Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One

by Short Story Anthology

  Three columns of dust were coming from the road now. Through the glasses Pete could see the jeeps, filled with men in their gleaming gray uniforms, crash helmets tight about their heads, blasters glistening in the pale light. They moved in deadly convoy along the rutted road, closer and closer to the crowd of Dusties overflowing the road.

  The Dusties just stood there. They didn't move. They didn't shift, or turn. They just waited.

  The captain's car was first in line. He pulled up before the line with a screech of brakes, and stared at the sea of creatures before him. "Get out of there!" he shouted.

  The Dusties didn't move.

  The captain turned to his men. "Fire into them," he snapped. "Clear a path."

  There was a blaze of fire, and a half a dozen Dusties slid to the ground, convulsing. Pete felt a chill pass through him, staring in disbelief. The Dusties had a weapon, he kept telling himself, they must have a weapon, something the colonists had never dreamed of. The guns came up again, and another volley echoed across the valley, and a dozen more Dusties fell to the ground. For every one that fell, another moved stolidly into its place.

  With a curse the captain sat down in the seat, gunned the motor, and started forward. The jeep struck the fallen bodies, rolled over them, and plunged straight into the wall of Dusties. Still they didn't move. The car slowed and stopped, mired down. The other cars picked up momentum and plunged into the brown river of creatures. They too ground to a stop.

  The captain started roaring at his men. "Cut them down! We're going to get through here!" Blasters began roaring into the faces of the Dusties, and as they fell the jeeps moved forward a few feet until more of the creatures blocked their path.

  Pete heard a cry below him, and saw Jack Mario standing in the road, gun on the ground, hands out in front of him, staring in horror as the Dusties kept moving into the fire. "Do you see what they're doing!" he screamed. "They'll be slaughtered, every one of them!" And then he was running down the road, shouting at them to stop, and so were Pete and Tegan and the rest of the men.

  Something hit Pete in the shoulder as he ran. He spun around and fell into the dusty road. A dozen Dusties closed in around him, lifted him up bodily, and started back through the village with him. He tried to struggle, but vaguely he saw that the other men were being carried back also, while the river of brown creatures held the jeeps at bay. The Dusties were hurrying, half carrying and half dragging him back through the village and up a long ravine into the hills beyond. At last they set Pete on his feet again, plucking urgently at his shirt sleeve as they hurried him along.

  He followed them willingly, then, with the rest of the colonists at his heels. He didn't know what the Dusties were doing, but he knew they were trying to save him. Finally they reached a cave, a great cleft in the rock that Pete knew for certain had not been there when he had led exploring parties through these hills years before. It was a huge opening, and already a dozen of the men were there, waiting, dazed by what they had witnessed down in the valley, while more were stumbling up the rocky incline, tugged along by the fuzzy brown creatures.

  Inside the cavern, steps led down the side of the rock, deep into the dark coolness of the earth. Down and down they went, until they suddenly found themselves in a mammoth room lit by blazing torches. Pete stopped and stared at his friends who had already arrived. Jack Mario was sitting on the floor, his face in his hands, sobbing. Tegan was sitting, too, blinking at Pete as if he were a stranger, and Dorfman was trembling like a leaf. Pete stared about him through the dim light, and then looked where Tegan was pointing at the end of the room.

  He couldn't see it clearly, at first. Finally, he made out a raised platform with four steps leading up. A torch lighted either side of a dais at the top, and between the torches, rising high into the gloom, stood a statue.

  It was a beautifully carved thing, hewn from the heavy granite that made up the core of this planet, with the same curious styling as other carving the Dusties had done. The design was intricate, the lines carefully turned and polished. At first Pete thought it was a statue of a Dustie, but when he moved forward and squinted in the dim light, he suddenly realized that it was something else indeed. And in that moment he realized why they were there and why the Dusties had done this incredible thing to protect them.

  The statue was weirdly beautiful, the work of a dedicated master sculptor. It was a figure, standing with five-fingered hands on hips, head raised high. Not a portrait, but an image seen through other eyes than human, standing high in the room with the lights burning reverently at its feet.

