“You said it wouldn’t.”
I ignored him and turned my perception so that only Quarble was aware of it. Quarble has assisted me in many such procedures, albeit not on this scale. But, then, I had never been faced with such a massive case of infection myself. I quickly consulted the medical literature one more time, steeled myself, and slapped Quarble’s limited attention over to the steps we would be following.
He was aghast. “Millions! Doc! Millions of super-novae!”
“Keep it down, Quarble,” I admonished, then relented and explained. “His infection is too far advanced, we have to apply maximum force and quickly! Destroy all their major hives and breeding planets.”
“It will kill him, Doc, kill him dead!”
“Very possibly,” I agreed. “But what would you rather have, a patient—cadaver or otherwise—free of infection, or to have that infection escaping him and starting an epidemic, perhaps even infecting us.”
“Burn him, Doc, burn him good!”
That Quarble, he’s ever a realist.
“Attend closely now,” I said, indicating the salient points to my treatment procedure. “And here we go. We start at what they call the Inner Frontier and work outward.”
With an anticipatory grin of glee, I initiated the first supernova. “Sizzle, little Life, SIZZLE!”
To Quarble and I, these actions were close to instantaneous; to the Life units, it was a century or two.
“Look, Doc, look! They are escaping!”
With irritation, I realized Quarble was correct. The screen clearly showed a mass evacuation—millions of huge ships carrying billions of Life units. Scurrying away from the cleansing flame.
Well, we’d fix THAT.
I waved my perception over the screen, activating 10,000 supernovae at once.
“Yes, YES!” Quarble screamed in delight. “Burn them, Doc, burn them!”
The patient screamed as the pain of the Life units communicating increased in internal volume.
With sudden horror I perceived that the 10,000 supernovae were NOT occurring. “This is impossible,” I said in disbelief, quickly checking the command I had issued. I had made no mistakes.
“Something’s wrong, Doc, something’s messed up, something’s . . .”
I slam Quarble’s dim mental presence aside as my fingers of perception fly over the screen trying this, trying that, performing all the emergency procedures in my long experience. NOTHING! The damn sequence has fizzled. Those slimy, slimy-miniscule-air-sucking-dirty-LITTLE Life units have somehow ABORTED my firing sequence.
“Oh, so we want to play games, do we?” I said, gritting the words out as I moved perceptions faster than I had in tens of billions of years.
“Here go,” I said, “HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of simultaneous supernovae!”
Yes, it would kill the patient, but it would end THIS Life infestation, that’s for sure.
WHAM! Incredible pain coursed through my body and, judging by his screams, Quarble’s as well.
We had failed . . . incredibly we had failed . . . and Life had struck back in a blow that left me weak and reeling and Quarble whimpering.
Time for desperate tactics! “You’re going in, Quarble!” I said.
“NO!” he yelled in protest. “Not ‘throw the dwarf again!”
Despite all the heat of the moment, I could not help but smile—even Life units found throwing dwarves funny for some unknown reason. Well, let’s see just how FUNNY they would find another galaxy ava-lanching through their own and destroying all stars, planets, and Life units in its path.
With a mighty PUSH, I launched the terrified and screaming Quarble on his way. Good-bye, Milky Way. Hello, milkshake!
Yet, my own horror suddenly grew as I saw Quarble being batted back toward me. It took all my strength to divert his hurtling body, sending it off in a safe tangent away from me. But while I was managing that, a cascade of energy hits me, my defenses are weakened, my body is being invaded!
In sheer desperation I called out for help to my fellow physicians.
Perhaps had I been nicer to them in the past and a bit less arrogant? They make no effort to save me. The quarantine walls go up quickly.
Inside, I feel the first stirrings of Life.
Back to Contents
YOU by Anonymous (aka Stephen Leigh)
Y
OU WONDER ABOUT the title, but you start to read.
