Year's Best SF 3

by David G. Hartwell

  His soul was filled all the while with love for the beautiful creature before him as—calmly, calmly, calmly—he pressed the stud. He heard a whooshing sound and felt the weapon kicking back against his shoulder with astonishing force, sending him thudding into a tree behind him and for a moment knocking the breath from him; and an instant later the left side of the beautiful creature's head exploded into a cascading fountain of flame, a shower of radiant fragments. A greenish-red mist of what must be alien blood appeared and went spreading outward into the air.

  The stricken Entity swayed and fell backward, dropping out of sight on the floor of the wagon.

  In that same moment the second Entity, the one that was riding on the far side, underwent so tremendous a convulsion that Khalid wondered if he had managed to kill it, too, with that single shot. It stumbled forward, then back, and crashed against the railing of the wagon with such violence that Khalid imagined he could hear the thump. Its great tubular body writhed and shook, and seemed even to change color, the purple hue deepening almost to black for an instant and the orange spots becoming a fiery red. At so great a distance it was hard to be sure, but Khalid thought, also, that its leathery hide was rippling and puckering as if in a demonstration of almost unendurable pain.

  It must be feeling the agony of its companion's death, he realized. Watching the Entity lurch around blindly on the platform of the wagon in what had to be terrible pain, Khalid's soul flooded with compassion for the creature, and sorrow, and love. It was unthinkable to fire again. He had never had any intention of killing more than one; but in any case he knew that he was no more capable of firing a shot at this stricken survivor now than he would be of firing at Aissha.

  During all this time the wagon had been moving silently onward as though nothing had happened; and in a moment more it turned the bend in the road and was gone from Khalid's sight, down the road that led toward Stonehenge.

  He stood for a while watching the place where the vehicle had been when he had fired the fatal shot. There was nothing there now, no sign that anything had occurred. Had anything occurred? Khalid felt neither satisfaction nor grief nor fear nor, really, any emotion of any other sort. His mind was all but blank. He made a point of keeping it that way, knowing he was as good as dead if he relaxed his control even for a fraction of a second.

  Strapping the gun to the bicycle basket again, he pedaled quietly back toward home. It was well past midnight; there was no one at all on the road. At the house, all was as it had been; Arch's car parked in front, the front lights still on, Richie and Arch snoring away in Richie's room.

  Only now, safely home, did Khalid at last allow himself the luxury of letting the jubilant thought cross his mind, just for a moment, that had been flickering at the threshold of his consciousness for an hour.

  Got you, Richie! Got you, you bastard!

  He returned the grenade gun to the cabinet and went to bed, and was asleep almost instantly, and slept soundly until the first bird-song of dawn.

  In the tremendous uproar that swept Salisbury the next day, with Entity vehicles everywhere and platoons of the glossy balloon-like aliens that everybody called Spooks going from house to house, it was Khalid himself who provided the key clue to the mystery of the assassination that had occurred in the night.

  “You know, I think it might have been my father who did it,” he said almost casually, in town, outside the market, to a boy named Thomas whom he knew in a glancing sort of way. “He came home yesterday with a strange sort of big gun. Said it was for killing Entities with, and put it away in a cabinet in our front room.”

  Thomas would not believe that Khalid's father was capable of such a gigantic act of heroism as assassinating an Entity. No, no, no, Khalid argued eagerly, in a tone of utter and sublime disingenuousness: He did it, I know he did it, he's always talked of wanting to kill one of them one of these days, and now he has.

  He has?

  Always his greatest dream, yes, indeed.

  Well, then—

  Yes. Khalid moved along. So did Thomas. Khalid took care to go nowhere near the house all that morning. The last person he wanted to see was Richie. But he was safe in that regard. By noon Thomas evidently had spread the tale of Khalid Burke's wild boast about the town with great effectiveness, because word came traveling through the streets around that time that a detachment of Spooks had gone to Khalid's house and had taken Richie Burke away.