  Unmistakably it was the statue of a man.

  * * * * *

  They heard the bombs, much later. The granite roof and floor of the cavern trembled, and the men and women stared at each other, helpless and sick as they huddled in that great hall. But presently the bombing stopped. Later, when they stumbled out of that grotto into the late afternoon light, the ship was gone.

  They knew it would be back. Possibly it would bring back search parties to hunt down the rebels in the hills; perhaps it would just wait and again bomb out the new village when it rose. But searching parties would never find their quarry, and the village would rise again and again, if necessary.

  And in the end, somehow, Pete knew that the colonists would find a way to survive here and live free as they had always lived. It might be a bitter struggle, but no matter how hard the fight, there would be one strange and wonderful thing they could count on.

  No matter what they had to do, he knew the Dusties would help them.

  URSULA K. LE GUIN

  b. 1929

  Ursula K. Le Guin published her first science fiction novel in 1966, and by 1970 was considered one of the most important writers within the field. Her reputation has now extended far beyond the readership of genre science fiction, and academia studies her works more than those of any other modern science fiction writer.

  Much of Le Guin's work, covering about 2500 years of future history beginning 300 years from now, is set in a common universe, seeded with human life by the people of the planet Hain. Generally known as the Hainish series, it consists of five novels, two novellas and several short stories, among them The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), the first work of Le Guin's maturity as a writer, and a winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novel. The fifth and last novel in the sequence, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) also won a Hugo and a Nebula, and is widely regarded as her most richly textured science fiction work.

  Le Guin also wrote works outside the Hainish sequence. Among these are The Lathe of Heaven (1971), a novel set in the imaginative territory generally associated with Philip K. Dick, and telling of a man who through his dreams can bring alternate reality structures into being; and several short stories, including the Hugo-winning "The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas" (1973), a bitter, deft parable about the cost of the good life, and "Nine Lives" (1969), a moving story of clones mining an alien planet. Le Guin's fantasy stories may be her most personal and popular work. The austere but vivid Earthsea trilogy, begun in 1968, is a major work whose appeal goes far beyond the teenage audience for whom it was intended.

  Le Guin has been honored with five Hugos and four Nebula awards, and in 1989 received the Pilgrim Award for services to science fiction criticism. All along she has demonstrated through example how the traditional novelist's interest in character and moral growth need not be alien to science fiction.

  Nine Lives, by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Although science fiction has always been fascinated by the idea of the duplication of human beings, and has long used ingenious twists on the idea of matter-transmission, or sometimes time-travel paradox loops, to produce such dopplegangers (stories about android duplicates of human beings, one of Philip K. Dick's most obsessive themes, are clearly related as well—another few years, and most of the android stories of the fifties would have been clone stories instead, I'm willing to bet), the genre as a whole didn't begin talking about "clones"
until the last few years of the sixties, after the appearance of Gordon Rattray Taylor's extremely influential nonfiction book, The Biological Time-Bomb. (Le Guin has explicitly acknowledged Taylor's influence on the story that follows; one of your editors was also writing an early clone story in 1969— "A Special Kind of Morning," published in 1971—before Le Guin's story hit print, and certainly Taylor was his inspiration as well; rarely, in fact, has a nonfiction book had as much impact on the evolution of the genre as Taylor's had.) Although there were earlier stories that dealt with some of the conceptual material of cloning—Theodore Sturgeon's "When You Care, When You Love, " for instance, or Damon Knight's "Mary"—the eloquent and hard-hitting story that follows, "Nine Lives," is perhaps science fiction's first true clone story, and is probably the first to use the word "clone" in its true context.

  It's a story that had a tremendous impact on the field, and one that is still as fresh and germane today as it was in 1969, telling the moving story of a young man who is suddenly left all alone in life in a way that no one has ever been alone before. . . .