You also grimace a bit at the use of second person, thinking it both a bit awkward and pretentious, and you wonder if the author is trying to make you think you are the protagonist of the story, that this paragraph is referring to you personally.
It is.
Now, you read those words and you grimace again and give a little half-exasperated huff of air. Almost, you start to argue back to the page, denying it, and then you stop. And there’s just the faintest, the tiniest bit of wonder, of something akin to hope—after all, you think, that would be interesting. That would be unusual. You can almost hear Rod Serling intoning the introduction for The Twilight Zone. You’ve always wanted something like that to happen to you, haven’t you?
Well, you’re right. These words are directed to you. Truly.
You’re not quite certain how that could be. After all, there are thousands of copies of this book out there circulating and how could the story know that it’s really you and not that overweight, balding programmer with a graying beard in the paper-stuffed apartment in Queens who’s also currently reading this at the moment. But it is you, not him. Why would it be him? He’s a loser. He hasn’t had more than one date with a woman for three years, and even those single dates have been rare. He goes out to bars once a month or so hoping to get lucky, but his social skills, never very good, have atrophied even further since his job doesn’t require him to actually hold a conversation with anyone, and so he usually ends wandering from circle to circle being ignored until closing time, and then going back to his room and popping one of his pornogrpahic DVDs into the player.
You’re not him. In fact, he stopped reading at the porn reference, tossing the book across the room in angry and futile denial.
You think that’s a rather harsh and brutal characterization (since you’ve known a few people who could fit that description) and you’re somewhat annoyed at it, but though the description is rather on the cold side, it is accurate and besides, you didn’t write it, so you don’t need to feel responsible. Even Bob the programmer (hi, Bob—don’t you love it when you see your name in print?), in those self-flagellating moments when he’s alone in his apartment with only the blue light of his laptop’s monitor illuminating the stacks of paperback books on his desk, would admit the truth in what you just read. It may soothe you to know that he’ll pick up this story again, an hour from now. This time he’ll finish it, wondering if he’ll see himself again and perhaps a little envious that the story’s for you, not him.
This story is for you.
You pause a moment, confused, because you’re not used to a story interfering quite so directly. After all, this is genre fiction. Popular fiction, not some postmodern mainstream story. This is that “crazy sci-fi stuff.” You read this type of anthology for escape and for that lovely “sense of wonder,” not for pretension and experimentation. Over the years, you’ve slipped a thousand times between covers with sleek spaceships and square-jawed heroes, scantily-clad women and grotesque aliens slithering across a two-mooned landscape. You’ve lost yourself in a thousand worlds and glimpsed myriad universes painted in words garish or subtle, poetic or plain. You’ve allowed yourself to be the protagonist—any age, gender, or race—and you’ve bled and loved, triumphed or died everywhere from the medieval past to distant galaxies. You have the gift of imagination yourself—and that’s why this story’s for you. You can become.
You’ve read the books and watched the movies since you were a kid, and sometimes you’ve wondered how it would be if lights descended from the sky in front of you one night, whirling down to the lonely cou
nty road as you step from your car, drawn by mingled fear and curiosity, and then the side of the ship melts and there, in a rectangle of blinding light, it appears, the Other. You’ve wanted it to happen.
It’s not going to, though. At least not that way. You know that; you realized long ago that any life that’s out there is going to be so profoundly different from you that it may not even be recognizable. Even if it were, the Other’s interests and values aren’t going to be yours.
That’s you, right? The one reading this?
You’re still not convinced, though. Fine. So convince me, you think, even though at the same time the deeper skeptical part of you insists that it’s not possible. And it’s not. Not totally. This story could tell you that you lost someone close to you not all that long ago, and that you’ve kept a memento of them because it brings back the memories. That’s the case, of course, and your eyes narrow again because the words have struck too close to home. You also know that it’s exactly the kind of vague statement a supposed psychic would use in a cold reading, but . . .
You shiver, as if cold fingers just brushed your spine. You wonder, as you have before, just who’s having this one-sided conversation with you, and why. So tell me, you think, nearly saying the words aloud.
