Foundations of Fear

by David G. Hartwell

  “My father shot us in the back,” Harry said, and turned and bolted down the aisle for the door.

  When he got outside he began to trot down seedy Oldtown Road. When he came to Oldtown Way he turned left. When he ran past number 45, he looked at every blank window. His face, his hands, his whole body felt hot and wet. Soon he had a stitch in his side. Harry blinked, and saw a dark line of trees, a wall of barbed wire before him. At the top of Oldtown Way he turned into Palmyra Avenue. From there he could continue running past Alouette’s boarded-up windows, past all the stores old and new, to the corner of Livermore, and from there, he only now realized, to the little house that belonged to Mr. Petrosian.

  XV

  On a sweltering midafternoon eleven years later at a camp in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, Lieutenant Harry Beevers closed the flap of his tent against the mosquitoes and sat on the edge of his temporary bunk to write a long-delayed letter back to Pat Caldwell, the young woman he wanted to marry—and to whom he would be married for a time, after his return from the war to New York State.

  This is what he wrote, after frequent crossings-out and hesitations. Harry later destroyed this letter.

  Dear Pat:

  First of all I want you to know how much I miss you, my darling, and that if I ever get out of this beautiful and terrible country, which I am going to do, that I am going to chase you mercilessly and unrelentingly until you say that you’ll marry me. Maybe in the euphoria of relief (YES!!!), I have the future all worked out, Pat, and you’re a big part of it. I have eighty-six days until DEROS, when they pat me on the head and put me on that big bird out of here. Now that my record is clear again, I have no doubts that Columbia Law School will take me in. As you know, my law board scores were pretty respectable (modest me!) when I took them at Adelphi. I’m pretty sure I could even get into Harvard Law, but I settled on Columbia because then we could both be in New York.

  My brother George has already told me that he will help out with whatever money I—you and I—will need. George put me through Adelphi. I don’t think you knew this. In fact, nobody knew this. When I look back, in college I was such a jerk. I wanted everybody to think my family was well-to-do, or at least middle-class. The truth is, we were damn poor, which I think makes my accomplishments all the more noteworthy, all the more loveworthy!

  You see, this experience, even with all the ugly and self-doubting and humiliating moments, has done me a lot of good. I was right to come here, even though I had no idea what it was really like. I think I needed the experience of war to complete me, and I tell you this even though I know that you will detest any such idea. In fact, I have to tell you that a big part of me loves being here, and that in some way, even with all this trouble, this year will always be one of the high points of my life. Pat, as you see, I’m determined to be honest—to be an honest man. If I’m going to be a lawyer, I ought to be honest, don’t you think? (Or maybe the reverse is the reality!) One thing that has meant a lot to me here has been what I can only call the close comradeship of my friends and my men—I actually like the grunts more than the usual officer types, which of course means that I get more loyalty and better performance from my men than the usual lieutenant. Some day I’d like you to meet Mike Poole and Tim Underhill and Pumo the Puma and the most amazing of all, M. O. Dengler, who of course was involved with me in the Ia Thuc cave incident. These guys stuck by me. I even have a nickname, “Beans.” They call me “Beans” Beevers, and I like it.

  There was no way my court-martial could have really put me in any trouble, because all the facts, and my own men, were on my side. Besides, could you see me actually killing children? This is Vietnam and you kill people, that’s what we’re doing here—we kill Charlies. But we don’t kill babies and children. Not even in the heat of wartime—and Ia Thuc was pretty hot!

  Well, this is my way of letting you know that at the court-martial of course I received a complete and utter vindication. Dengler did too. There were even unofficial mutterings about giving us medals for all the BS we put up with for the past six weeks—including that amazing story in Time magazine. Before people start yelling about atrocities, they ought to have all the facts straight. Fortunately, last week’s magazines go out with the rest of the trash.

  Besides, I already knew too much about what death does to people.

