’ll get lost.”
“So what? Its safer than hanging around this place,” I said and slammed the door shut on his hand.
I made it halfway to the woodpile before he grabbed me. “Let me go,” I said. “I’m leaving. I’m going to go find some other people to live with.”
“There aren’t any other people! For Christ’s sake, we went all the way to South Park last winter. There wasn’t anybody. We didn’t even see those looters. And what if you run into them, the looters who shot Mr. Talbot?”
“What if I do? The worst they could do is shoot me. I’ve been shot at before.”
“You’re acting crazy. You know that, don’t you?” he said. “Coming in here out of the clear blue, taking potshots at everybody with that crazy letter!”
“Potshots!” I said, so mad I was afraid I was going to start crying. “Potshots. What about last summer? Who was taking potshots then?”
“You didn’t have any business taking the shortcut,” David said. “Dad told you never to come that way.”
“Was that any reason to try and shoot me? Was that any reason to kill Rusty?”
David was squeezing my arm so hard I thought he was going to snap it right in two. “The looters had a dog with them. We found its tracks all around Mr. Talbot. When you took the shortcut and we heard Rusty barking, we thought you were the looters.” He looked at me. “Mom’s right. Paranoia’s the number-one killer. We were all a little crazy last summer. We’re all a litde crazy all the time, I guess. And then you pull a stunt like bringing that letter home, reminding everybody of everything that’s happened, of everybody we’ve lost. . . .” He let go of my arm and looked down at his hand.
“I told you,” I said. “I found it while I was looking for a magazine. I thought you’d all be glad I found it.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll bet.”
He went inside and I stayed out a long time, waiting for Dad and Stitch. When I came in, nobody even looked up. Mom was still standing at the window. I could see a star over her head. Mrs. Talbot had stopped crying and was setting the table. Mom dished up the soup and we all sat down. While we were eating, Dad came in.
He had Stitch with him. And all the magazines. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Talbot,” he said. “If you’d like, I’ll put them under the house and you can send Lynn for them one at a time.” “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I don’t feel like reading them any more.”
Dad put the magazines on the couch and sat down at the card table. Mom dished him up a bowl of soup. “I got the seeds,” he said. “The tomato seeds had gotten water-soaked, but the corn and squash were okay.” He looked at me. “I had to board up the post office, Lynn,” he said. “You understand that, don’t you? You understand that I can’t let you go there anymore? It’s just too dangerous.”
“I told you,” I said. “I found it. While I was looking for a magazine.”
“The fire’s going out,” he said.
After they shot Rusty, I wasn’t allowed
to go anywhere for a month for fear they’d shoot me when I came home, not even when I promised to take the long way around. But then Stitch showed up and nothing happened and they let me start going again. I went every day till the end of summer and after that whenever they’d let me. I must have looked through every pile of mail a hundred times before I found the letter from the Clearys. Mrs. Talbot was right about the post office. The letter was in somebody else’s box.
Swarm - by Bruce Sterling
Texas-born Bruce Sterling made a startling fictional debut in 1977, when he was 23 years old, with the ingenious and audacious novel Involution Ocean. He followed it with another in 1980—The Artificial Kid—and has published a number of short stories as well. So far he does not seem to have achieved the reputation he deserves, as one of the most inventive and keen-minded science fiction writers to come along in the past decade or two. But 1 think that that will begin to change in short order: major writers do not long remain in obscurity in the science fiction field, and I suspect Sterling is finally on the verge of some—much overdue—attention.
“I will miss your conversation during the rest of the voyage,” the alien said.
Captain-doctor Simon Afriel folded his jeweled hands over his gold-embroidered waistcoat. “I regret it also, ensign,” he said in the aliens own hissing language. “Our talks together have been very useful to me. I would have paid to learn so much, but you gave it freely.”
“But that was only information,” the alien said. He shrouded his bead-bright eyes behind thick nictitating membranes. “We Investors deal in energy, and precious metals. To prize and pursue mere knowledge is an immature racial trait.” The alien lifted the long ribbed frill behind his pinhole-sized ears.
“No doubt you are right,” Afriel said, despising him. “We
humans are as children to other races, however; so a certain immaturity seems natural to us.” Afriel pulled off his sunglasses to rub the bridge of his nose. The starship cabin was drenched in searing blue light, heavily ultraviolet. It was the light the Investors preferred, and they were not about to change it for one human passenger.
“You have not done badly,” the alien said magnanimously. “You are the kind of race we like to do business with: young, eager, plastic, ready for a wide variety of goods and experiences. We would have contacted you much earlier, but your technology was still too feeble to afford us a profit.”
“Things are different now,” Afriel said. “We’ll make you rich.”
“Indeed,” the Investor said. The frill behind his scaly head flickered rapidly, a sign of amusement. “Within two hundred years you will be wealthy enough to buy from us the secret of our star-flight. Or perhaps your Mechanist faction will discover the secret through research.”
Afriel was annoyed. As a member of the Reshaped faction, he did not appreciate the reference to the rival Mechanists. “Don’t put too much stock in mere technical expertise,” he said. “Consider the aptitude for languages we Shapers have. It makes our faction a much better trading partner. To a Mechanist, all Investors look alike.”
The alien hesitated. Afriel smiled. He had made an appeal to the aliens personal ambition with his last statement, and the hint had been taken. That was where the Mechanists always erred. They tried to treat all Investors equally, using the same programmed routines each time. They lacked imagination.
Something would have to be done about the Mechanists, Afriel thought. Something more permanent than the small but deadly confrontations between isolated ships in the Asteroid Belt and the ice-rich rings of Saturn. Both factions maneuvered constantly looking for a decisive stroke, bribing away each others best talent, practicing ambush, assassination, and industrial espionage.