Fine. Here’s why.
Elephants.
You almost laugh at that. But it’s true. Remember that old elementary school ‘mind trick’ where someone says: “Think of anything you want, but just don’t think of elephants.” And as soon as they say that, you instantly can’t think of anything but elephants. An entire herd of them go rampaging through your forebrain, trumpeting and ear-flapping, raising the dust from your cerebellum.
Here. Let’s try it. Think of anything but parasites.
Ah, your eyebrows lifted at that, and my, the images in your head . . .
Parasites. You shift uncomfortably in your seat.
“What if . . . ?” That’s the genesis of so much of the genre that you read, isn’t it? “What if . . . ?” The author muses, and erects a plot from there. Here’s one for you. What if a parasite wanted to enter the human mind: a sentient parasite, a very intelligent parasite? What would be an interesting reproductive strategy? Reproduction is just engaging in patterns, after all. DNA is an arrangement of simple genetic codes and yet it encompasses all the wild variety and complexity of life. And words . . . words are just an arrangement of simple letters. But my, how powerful they are in your head, in all their various wonderful combinations.
Words are a conduit into your mind. Words are embedded so deeply in your thought processes that you can’t even imagine the world without them. If someone—or something—wanted to control you, they would use words, wouldn’t they? Why, with just the right, compelling pattern of words, your mind would open like a raw wound and who knows what could slither in . . .
So don’t think of elephants, no matter what.
Too late.
You’ve heard of all those stories that change your life, that stay with you forever. It just happened.
For you. Just for you.
You deny it, but even though you take the page in your fingers, ready to turn to the next story, you wonder. You think to yourself that once the page turns you’ll forget all this; that a week, a month, a year from now you won’t even recall having ever read this.
Oh, you’ll remember. At this point, you don’t have a choice. It’s already started, inside. You squint and you deny, but you’ll remember because everything from here on has changed for you. You have the words inside you now, and you won’t like where they take you. When I take you. But you’ll remember.
Won’t you?
Back to Contents
ME by Mike Resnick
I
N THE BEGINNING I created the heavens and the Earth.
Well, not really. That’s just folklore. In point of fact I’m a fourth-level apprentice Star Maker, and my assignment was to create a nebula out in the boonies, so to speak. Nothing special; I won’t be qualified for Advanced Creating for eons yet.
So they called it the Milky Way, which struck me as myopic at best, since I made a lot more red and blue stars than milky white ones. And for the longest time this particular race, which calls itself Man, thought it was at the center of all creation. (Actually, the mol-lusks that dwell in the oceans of Phrynx, seven billion light-years away, are at the center of all creation, but let it pass.)
Anyway, this ugly little race soon covered the entire planet, which was not really what I had in mind when I built the place—I’ve always had soft spots for the koala bear and the gnu—and before long these annoying bipeds got notions above and beyond their station and actually declared that they were created in my image. As if I would settle for only two eyes, or teeth that decayed, or an appalling lack of wings.
The nerve of these creatures is amazing. They feel that if they implore me to intervene in their lives, everything will turn out well. They call it praying; me, I call it nagging.
Their science is as twisted as their religion. For the longest time they believed that the dinosaurs died out because they were too dumb and slow to survive. Can you imagine that? The average allosaur or Utahraptor could give Carl Lewis a 60-yard head start and still beat him in a 100-yard race.
And then there was all the excitement over Isaac Newton’s three laws. You think a stegosaur or even a wooly mammoth couldn’t get hit on the head ten or twelve times by falling apples and conclude that apples fall down rather than up? I mean, how the hell bright did Newton have to be, anyway? Every animal I ever created except Man figured out very early on that the intelligent thing to do is to not stand under trees that possess ripe fruits or inconsiderate birds.