  Ursula K Le Guin is probably one of the best known and most universally respected SF writers in the world today. Her famous novel The Left Hand of Darkness may have been the most influential SF novel of its decade and shows every sign of becoming one of the enduring classics of the genre. Even ignoring the rest of Le Guìn's work, the impact of this one novel alone on future SF writers would be incalculably strong. (Her 1968 fantasy novel, A Wizard of Earthsea, would be almost as influential on future generations of High Fantasy writers.) The Left Hand of Darkness won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, as did Le Guin's monumental novel The Dispossessed a few years later. Her novel Tehanu won her another Nebula in 1990, and she has also won three other Hugo Awards and a Nebula Award for her short fiction, as well as the National Book Award for Children's literature for her novel The Farthest Shore, part of her acclaimed Earthsea trilogy. Her other novels include Planet of Exile, The Lathe of Heaven, City of Illusions, Rocannon's World, The Beginning Place, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, Tehanu, Searoad, and the controversial multimedia novel Always Coming Home. She has had six collections: The Wind's Twelve Quarters, Orsinian Tales, The Compass Rose, Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, and her most recent book, Four Ways to Forgiveness.

  Nine Lives

  Nebula Nomination for Best Novelette 1969

  She was alive inside but dead outside, her face a black and dun net of wrinkles, tumors, cracks. She was bald and blind. The tremors that crossed Libra's face were mere quiverings of corruption. Underneath, in the black corridors, the halls beneath the skin, there were crepitations in darkness, ferments, chemical nightmares that went on for centuries. "O the damned flatulent planet," Pugh murmured as the dome shook and a boil burst a kilometer to the southwest, spraying silver pus across the sunset. The sun had been setting for the last two days. "I'll be glad to see a human face."

  "Thanks," said Martin.

  "Yours is human to be sure," said Pugh, "but I've seen it so long I can't see it."

  Radvid signals cluttered the communicator which Martin was operating, faded, returned as face and voice. The face filled the screen, the nose of an Assyrian king, the eyes of a samurai, skin bronze, eyes the color of iron: young, magnificent. "Is that what human beings look like?" said Pugh with awe. "I'd forgotten."

  "Shut up, Owen, we're on."

  "Libra Exploratory Mission Base, come in please, this is Passerine launch."

  "Libra here. Beam fixed. Come on down, launch."

  "Expulsion in seven E-seconds. Hold on." The screen blanked and sparkled.

  "Do they all look like that? Martin, you and I are uglier men than I thought."

  "Shut up, Owen. . .."

  For twenty-two minutes Martin followed the landing craft down by signal and then through the cleared dome they saw it, small star in the blood-colored east, sinking. It came down neat and quiet, Libra's thin atmosphere carrying little sound. Pugh and Martin closed the headpieces of their insuits, zipped out of the dome airlocks, and ran with soaring strides, Nijinsky and Nureyev, toward the boat. Three equipment modules came floating down at four-minute intervals from each other and hundred-meter intervals east of the boat. "Come on out," Martin said on his suit radio, "we're waiting at the door."

  "Come on in, the methane's fine," said Pugh.

  The hatch opened. The young man they had seen on the screen came out with one athletic twist and leaped down onto the shaky dust and clinkers of Libra. Martin shook his hand, but Pugh was staring at the hatch, from which another young man emerged with the same neat twist and jump, followed by a young woman who emerged with the same neat twist, ornamented by a wriggle, and the jump. They were all tall, with bronze skin, black hair, high-bridged noses, epicanthic fold, the same face. They all had the same face. The fourth was emerging from the hatch with a neat twist and jump. "Martin bach," said Pugh, "we've got a clone."

  "Right," said one of them, "we're a tendone. John Chow's the name. You're Lieutenant Martin?"

  "I'm Owen Pugh."

  "Alvaro Guillen Martin," said Martin, formal, bowing slightly. Another girl was out, the same beautiful face; Martin stared at her and his eye rolled like a nervous pony's. Evidently he had never given any thought to cloning and was suffering technological shock. "Steady," Pugh said in the Argentine dialect, "it's only excess twins." He stood close by Martin's elbow. He was glad himself of the contact.