  I never told you that I once had a little brother named Edward. When I was ten, my little brother wandered up into the top floor of our house one night and suffered a fatal epileptic fit. This event virtually destroyed my family. It led directly to my father’s leaving home. (He had been a hero in WWII, something else I never told you.) It deeply changed, I would say even damaged, my older brother Albert. Albert tried to enlist in 1964, but they wouldn’t take him because they said he was psychologically unfit. My mom too almost came apart for a while. She used to go up in the attic and cry and wouldn’t come down. So you could say that my family was pretty well destroyed, or ruined, or whatever you want to call it, by a sudden death. I took it, and my dad’s desertion, pretty hard myself. You don’t get over these things easily.

  The court-martial lasted exactly four hours. Big deal, hey?—as we used to say back in Palmyra. We used to have a neighbor named Pete Petrosian who said things like that, and against what must have been million-to-one odds, who died exactly the same way my brother did, about two weeks after—lightning really did strike twice. I guess it’s dumb to think about him now, but maybe one thing war does is to make you conversant with death. How it happens, what it does to people, what it means, how all the dead in your life are somehow united, joined, part of your eternal family. This is a profound feeling, Pat, and no damn whipped-up failed court-martial can touch it. If there were any innocent children in that cave, then they are in my family forever, like little Edward and Pete Petrosian, and the rest of my life is a poem to them. But the Army says there weren’t, and so do I.

  I love you and love you and love you. You can stop worrying now and start thinking about being married to a Columbia Law student with one hell of a good future. I won’t tell you any more war stories than you want to hear. And that’s a promise, whether the stories are about Nam or Palmyra.

  Always yours,

  Harry

  (aka “Beans!”)

  George R. R. Martin

  Sandkings

  George R. R. Martin gained wide popularity in the science fiction field as a young writer in the 1970s, winning both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. In the 1980s, he moved into the horror genre with two novels, Fevre Dream (1982), an historical vampire novel, and Armageddon Rag (1983), a rock ’n’ roll apocalypse of the 1960s, and a short story collection, Songs the Dead Men Sing (1983). Since then he has pursued a career as anthologist, television scriptwriter and editor. “Sandkings” was the title story of his last science fiction collection (1979). It won the Hugo Award as best story of the year. One can see that Martin was already moving from science fiction to horror in this piece of uncanny, fantastic nightmare. It is both a literal and a psychological monster story, a social allegory and a moral one. The layering of meaning is deep and complex, the possibilities of reading many. Isaac Asimov said of this piece, “I can’t help feeling what a terrific example of the horror story ‘Sandkings’ is . . . it just keeps hitting you harder as you go.” Martin’s contribution to horror in the 1980s is significant.

  Simon Kress lived alone in a sprawling manor house among the dry, rocky hills fifty kilometers from the city. So, when he was called away unexpectedly on business, he had no neighbors he could conveniently impose on to take his pets. The carrion hawk was no problem; it roosted in the unused belfry and customarily fed itself anyway. The shambler Kress simply shooed outside and left to fend for itself; the little monster would gorge on slugs and birds and rockjocks. But the fish tank, stocked with genuine Earth piranhas, posed a difficulty. Kress finally just threw a haunch of beef into the huge tank. The piranhas could always eat each other if he were detained longer than expected. They’d d
one it before. It amused him.

  Unfortunately, he was detained much longer than expected this time. When he finally returned, all the fish were dead. So was the carrion hawk. The shambler had climbed up to the belfry and eaten it. Simon Kress was vexed.

  The next day he flew his skimmer to Asgard, a journey of some two hundred kilometers. Asgard was Baldur’s largest city and boasted the oldest and largest starport as well. Kress liked to impress his friends with animals that were unusual, entertaining, and expensive; Asgard was the place to buy them.

  This time, though, he had poor luck. Xenopets had closed its doors, t’Etherane the Petseller tried to foist another carrion hawk off on him, and Strange Waters offered nothing more exotic than piranhas, glowsharks, and spider-squids. Kress had had all those; he wanted something new.

