The Mammoth Book Of Science Fiction

by Mike Ashley (Editor)

  The professor’s face was glum in the firelight as he reflected on this. He polished off another cup of cognac. The minister watched him drink, then said kindly, “There is nothing to be done about it, really. That is the nature of the past.”

  “I know.”

  Conclusions. They threw the last big logs on the fire, and flames roared up, yellow licks breaking free among the stars. The professor felt numb all over, his heart was cold, the firelit faces were smeary primitive masks, dancing in the light. The songs were harsh and raucous, he couldn’t understand the words. The wind was chilling, and the hot skin of his arms and neck goosepimpled uncomfortably. He felt sick with alcohol, and knew it would be a while before his body could overmaster it.

  The minister led him away from the fire, then up the rocky ridge. Getting him away from the students and laborers, no doubt, so he wouldn’t embarrass himself. Starlight illuminated the heather and broken granite under their feet. He stumbled. He tried to explain to her what it meant, to be an archeologist whose most important work was the discovery that a bit of their past was a falsehood.

  “It’s like a mosaic,” he said, drunkenly trying to follow the fugitive thought. “A puzzle with most of the pieces gone. A tapestry. And if you pull a thread out . . . it’s ruined. So little lasts! We need every bit we can find!”

  She seemed to understand. In her student days, she told him, she had waitressed at a café in Montreal. Years later she had gone down the street to have a look, just for nostalgia’s sake. The café was gone. The street was completely different. And she couldn’t remember the names of any of the people she had worked with. “This was my own past, not all that many years ago!”

  The professor nodded. Cognac was rushing through his veins, and as he looked at the minister, so beautiful in the starlight, she seemed to him a kind of muse, a spirit sent to comfort him, or frighten him, he couldn’t tell which. Cleo, he thought. The muse of history. Someone he could talk to.

  She laughed softly. “Sometimes it seems our lives are much longer than we usually think. So that we live through incarnations, and looking back later we have nothing but . . .” She waved a hand.

  “Bronze pins,” the professor said. “Iron rivets.”

  “Yes.” She looked at him. Her eyes were bright in the starlight. “We need an archeology for our own lives.”

  Acknowledgments. Later he walked her back to the fire, now reduced to banked red coals. She put her hand to his upper arm as they walked, steadying herself, and he felt in the touch some kind of portent; but couldn’t understand it. He had drunk so much! Why be so upset about it, why? It was his job to find the truth; having found it, he should be happy! Why had no one told him what he would feel?

  The minister said goodnight. She was off to bed; she suggested he do likewise. Her look was compassionate, her voice firm.

  When she was gone he hunted down the bottle of cognac, and drank the rest of it. The fire was dying, the students and workers scattered – in the tents, or out in the night, in couples.

  He walked by himself back down to the site.

  Low mounds, of walls that had never been. Beyond the actual site were rounded buildings, models built by the park service, to show tourists what the “real” buildings had looked like. When Vikings had camped on the edge of the new world. Repairing their boats. Finding food. Fighting among themselves, mad with epic jealousies. Fighting the dangerous Indians. Getting killed, and then driven away from this land, so much lusher than Greenland.

  A creak in the brush and he jumped, startled. It would have been like that: death in the night, creeping up on you – he turned with a jerk, and every starlit shadow bounced with hidden skraelings, their bows drawn taut, their arrows aimed at his heart. He quivered, hunched over.

  But no. It hadn’t been like that. Not at all. Instead, a man with spectacles and a bag full of old junk, directing some unemployed sailors as they dug. Nondescript, taciturn, nameless; one night he would have wandered back there into the forest, perhaps fallen or had a heart attack – become a skeleton wearing leathers and swordbelt, with spectacles over the skull’s eyesockets, the anachronism that gave him away at last . . . The professor staggered over the low mounds toward the trees, intent on finding that inadvertent grave . . .

  But no. It wouldn’t be there. The taciturn figure hadn’t been like that. He would have been far away when he died, nothing to show what he had spent years of his life doing. A man in a hospital for the poor, the bronze pin in his pocket overlooked by the doctor, stolen by an undertaker’s assistant. An anonymous figure, to the grave and beyond. The creator of Vinland. Never to be found.