  “What about my grandmother?” Khalid asked. “She wasn't arrested too, was she?”

  “No, it was just him,” he was told. “Billy Cavendish saw them taking him, and he was all by himself. Yelling and screaming, he was, the whole time, like a man being hauled away to be hanged.”

  Khalid never saw his father again.

  During the course of the general reprisals that followed the killing, the entire population of Salisbury and five adjacent towns was rounded up and transported to walled detention camps near Portsmouth. A good many of the deportees were executed within the next few days, seemingly by random selection, no pattern being evident in the choosing of those who were put to death. At the beginning of the following week the survivors were sent on from Portsmouth to other places, some of them quite remote, in various parts of the world.

  Khalid was not among those executed. He was merely sent very far away.

  He felt no guilt over having survived the death-lottery while others around him were being slain for his murderous act. He had trained himself since childhood to feel very little indeed, even while aiming a rifle at one of Earth's beautiful and magnificent masters. Besides, what affair was it of his, that some of these people were dying and he was allowed to live? Everyone died, some sooner, some later. Aissha would have said that what was happening was the will of Allah. Khalid more simply put it that the Entities did as they pleased, always, and knew that it was folly to ponder their motives.

  Aissha was not available to discuss these matters with. He was separated from her before reaching Portsmouth and Khalid never saw her again, either. From that day on it was necessary for him to make his way in the world on his own.

  He was not quite thirteen years old. Often, in the years ahead, he would look back at the time when he had slain the Entity; but he would think of it only as the time when he had rid himself of Richie Burke, for whom he had had such hatred. For the Entities he had no hatred at all, and when his mind returned to that event by the roadside on the way to Stonehenge, to the alien being centered in the crosshairs of his weapon, he would think only of the marvelous color and form of the two starborn creatures in the floating wagon, of that passing moment of beauty in the night.

  Mr.Pale

  RAY BRADBURY

  Ray Bradbury is one of the great SF writers of the century. His most transforming and influential work was written in the 1940s and 1950s: the stories collected in Dark Carnival, The October Country and The Martian Chronicles, The Golden Apples of the Sun and The Illustrated Man; the novels Fahrenbeit 451, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. There has always been a strong strain of moral allegory in his fiction, and he often combines fantasy and the supernatural with science fiction. Although he has devoted most of his effort in succeeding decades to poetry and plays, and a couple of nostalgic mystery novels, he has never entirely abandoned short fiction, and every once in a while reminds us of what he has done and can still do in that form. Most of his fiction of this decade has been fantasy. This is one of his now scarce hybrids, which takes us back to his 50s best.

  He's a very sick man.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Up above on Deck C. I got him to bed.”

  The doctor sighed. “I came on this trip for a vacation. All right, all right. Excuse me,” he said to his wife. He followed the private up through the ramps of the spaceship and the ship, in the few minutes while he did this, pushed itself on in red and yellow fire across space, a thousand miles a second.

  “Here we are,” said the orderly.

  The doctor
turned in at the portway and saw the man lying on the bunk, and the man was tall and his flesh was sewed tight to his skull. The man was sick, and his lips fluted back in pain from his large, discolored teeth. His eyes were shadowed cups from which flickers of light peered, and his body was as thin as a skeleton. The color of his hands was that of snow. The doctor pulled up a magnetic chair and took the sick man's wrist.

  “What seems to be the trouble?”

  The sick man didn't speak for a moment, but only licked a colorless tongue over his sharp lips.

  “I'm dying,” he said, at last, and seemed to laugh.

  “Nonsense, we'll fix you up, Mr.…?”

  “Pale, to fit my complexion. Pale will do.”

  “Mr. Pale.” This wrist was the coldest wrist he had ever touched in his life. It was like the hand of a body you pick up and tag in the hospital morgue. The pulse was gone from the cold wrist already. If it was there at all, it was so faint that the doctor's own fingertips, pulsing, covered it.

  “It's bad, isn't it?” asked Mr.Pale.

