Yondering

by Robert Reginald (ed)

  Howard didn’t want to be hurt either. “I’m sorry,” was all he said.

  “Very well,” the lead bulldog said. He made his thumbs touch. Howard leaped aside as a blast of green fire shot out from where the thumbs touched and struck the ground where he had been standing. “Please give us the McGuffin.”

  “In the name of the Galactic Police…,” Howard began, hoping for the best. He watched in horror as his blaster arm sagged like taffy at the elbow. He could feel himself melting. “Oops,” he said to himself.

  “Now we are certain that you are not a Galactic Policeman,” the lead bulldog said, and fired another green blast.

  As best he could Howard ran into the woods, his limbs feeling like rubber. As his body softened, running became more difficult. Soon he was slithering over the rough ground, pseudopod over pseudopod, like a giant amoeba. The bulldog things were not far behind.

  Howard thought another code that Sandar had given him, and he found himself unable to move. His arms stretched upward, divided and divided again. As he had intended, he was now a tree. He could still see and hear from a place somewhere among the leaves and branches.

  The three bulldogs strode right by him without even slowing down, their thumbs at the ready. They returned a short time later, grumbling, and stopped under him, still glancing around. “Nobody makes fools of us,” the lead bulldog said. “If we don’t find him soon we’ll destroy the planet.”

  “If we destroy the planet, the McGuffin goes with it,” another bulldog said. “We dare not go home empty-handed.”

  “Nobody makes a fool of Feklar,” the lead bulldog reminded his assistant. They walked back to the clearing in which their ship had landed.

  Howard didn’t like the sound of that. “Destroy the planet” might just be a figure of speech, but Howard didn’t want to take any chances. Would the good guys think it was a fair trade—destroy the Earth to save the universe? Maybe. Maybe they were even right to think that way. But Howard had a lot of friends on Earth. And his comic book collection. And there were a few movies he hadn’t seen yet. If the Earth was gone, he personally wouldn’t have much use for the rest of the universe.

  He didn’t know if he could stop them permanently, but he knew he could stop them temporarily if he went back to the clearing. He couldn’t go as a tree, however, and he didn’t think Feklar would buy his Galactic Police form now even if he’d bought it before. Howard chuckled at what he decided to do.

  He made himself a little shorter and a lot more muscular. His tail thrashed from side to side and he bellowed as he entered the clearing in the shape of a Tyrannosaurus rex—one sporting a very un-T-rex pair of antennae.

  The three bulldogs seemed surprised.

  “This is my real form,” Howard roared. “Go back and report that you failed, or die here and now!” He aimed his blaster at them, hoping he would not have to fire. He had never killed anything bigger than a fly.

  “I’m afraid that’s unacceptable,” Feklar said. “Give us the McGuffin.” They readied their thumbs. Apparently, given a choice, Feklar would rather take home the McGuffin than destroy the Earth.

  This was a frustrating situation. Howard considered giving up the McGuffin to save the Earth. After all, this wasn’t his fight. And if these bulldogs were the good guys, they deserved the McGuffin. On the other hand, the bulldogs might be the bad guys, and if they destroyed the universe, the Earth would probably go with it. Giving up the McGuffin wouldn’t buy Howard anything. All this upping and backing was driving him crazy.

  Howard could barely believe it when, at that moment, a loud thump filled the clearing as a third ship suddenly appeared on the ground. It was bright red and covered with tiny shards of white crystal. The ship looked like a gumdrop, a cherry gumdrop. Were the Galactic Police aboard? If they were, was that a good thing?

  “Feklar!” The entire ship vibrated, making the word boom through the clearing. “Put down your thumbs and back away from the policeman.”

  “Careful, men,” cried Feklar. “It’s another trick.”

  “No tricks,” the ship vibrated. A cockroach dressed as Howard was walking out from behind the ship holding an object in one hand. It might have been a weapon, but it didn’t look like the proto blaster. “I am Khar Nolo,” the cockroach said. “Put down your thumbs and back away from the policeman.”

  The two bulldogs who had been following Feklar around trained their thumbs on the new arrival. Feklar kept his attention on Howard.

  “Give me the McGuffin,” Khar Nolo said and held one claw out to Howard.

  “Give it to me,” Feklar suggested.

  “Sandar would have wanted you to give it to me,” Khar Nolo said.