  The professor looked around, confused and sick. There was a waist-high rock, a glacial erratic. He sat on it. Put his head in his hands. Really quite unprofessional. All those books he had read as a child. What would the minister think! Grant money. No reason to feel so bad!

  At that latitude midsummer nights are short, and the party had lasted late. The sky to the east was already gray. He could see down onto the site, and its long sod roofs. On the beach, a trio of long narrow high-ended ships. Small figures in furs emerged from the longhouses and went down to the water, and he walked among them and heard their speech, a sort of dialect of Norwegian that he could mostly understand. They would leave that day, it was time to load the ships. They were going to take everything with them, they didn’t plan to return. Too many skraelings in the forest, too many quick arrow deaths. He walked among them, helping them load stores. Then a little man in a black coat scurried behind the forge, and he roared and took off after him, scooping up a rock on the way, ready to deal out a skraeling death to that black intruder.

  The minister woke him with a touch of her hand. He almost fell off the rock. He shook his head; he was still drunk. The hangover wouldn’t begin for a couple more hours, though the sun was already up.

  “I should have known all along,” he said to her angrily. “They were stretched to the limit in Greenland, and the climate was worsening. It was amazing they got that far. Vinland –” he waved a hand at the site “– was just some dreamer’s story.”

  Regarding him calmly, the minister said, “I am not sure it matters.”

  He looked up at her. “What do you mean?”

  “History is made of stories people tell. And fictions, dreams, hoaxes – they also are made of stories people tell. True or false, it’s the stories that matter to us. Certain qualities in the stories themselves make them true or false.”

  He shook his head. “Some things really happened in the past. And some things didn’t.”

  “But how can you know for sure which is which? You can’t go back and see for yourself. Maybe Vinland was the invention of this mysterious stranger of yours; maybe the Vikings came here after all, and landed somewhere else. Either way it can never be anything more than a story to us.”

  “But . . .” He swallowed. “Surely it matters whether it is a true story or not!”

  She paced before him. “A friend of mine once told me something he had read in a book,” she said. ‘It was by a man who sailed the Red Sea, long ago. He told of a servant boy on one of the dhows, who could not remember ever having been cared for. The boy had become a sailor at age three – before that, he had been a beach-comber.” She stopped pacing and looked at the beach below them. “Often I imagined that little boy’s life. Surviving alone on a beach, at that age – it astonished me. It made me . . . happy.”

  She turned to look at him. “But later I told this story to an expert in child development, and he just shook his head. ‘It probably wasn’t true,’ he said. Not a lie, exactly, but a . . .”

  “A stretcher,” the professor suggested.

  “A stretcher, exactly. He supposed that the boy had been somewhat older, or had had some help. You know.”

  The professor nodded.

  “But in the end,” the minister said, “I found this judgment did not matter to me. In my mind I still saw that toddler, searching the tidepools for
his daily food. And so for me the story lives. And that is all that matters. We judge all the stories from history like that – we value them according to how much they spur our imaginations.”

  The professor stared at her. He rubbed his jaw, looked around. Things had the sharp-edged clarity they sometimes get after a sleepness night, as if glowing with internal light. He said, “Someone with opinions like yours probably shouldn’t have the job that you do.”

  “I didn’t know I had them,” the minister said. “I only just came upon them in the last couple of hours, thinking about it.”

  The professor was surprised. “You didn’t sleep?”

  She shook her head. “Who could sleep on a night like this?”

  “My feeling exactly!” He almost smiled. “So. A nuit blanche, you call it?”

  “Yes,” she said. “A nuit blanche for two.” And she looked down at him with that amused glance of hers, as if . . . as if she understood him.

  She extended her arms toward him, grasped his hands, helped pull him to his feet. They began to walk back toward the tents, across the site of L’Anse aux Meadows. The grass was wet with dew, and very green. “I still think,” he said as they walked together, “that we want more than stories from the past. We want something not easily found – something, in fact, that the past doesn’t have. Something secret, some secret meaning . . . something that will give our lives a kind of sense.”