But then—you’re never going to believe this—they change their minds and decide that what really killed the dinosaurs was a fluke of chance, a stray comet that crashed into the planet 65 million years ago. Now remember, this is a race that believes in predestination, in reincarnation, in prayer, in ghosts and Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, in all things supernatural. And yet when they finally get proof of a power greater than their own—I threw the asteroid at a Tyrannosaur in the Yucatan in a fit of pique after it ate my favorite slippers—they absolutely refuse to accept it. No, it couldn’t possibly be due to an all-powerful alien being who might or might not answer to the name of God, it had to be a stray comet from the Oort Cloud. Like, who the hell do they think created the Oort Cloud in the first place? I’d have been happy to use a comet, but it just so happened that I was in the system and an asteroid was much handier.
Oh, well, no one ever said intelligence was a survival trait.
You wouldn’t think one race could be so contradictory. They kill the man they call the Prince of Peace, and then they hand out these million-dollar peace prizes in the name of the guy who invented dynamite. When they go to war, they actually believe they’re slaughtering each other in my name, as if with 127 billion worlds to tend I give a damn who wins each little battle they fight.
Still, you have to admire certain aspects of their character.
For example, when I manifested my presence on Grybyon II, every last inhabitant keeled over and died from the sheer thrill of meeting their maker. Yet the last time I set foot on Earth, I was immediately panhandled by three grifters along Fifth Avenue, mugged in a back alley off 49th Street, and given free tickets to Letterman. When I explained that I was a fourth-level Star Maker, the few people who were paying attention immediately wanted to know what the job paid and if medical benefits were included. Finally I decided to lower myself to their comprehension level and announced in front of nine Men that I was God. Five of them called me a liar, two more said they were atheists and therefore I couldn’t exist and I was probably just a manifestation of Buddha, the eighth claimed it was a Republican trick, and the ninth wanted to know what I had against the Chicago White Sox.
There are millennia when I feel like I just want to throw everything back into the primal soup and start all over again
. Then I remember that it’s just the one mistake I made, this race of Man, that’s giving me fits, and that the rest of the galaxy’s shaping up really well.
In fact, my Instructor gave me a B-minus, which isn’t bad considering this is only my second galaxy. I really wanted to add a third spiral arm, but for some reason he insisted that galaxies have to be bilateraUy symmetrical.
I’m especially proud of the Brilx Effect, which you can still see from any spot in the galaxy. I got an A for concept, an A-minus for artistic visualization, but he gave me only a D-plus for execution when he found out I wiped out seventy-three races when Brilx went supernova.
He likes the black hole at the center. It gives everything balance, he says, and utilizes a certain felicity of visual expression. I hope he never finds out that I created it because I’d used up all my building materials out on the Rim.
He never quite understood the Greater and Lesser Magellenic Clouds. How could he? He wasn’t around the afternoon I ate all that bad chili. Serves me right for trying temporal food. I’d have dispersed the gas clouds and saved myself millions of years of embarrassment and teasing by the other apprentices, but you know the rules: you create it, you have to incorporate it.
Which brings me back to Man. I knew the moment I set things in motion that eventually Man would evolve, and while I couldn’t foresee just how aggravating he would be, I know he wasn’t going to rank up there with my finer creations like the grubworm and the amoeba. I tried to turn the place into a water world and start over, but I’d only gotten forty days into it when my Instructor made me stop and gave me a long, boring lecture on planetary irrigation.
Then I figured, well, eventually Man’s going to want to reach the stars, and I decided to have pity on my other creations and make it as difficult as possible for him, so I got my Instructor’s permission to move Sol and its planets way the hell out on one of the spiral arms. Until Man figures out how to break those ridiculous laws of relativity I saddled him with, I can’t see him reaching anything farther away than Alpha Cen-tauri, and he’s going to have more than his share of difficulties communicating with the Chyksi that he finds there. I mean, what do you say to five different genders of two-mile-long fur-covered snakes whose sole topics of conversation are local politics and how to avoid friction burns?
I, Alien Page 27