Captain-doctor Simon Afriel was a past master of these pursuits. That was why the Reshaped faction had paid the millions of kilowatts necessary to buy his passage. Afriel held doctorates in biochemistry and alien linguistics, and a masters degree in magnetic weapons engineering. He was thirty-eight years old and had been Reshaped according to the state of the art at the time of his conception. His hormonal balance had been altered slightly to compensate for long periods spent in free-fall. He had no appendix. The structure of his heart had been redesigned for greater efficiency, and his large intestine had been altered to produce the vitamins normally made by intestinal bacteria. Genetic engineering and rigorous training in childhood had given him an intelligence quotient of one hundred and eighty. He was not the brightest of the agents of the Ring Council, but he was one of the most mentally stable and the best trusted.
“It seems a shame, ” the alien said, “that a human of your accomplishments should have to rot for two years in this miserable, profitless outpost.”
“The years won’t be wasted,” Afriel said.
“But why have you chosen to study the Swarm? They can teach you nothing, since they cannot speak. They have no wish to trade, having no tools or technology. They are the only spacefaring race to be essentially without intelligence.” “That alone should make them worthy of study.”
“Do you seek to imitate them, then? You would make monsters of yourselves.” Again the ensign hesitated. “Perhaps you could do it. It would be bad for business, however.” There came a fluting burst of alien music over the ships speakers, then a screeching fragment of Investor language. Most of it was too high-pitched for Afriels ears to follow.
The alien stood, his jeweled skirt brushing the tips of his clawed, bird-like feet. “The Swarm’s symbiote has arrived,” he said.
“Thank you,” Afriel said. When the ensign opened the cabin door, Afriel could smell the Swarms representative; the creature’s warm, yeasty scent had spread rapidly through the starships recycled air.
Afriel quickly checked his appearance in a pocket mirror. He touched powder to his face and straightened the round velvet hat on his shoulder-length reddish-blond hair. His earlobes glittered with red impact-rubies, thick as his thumbs’ ends, mined from the Asteroid Belt. His knee-length coat and waistcoat were of gold brocade; the shirt beneath was of dazzling fineness, woven .with red-gold thread. He had dressed to impress the Investors, who expected and appreciated a prosperous look from their customers. How could he impress this new alien? Smell, perhaps. He freshened his perfume.
Beside the starships secondary airlock, the Swarms symbiote was chittering rapidly at the ships commander. The commander was an old and sleepy Investor, twice the size of most of her crewmen. Her massive head was encrusted in a jeweled helmet. From within the helmet her clouded eyes glittered like cameras.
The symbiote lifted on its six posterior legs and gestured feebly with its four clawed forelimbs. The ships artificial gravity, a third again as strong as Earths, seemed to bother it. Its rudimentary eyes, dangling on stalks, were shut tight against the glare. It must be used to darkness, Afriel thought.
The commander answered the creature in its own language. Afriel grimaced, for he had hoped that the creature spoke Investor. Now he would have to learn another language, a language designed for a being without a tongue.
After another brief interchange the commander turned to Afriel. “The symbiote is not pleased with your arrival,” she told Afriel in the Investor language. “There has apparently been some disturbance here involving humans, in the recent past. However, I have prevailed upon it to admit you to the Nest. The episode has been recorded. Payment for my diplomatic services will be arranged with your faction when I return to your native star system.”
“I thank Your Authority,” Afriel said. “Please convey to the symbiote my best personal wishes, and the harmlessness and humility of my intentions. . . .” He broke off short as the symbiote lunged toward him, biting him savagely in the calf of his left leg. Afriel jerked free and leapt backward in the heavy artificial gravity, going into a defensive position. The symbiote had ripped away a long shred of his pants leg; it now crouched quietly, eating it.
“It will convey your scent and composition to its nest-mates,” said the commander. �
��This is necessary. Otherwise you would be classed as an invader, and the Swarms warrior caste would kill you at once.”
Afriel relaxed quickly and pressed his hand against the puncture wound to stop the bleeding. He hoped that none of the Investors had noticed his reflexive action. It would not mesh well with his story of being a harmless researcher.
“We will reopen the airlock soon,” the commander said phlegmatically, leaning back on her thick reptilian tail. The symbiote continued to munch the shred of cloth. Afriel studied the creatures neckless segmented head. It had a mouth and nostrils; it had bulbous atrophied eyes on stalks; there were hinged slats that might be radio receivers, and two parallel ridges of clumped wriggling antennae, sprouting among three chitinous plates. Their function was unknown to him.
The airlock door opened. A rush of dense, smoky aroma entered the departure cabin. It seemed to bother the half-dozen Investors, who left rapidly. “We will return in six hundred and twelve of your days, as by our agreement,” the commander said.
“I thank Your Authority,” Afriel said.
“Good luck,” the commander said in English. Afriel smiled.
The symbiote, with a sinuous wriggle of its segmented body, crept into the airlock. Afriel followed it. The airlock door shut behind them. The creature said nothing to him but continued munching loudly. The second door opened, and the symbiote sprang through it, into a wide, round, stone tunnel. It vanished at once into the gloom.
Afriel put his sunglasses into a pocket of his jacket and pulled out a pair of infrared goggles. He strapped them to his head and stepped out of the airlock. The artificial gravity vanished, replaced by the almost imperceptible gravity of the Swarms asteroid nest. Afriel smiled, comfortable for the first time in weeks. Most of his adult life had been spent in free-fall, in the Shapers colonies in the rings of Saturn.
Nebula Award Stories - 1983 #18 Page 26