  She slipped a hand under his arm. “We want the Atlantis of childhood. But, failing that . . .” She laughed and kicked at a clump of grass; a spray of dew flashed ahead of them, containing, for just one moment, a bright little rainbow.

  A Ticket to Tranai

  Robert Sheckley

  I am positive that if there were a poll of the top ten sf writers who emerged in the 1950s, Robert Sheckley would be very near the top. (I suspect Philip K. Dick would be at the top and there’s a story by him next.) Sheckley (1928-2005) was immensely prolific in the fifties producing quality stories with facile gay abandon. He was one of the Horace Gold school of writers. Gold edited Galaxy Magazine, the leading sf magazine of the fifties that produced the real Golden Age of science fiction. Gold didn’t go for high-tech sf like John W. Campbell at Astounding. He preferred stories built around people living in the societies produced by the high-tech stuff that the guys over at Astounding were predicting. Often Gold published satires of future societies, and the following is one of the best.

  One fine day in June, a tall, thin, intent, soberly dressed young man walked into the offices of the Transstellar Travel Agency. Without a glance, he marched past the gaudy travel poster depicting the Harvest Feast on Mars. The enormous photomural of dancing forests on Triganium didn’t catch his eye. He ignored the somewhat suggestive painting of dawn-rites on Opiuchus II, and arrived at the desk of the booking agent.

  “I would like to book passage to Tranai,” the young man said.

  The agent closed his copy of Necessary Inventions and frowned. “Tranai? Tranai? Is that one of the moons of Kent IV?”

  “It is not,” the young man said. “Tranai is a planet, revolving around a sun of the same name. I want to book passage there.”

  “Never heard of it.” The agent pulled down a star catalogue, a simplified star chart, and a copy of Lesser Space Routes.

  “Well, now,” he said finally. “You learn something new every day. You want to book passage to Tranai, Mister –”

  “Goodman. Marvin Goodman.”

  “Goodman. Well, it seems that Tranai is about as far from Earth as one can get and still be in the Milky Way. Nobody goes there.”

  “I know. Can you arrange passage for me?” Goodman asked, with a hint of suppressed excitement in his voice.

  The agent shook his head. “Not a chance. Even the non-skeds don’t go that far.”

  “How close can you get me?”

  The agent gave him a winning smile. “Why bother? I can send you to a world that’ll have everything this Tranai place has, with the additional advantages of proximity, bargain rates, decent hotels, tours –”

  “I’m going to Tranai,” Goodman said grimly.

  “But there’s no way of getting there,” the agent explained patiently. “What is it you expected to find? Perhaps I could help.”

  “You can help by booking me as far as –”

  “Is it adventure?” the agent asked, quickly sizing up Goodman’s unathletic build and scholarly stoop. “Let me suggest Africanus II, a dawn-age world filled with savage tribes, sabre-tooths, man-eating ferns, quicksand, active volcanoes, pterodactyls and all the rest. Expeditions leave New York every five days and they combine the utmost in danger with absolute safety. A dinosaur head guaranteed or your money refunded.”

  “Tranai,” Goodman said.

  “Hmm.” The clerk looked appraisingly at Goodman’s set lips and uncompromising eyes. “Perhaps you are tired of the puritanical restrictions of Earth? Then let me suggest a trip to Almagordo III, the Pearl of the Southern Ridge Belt. Our ten day all-expense plan includes a trip through the mysterious Almagordian Casbah, visits to eight night-clubs (first drink on us), a trip to a zintal factory, where you can buy genuine zintal belts, shoes and pocketbooks at phenomenal savings, and a tour through two distilleries. The girls of Almagordo are beautiful, vivacious and refreshingly naive. They consider the Tourist the highest and most desirable type of human being. Also –”

  “Tranai,” Goodman said. “How close can you get me?”

  Sullenly the clerk extracted a strip of tickets. “You can take the Constellation Queen as far as Legis II and transfer to the Galactic Splendor, which will take you to Oumé. Then you’ll have to board a local, which, after stopping at Machang, Inchang, Pankang, Lekung and Oyster, will leave you at Tung-Bradar IV, if it doesn’t break down en route. Then a non-sked will transport you past the Galactic Whirl (if it gets past) to Aloomsridgia, from which the mail ship will take you to Bellismoranti. I believe the mail ship is still functioning. That brings you about halfway. After that, you’re on your own.”