  Near dusk, he found himself walking down the Rainbow Boulevard, looking for places he had not patronized before. So close to the starport, the street was lined by importers’ marts. The big corporate emporiums had impressive long windows, where rare and costly alien artifacts reposed on felt cushions against dark drapes that made the interiors of the stores a mystery. Between them were the junk shops; narrow, nasty little places whose display areas were crammed with all manner of offworld bric-a-brac. Kress tried both kinds of shop, with equal dissatisfaction.

  Then he came across a store that was different.

  It was quite close to the port. Kress had never been there before. The shop occupied a small, single-story building of moderate size, set between a euphoria bar and a temple-brothel of the Secret Sisterhood. Down this far, the Rainbow Boulevard grew tacky. The shop itself was unusual. Arresting.

  The windows were full of mist; now a pale red, now the gray of true fog, now sparkling and golden. The mist swirled and eddied and glowed faintly from within. Kress glimpsed objects in the window—machines, pieces of art, other things he could not recognize—but he could not get a good look at any of them. The mists flowed sensuously around them, displaying a bit of first one thing and then another, then cloaking all. It was intriguing.

  As he watched, the mist began to form letters. One word at a time. Kress stood and read.

  WO. AND. SHADE. IMPORTERS.

  ARTIFACTS. ART. LIFE-FORMS. AND. MISC.

  The letters stopped. Through the fog, Kress saw something moving. That was enough for him, that and the “life-forms” in their advertisement. He swept his walking cloak over his shoulder and entered the store.

  Inside, Kress felt disoriented. The interior seemed vast, much larger than he would have guessed from the relatively modest frontage. It was dimly lit, peaceful. The ceiling was a starscape, complete with spiral nebulae, very dark and realistic, very nice. The counters all shone faintly, to better display the merchandise within. The aisles were carpeted with ground fog. It came almost to his knees in places, and swirled about his feet as he walked.

  “Can I help you?”

  She almost seemed to have risen from the fog. Tall and gaunt and pale, she wore a practical gray jumpsuit and a strange little cap that rested well back on her head.

  “Are you Wo or Shade?” Kress asked. “Or only sales help?”

  “Jala Wo, ready to serve you,” she replied. “Shade does not see customers. We have no sales help.”

  “You have quite a large establishment,” Kress said. “Odd that I have never heard of you before.”

  “We have only just opened this shop on Baldur,” the woman said. “We have franchises on a number of other worlds, however. What can I sell you? Art, perhaps? You have the look of a collector. We have some fine Nor T’alush crystal carvings.”

  “No,” Simon Kress said. “I own all the crystal carvings I desire. I came to see about a pet.”

  “A life-form?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alien?”

  “Of course.”

  “We have a mimic in stock. From Celia’s World. A clever little simian. Not only will it learn to speak, but eventually it will mimic your voice, inflections, gestures, even facial expressions.”

  “Cute,” said Kress. “And common. I have no use for either, Wo. I want something exotic. Unusual. And not cute. I detest cute animals. At the moment I own a shambler. Imported from Cotho, at no mean expense. From time to time I feed him a litter of unwanted kittens. This is what I think of cute. Do I make myself understood?”

  Wo smiled enigmatically. “Have you ever owned an animal that worshiped you?” she asked.

  Kress grinned. “Oh, now and again. But I don’t require worship, Wo. Just entertainment.”

  “You misunderstand me,” Wo said, still wearing her strange smile. “I meant worship literally.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I think I have just the thing for you,” Wo said. “Follow me.”

  She led Kress between the radiant counters and down a long, fog-shrouded aisle beneath false starlight. They passed through a wall of mist into another section of the store, and stopped before a large plastic tank. An aquarium, thought Kress.

  Wo beckoned. He stepped closer and saw that he was wrong. It was a terrarium. Within lay a miniature desert about two meters square. Pale sand bleached scarlet by wan red light. Rocks: basalt and quartz and granite. In each corner of the tank stood a castle.

  Kress blinked, and peered, and corrected himself; actually only three castles stood. The fourth leaned; a crumbled, broken ruin. The other three were crude but intact, carved of stone and sand. Over their battlements and through their rounded porticos, tiny creatures climbed and scrambled. Kress pressed his face against the plastic. “Insects?” he asked.