  The doctor said nothing but probed the bared chest of the dying man with his silver stethoscope.

  There was a faint far clamor, a sigh, a musing upon distant things, heard in the stethoscope. It seemed almost to be a regretful wailing, a muted screaming of a million voices, instead of a heartbeat, a dark wind blowing in a dark space and the chest cold and the sound cold to the doctor's ears and to his own heart, which gave pause in hearing it.

  “I was right, wasn't I?” said Mr.Pale.

  The doctor nodded. “Perhaps you can tell me…”

  “What caused it?” Mr.Pale closed his eyes smilingly over his colorlessness. “I haven't any food. I'm starving.”

  “We can fix that.”

  “No, no, you don't understand,” whispered the man. “I barely made it to this rocket in time to get aboard. Oh, I was really healthy there for a while, a few minutes ago.”

  The doctor turned to the orderly. “Delirious.”

  “No,” said Mr. Pale, “no.”

  “What's going on here?” said a voice, and the captain stepped into the room. “Hello, who's this? I don't recall…”

  “I'll save you the trouble,” said Mr.Pale. “I'm not on the passenger list. I just came aboard.”

  “You couldn't have. We're ten million miles away from Earth.”

  Mr.Pale sighed. “I almost didn't make it. It took all my energy to catch you. If you'd been a little farther out…”

  “A Stowaway, pure and simple,” said the captain. “And drunk, too, no doubt.”

  “A very sick man,” said the doctor. “He can't be moved. I'll make a thorough examination…”

  “You'll find nothing,” said Mr.Pale, faintly, lying white and long and alone in the cot, “except I'm in need of food.”

  “We'll see about that,” said the doctor, rolling up his sleeves.

  An hour passed. The doctor sat back down on his magnetic chair. He was perspiring. “You're right. There's nothing wrong with you, except you're starved. How could you do this to yourself in a rich civilization like ours?”

  “Oh, you'd be surprised,” said the cold, thin, white man. His voice was a little breeze blowing ice through the room. “They took all my food away an hour or so ago. It was my own fault. You'll understand in a few minutes now. You see, I'm very very old. Some say a million years, some say a billion. I've lost count. I've been too busy to count.”

  Mad, thought the doctor, utterly mad.

  Mr.Pale smiled weakly as if he had heard this thought. He shook his tired head and the dark pits of his eyes flickered. “No, no. No, no. Old, very old. And foolish. Earth was mine. I owned it. I kept it for myself. It nurtured me, even as I nurtured it. I lived well there, for a billion years, I lived high. And now here I am, in the name of all that's darkest, dying too. I never thought I could die. I never thought I could be killed, like everyone else. And now I know what the fear is, what it will be like to die. After a billion years I know, and it is frightening, for what will the universe be without me?”

  “Just rest easily, now, we'll fix you up.”

  “No, no. No, no, there's nothing you can do. I over-played my hand. I lived as I pleased. I started wars and stopped wars. But this time I went too far, and committed suicide, yes, I did. Go to the port there and look out.” Mr.Pale was trembling, the trembling moved in his fingers and his lips. “Look out. Tell me what you see.”

  “Earth. The planet Earth, behind us.”

  “Wait just a moment, then,” said Mr.Pale.

  The doctor waited.

  “Now,” said Mr.Pale, softly. “It should happen about now.”

  A blind fire filled the sky.

  The doctor cried out. “My God, my God, this is terrible!”

  “What do you see?”

  “Earth! It's caught fire. It's burning!”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Pale.

  The fire crowded the universe with a dripping blue yellow flare. Earth blew itself into a thousand pieces and fell away into sparks and nothingness.

  “Did you see?” said Mr. Pale.

  “My God, my God.” The doctor staggered and fell against the port, clawing at his heart and his face. He began to cry like a child.

  “You see,” said Mr. Pale, “What a fool I was. Too far. I went too far. I thought, What a feast. What a banquet. And now, and now, it's over.”