  “Fine,” Goodman said. “Can you have my forms made out by this afternoon?”

  The clerk nodded. “Mr Goodman,” he asked in despair, “just what sort of place is this Tranai supposed to be?”

  Goodman smiled a beatific smile. “A utopia,” he said.

  Marvin Goodman had lived most of his life in Seakirk, New Jersey, a town controlled by one political boss or another for close to fifty years. Most of Seakirk’s inhabitants were indifferent to the spectacle of corruption in high places and low, the gambling, the gang wars the teenage drinking. They were used to the sight of their roads crumbling, their ancient water mains bursting, their power plants breaking down, their decrepit old buildings falling apart, while the bosses built bigger homes, longer swimming pools and warmer stables. People were used to it. But not Goodman.

  A natural-born crusader, he wrote exposé articles that were never published, sent letters to Congress that were never read, stumped for honest candidates who were never elected, and organized the League for Civic Improvement, the People Against Gangsterism, the Citizen’s Union for an Honest Police Force, the Association Against Gambling, the Committee for Equal Job Opportunities for Women, and a dozen others.

  Nothing came of his efforts. The people were too apathetic to care. The politicoes simply laughed at him, and Goodman couldn’t stand being laughed at. Then, to add to his troubles, his fiancée jilted him for a noisy young man in a loud sports jacket who had no redeeming feature other than a controlling interest in the Seakirk Construction Corporation.

  It was a shattering blow. The girl seemed unaffected by the fact that the SCC used disproportionate amounts of sand in their concrete and shaved whole inches from the width of their steel girders. As she put it, “Gee whiz, Marvie, so what? That’s how things are. You gotta be realistic.”

  Goodman had no intention of being realistic. He immediately repaired to Eddie’s Moonlight Bar, where, between drinks, he began to contemplate the a
ttractions of a grass shack in the green hell of Venus.

  An erect, hawk-faced old man entered the bar. Goodman could tell he was a spacer by his gravity-bound gait, his pallor, his radiation scars and his far-piercing gray eyes.

  “A Tranai Special, Sam,” the old spacer told the bartender.

  “Coming right up, Captain Savage, sir,” the bartender said.

  “Tranai?” Goodman murmured involuntarily.

  “Tranai,” the captain said. “Never heard of it, did you, sonny?”

  “No, sir,” Goodman confessed.

  “Well, sonny,” Captain Savage said, “I’m feeling a mite wordy tonight, so I’ll tell you a tale of Tranai the Blessed, out past the Galactic Whirl.”

  The captain’s eyes grew misty and a smile softened the grim line of his lips.

  “We were iron men in steel ships in those days. Me and Johnny Cavanaugh and Frog Larsen would have blasted to hell itself for half a load of terganium. Aye, and shanghaied Beelzebub for a wiper if we were short of men. Those were the days when space scurvy took every third man, and the ghost of Big Dan McClintock haunted the space-ways. Moll Gann still operated the Red Rooster Inn out on Asteroid 342-AA, asking five hundred Earth dollars for a glass of beer, and getting it too, there being no other place within ten billion miles. In those days, the Scarbies were still cutting up along Star Ridge and ships bound for Prodengum had to run the Swayback Gantlet. So you can imagine how I felt, sonny, when one fine day I came upon Tranai.”

  Goodman listened as the old captain limned a picture of the great days, of frail ships against an iron sky, ships outward bound, forever outward, to the far limits of the Galaxy.

  And there, at the edge of the Great Nothing, was Tranai.

  Tranai, where The Way had been found and men were no longer bound to The Wheel! Tranai the Bountiful, a peaceful, creative, happy society, not saints or ascetics, not intellectuals, but ordinary people who had achieved utopia.

  For an hour, Captain Savage spoke of the multiform marvels of Tranai. After finishing his story, he complained of a dry throat. Space throat, he called it, and Goodman ordered him another Tranai Special and one for himself. Sipping the exotic, green-gray mixture, Goodman too was lost in the dream.