  “No,” Wo replied. “A much more complex life-form. More intelligent as well. Smarter than your shambler by a considerable amount. They are called sandkings.”

  “Insects,” Kress said, drawing back from the tank. “I don’t care how complex they are.” He frowned. “And kindly don’t try to gull me with this talk of intelligence. These things are far too small to have anything but the most rudimentary brains.”

  “They share hiveminds,” Wo said. “Castle minds, in the case. There are only three organisms in the tank, actually. The fourth died. You see how her castle has fallen.”

  Kress looked back at the tank. “Hiveminds, eh? Interesting.” He frowned again. “Still, it is only an oversized ant farm. I’d hoped for something better.”

  “They fight wars.”

  “Wars? Hmmm.” Kress looked again.

  “Note the colors, if you will,” Wo told him. She pointed to the creatures that swarmed over the nearest castle. One was scrabbling at the tank wall. Kress studied it. It still looked like an insect to his eyes. Barely as long as his fingernail, six-limbed, with six tiny eyes set all around its body. A wicked set of mandibles clacked visibly, while two long fine antennae wove patterns in the air. Antennae, mandibles, eyes and legs were sooty black, but the dominant color was the burnt orange of its armor plating. “It’s an insect,” Kress repeated.

  “It is not an insect,” Wo insisted calmly. “The armored exoskeleton is shed when the sandking grows larger. If it grows larger. In a tank this size, it won’t.” She took Kress by the elbow and led him around the tank to the next castle. “Look at the colors here.”

  He did. They were different. Here the sandkings had bright-red armor; antennae, mandibles, eyes, and legs were yellow. Kress glanced across the tank. The denizens of the third live castle were off-white, with red trim. “Hmmm,” he said.

  “They war, as I said,” Wo told him. “They even have truces and alliances. It was an alliance that destroyed the fourth castle in this tank. The blacks were getting too numerous, so the others joined forces to destroy them.”

  Kress remained unconvinced. “Amusing, no doubt. But insects fight wars too.”

  “Insects do not worship,” Wo said.

  “Eh?”

  Wo smiled and pointed at the castle. Kress stared. A face had been carved into the wall of the highest tower. He recognized it. It was Jala Wo’s fa
ce. “How . . . ?”

  “I projected a holograph of my face into the tank, kept it there for a few days. The face of god, you see? I feed them, I am always close. The sandkings have a rudimentary psionic sense. Proximity telepathy. They sense me, and worship me by using my face to decorate their buildings. All the castles have them, see?” They did.

  On the castle, the face of Jala Wo was serene and peaceful, and very lifelike. Kress marveled at the workmanship. “How do they do it?”

  “The foremost legs double as arms. They even have fingers of a sort: three small, flexible tendrils. And they cooperate well, both in building and in battle. Remember, all the mobiles of one color share a single mind.”

  “Tell me more,” Kress said.

  Wo smiled. “The maw lives in the castle. Maw is my name for her. A pun, if you will; the thing is mother and stomach both. Female, large as your fist, immobile. Actually, sandking is a bit of a misnomer. The mobiles are peasants and warriors, the real ruler is a queen. But that analogy is faulty as well. Considered as a whole, each castle is a single hermaphroditic creature.”

  “What do they eat?”

  “The mobiles eat pap, predigested food obtained inside the castle. They get it from the maw after she has worked on it for several days. Their stomachs can’t handle anything else, so if the maw dies, they soon die as well. The maw . . . the maw eats anything. You’ll have no special expense there. Table scraps will do excellently.”

  “Live food?” Kress asked.

  Wo shrugged. “Each maw eats mobiles from the other castles, yes.”

  “I am intrigued,” he admitted. “If only they weren’t so small.”

  “Yours can be larger. These sandkings are small because their tank is small. They seem to limit their growth to fit available space. If I moved these to a larger tank, they’d start growing again.”

  “Hmmm. My piranha tank is twice this size, and vacant. It could be cleaned out, filled with sand . . .”