  The doctor slid down and sat on the floor, weeping. The ship moved in space. Down the corridors, faintly, you could hear running feet and stunned voices, and much weeping.

  The sick man lay on his cot, saying nothing, shaking his head slowly back and forth, swallowing convulsively. After five minutes of trembling and weeping, the doctor gathered himself and crawled and then got to his feet and sat on the chair and looked at Mr. Pale who lay gaunt and long there, almost phosphorescent, and from the dying man came a thick smell of something very old and chilled and dead.

  “Now do you see?” said Mr. Pale. “I didn't want it this way.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I wanted it to go on for another billion years, the high life, the picking and choosing. Oh, I was king.”

  “You're mad!”

  “Everyone feared me. And now I'm afraid. For there's no one left to die. A handful on this ship. A few thousand left on Mars. That's why I'm trying to get there, to Mars, where I can live, if I make it. For in order for me to live, to be talked about, to have an existence, others must be alive to die, and when all the living ones are dead and no one is left to die, then Mr. Pale himself must die, and he most assuredly does not want that. For you see, life is a rare thing in the universe. Only Earth lived, and only I lived there because of the living me. But now I'm so weak, so weak. I can't move. You must help me.”

  “Mad, mad!”

  “It's another two days to Mars,” said Mr. Pale, thinking it through, his hands collapsed at his sides. “In that time you must feed me. I can't move or I would tend myself. Oh, an hour ago, I had great power, think of the power I took from so much and so many dying at once. But the effort of reaching this ship dispersed the power, and the power is self-limiting. For now I have no reason to live, except you, and your wife, and the twenty other passengers and crew, and those few on Mars. My incentive, you see, weakens, weakens…” His voice trailed off into a sigh. And then, after swallowing, he went on, “Have you wondered, Doctor, why the death rate on Mars in the six months since you established bases there has been nil? I can't be everywhere. I was born on Earth on the same day as life was born. And I've waited all these years to move on out into the star system. I should have gone months ago, but I put it off, and now, I'm sorry. What a fool, what a greedy fool.”

  The doctor stood up, stiffening and pulling back. He clawed at the wall. “You're out of your head.”

  “Am I? Look out the port again at what's left of Earth.”

  “I won't listen to you.”

  “You must help me. You must decide quickly. I want the captain. He must com
e to me first. A transfusion, you might call it. And then the various passengers, one by one, just to keep me on the edge, to keep me alive. And then, of course, perhaps even you, or your wife. You don't want to live forever, do you? That's what would happen if you let me die.”

  “You're raving.”

  “Do you dare believe I am raving? Can you take that chance? If I die, all of you would be immortal. That's what man's always wanted, isn't it? To live forever. But I tell you, it would be insanity, one day like another, and think of the immense burden of memory! Think! Consider.”

  The doctor stood across the room with his back to the wall, in shadow.

  Mr. Pale whispered, “Better take me up on this. Better die when you have the chance than live on for a million billion years. Believe me. I know. I'm almost glad to die. Almost, but not quite. Self-preservation. Well?”

  The doctor was at the door. “I don't believe you.”

  “Don't go,” murmured Mr. Pale. “You'll regret it.”

  “You're lying.”

  “Don't let me die…” The voice was so far away now, the lips barely moved. “Please don't let me die. You need me. All life needs me to make life worthwhile, to give it value, to give it contrast. Don't…”

  Mr. Pale was thinner and smaller and now the flesh seemed to melt faster. “No,” he sighed. “No…” said the wind behind the hard yellowed teeth. “Please…” The deep-socketed eyes fixed themselves in a stare at the ceiling.

  The doctor crashed out the door and slammed it and bolted it tight. He lay against it, weeping again, and through the ship he could see the people standing in groups staring back at the empty space where Earth had been. He heard cursing and wailing. He walked unsteadily and in great unreality for an hour through the ship's corridors until he reached the captain.

  “Captain, no one is to enter that room where the dying man is. He has a plague. Incurable. Quite insane. He'll be dead within the hour. Have the room welded shut.”