  It is hard to meet a stranger. Even the greatest extrovert meeting even the meekest stranger knows a certain dread, though he may not know he knows it. Will he make a fool of me wreck my image of myself invade me destroy me change me? Will he be different from me? Yes, that he will. There's the terrible thing: the strangeness of the stranger.

  After two years on a dead planet, and the last half year isolated as a team of two, oneself and one other, after that it's even harder to meet a stranger, however welcome he may be. You're out of the habit of difference, you've lost the touch; and so the fear revives, the primitive anxiety, the old dread.

  The clone, five males and five females, had got done in a couple of minutes what a man might have got done in twenty: greeted Pugh and Martin, had a glance at Libra, unloaded the boat, made ready to go. They went, and the dome filled with them, a hive of golden bees. They hummed and buzzed quietly, filled up all silences, all spaces with a honey-brown swarm of human presence. Martin looked bewildered at the long-limbed girls, and they smiled at him, three at once. Their smile was gentler than that of the boys, but no less radiantly self-possessed.

  "Self-possessed," Owen Pugh murmured to his friend, "that's it. Think of it, to be oneself ten times over. Nine seconds for every motion, nine ayes on every vote. It would be glorious." But Martin was asleep. And the John Chows had all gone to sleep at once. The dome was filled with their quiet breathing. They were young, they didn't snore. Martin sighed and snored, his Hershey-bar-colored face relaxed in the dim afterglow of Libra's primary, set at last. Pugh had cleared the dome and stars looked in, Sol among them, a great company of lights, a clone of splendors. Pugh slept and dreamed of a one-eyed giant who chased him through the shaking halls of Hell.

  From his sleeping bag Pugh watched the clone's awakening. They all got up within one minute except for one pair, a boy and a girl, who lay snugly tangled and still sleeping in one bag. As Pugh saw this there was a shock like one of Libra's earthquakes inside him, a very deep tremor. He was not aware of this and in fact thought he was pleased at the sight; there was no other such comfort on this dead hollow world. More power to them, who made love. One of the others stepped on the pair. They woke and the girl sat up flushed and sleepy, with bare golden breasts. One of her sisters murmured something to her; she shot a glance at Pugh and disappeared in the sleeping bag; from another direction came a fierce stare, from still another direction a voice: "Christ, we're used to having a room to ourselves. Hope you don't mind, Captain Pugh."

  "It's a pleasure
," Pugh said half truthfully. He had to stand up then wearing only the shorts he slept in, and he felt like a plucked rooster, all white scrawn and pimples. He had seldom envied Martin's compact brownness so much. The United Kingdom had come through the Great Famines well, losing less than half its population: a record achieved by rigorous food control. Black marketeers and hoarders had been executed. Crumbs had been shared. Where in richer lands most had died and a few had thriven, in Britain fewer died and none throve. They all got lean. Their sons were lean, their grandsons lean, small, brittle-boned, easily infected. When civilization became a matter of standing in lines, the British had kept queue, and so had replaced the survival of the fittest with the survival of the fair-minded. Owen Pugh was a scrawny little man. All the same, he was there.

  At the moment he wished he wasn't.

  At breakfast a John said, "Now if you'll brief us, Captain Pugh—"

  "Owen, then."

  "Owen, we can work out our schedule. Anything new on the mine since your last report to your Mission? We saw your reports when Passerine was orbiting Planet V, where they are now."

  Martin did not answer, though the mine was his discovery and project, and Pugh had to do his best. It was hard to talk to them. The same faces, each with the same expression of intelligent interest, all leaned toward him across the table at almost the same angle. They all nodded together.

  Over the Exploitation Corps insigne on their tunics each had a nameband, first name John and last name Chow of course, but the middle names different. The men were Aleph, Kaph, Yod, Gimel, and Samedh; the women Sadhe, Daleth, Zayin, Beth, and Resh. Pugh tried to use the names but gave it up at once; he could not even tell sometimes which one had spoken, for all the voices were alike.