  That was no doubt true, but knowing what Sandar wanted did not make Howard’s choice any easier. He still didn’t know which group was the bad guys. His guts were silent. “That’s a good argument,” was all he said.

  “Give me the McGuffin or I’ll be forced to destroy your world,” Feklar said.

  “That’s a good argument, too,” Howard agreed. It was difficult to nod because his head was connected directly to his body. An idea came to him, and his antennae whipped around.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Howard said as he took a few steps forward. “I can’t decide who to give the McGuffin to, so I’ll just have to destroy it.” He set the McGuffin on the ground and stepped back.

  Feklar stepped toward it but Howard waved his blaster at him. “Uh, uh, uh,” he said, cautioning Feklar. When Feklar retreated, Howard aimed at the McGuffin.

  “No!” Feklar cried. Khar Nolo said nothing.

  “Yes,” Howard said and fired at the McGuffin. At the same moment a lightning bolt kicked up dirt just to one side of it, and all three bulldogs screamed.

  “That answers my question,” Howard said as he picked up the McGuffin and tossed it to Khar Nolo. Khar Nolo caught it in one claw with leisurely skill. “I knew,” Howard explained, “that the good guys wouldn’t mind losing the McGuffin as long as the bad guys didn’t get it.”

  Feklar and his friends were backing toward their ship.

  “Absolutely,” Khar Nolo said. He quickly adjusted the McGuffin, aimed it at the bulldogs, and fired. They were surrounded by a rainbow bubble which immediately shrank to a transparent sphere no larger than a baseball. Khar Nolo picked up the sphere and showed it to Howard. Inside, the three bulldogs were pounding on the wall.

  “Cool,” Howard said.

  “Very cool,” Khar Nolo agreed. “Now I have one more thing to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  Khar Nolo surprised Howard by gripping his antennae with one three-clawed hand. “Huh?” Howard cried, fearing that he’d chosen the wrong group after all.

  Suddenly Howard forgot how to shapeshift. Knowing how to do it was like having a word at the tip of his tongue, like almost knowing a date he needed for a history test, like not quite remembering a dream, even as it faded. All by itself his body flowed into its normal shape. He looked down at his familiar arms and body. His head felt right too.

  “Thank you for your help,” Khar Nolo said. “The galaxy will sleep a little safer tonight.”

  “That’s okay. But I wish you’d left me the shapeshifting ability. Some kind of souvenir would have been nice.”

  “Fear not,” Khar Nolo said. He lifted the body of Sandar Mons of the Galactic Police and carried it into his cherry gumdrop ship. The ship rose into the air, making no more noise than the soft summer wind in the trees, and the other two ships rose behind it. When they reached the level of the treetops, all three ships suddenly disappeared.

  Howard realized that he should have asked Khar Nolo to take him home. Not only would that have gotten him home, but he would have had a ride in a real spaceship.

  But no. What a doofus.

  Now all he could do was go with his guts.

  * * * *

  “Did you find your way home, Mr. Slatterman?” Ms. Fosdick asked with some concern.

  “Nope,” the ol
d guy said. “Uncle Fred had to find me with dogs.” He chuckled.

  The three children laughed, delighted that the story had no moral, but Ms. Fosdick seemed unsure what she ought to think.

  “What souvenir did Khar Nolo leave you?” Little Dan asked.

  “He didn’t leave any souvenir, silly,” Beatrice said. “It’s just a story.”

  “Is it just a story?” Little Dan asked.

  “Of course it is,” Arthur said.

  “Of course it isn’t,” Mr. Slatterman said. “As it turned out, Khar Nolo didn’t entirely take away my ability to shapeshift.” He held up the little finger of his left hand.

  Ms. Fosdick and the three children looked at the finger doubtfully. It began to change as if things under the skin were moving.

  “Eew,” all three children cried.

  Soon the little finger of Mr. Slatterman’s left hand formed into a cockroach wearing a jerkin made of straps. It waved its antennae at them. Ms. Fosdick and the children got very quiet.

  Mr. Slatterman put both hands into his pockets. “I think we should go home now. Your parents are probably back from shopping.”

  “Maybe we should take another look at that rock where Dan says he saw the fossil,” Beatrice said.

  “Tomorrow,” Ms. Fosdick said firmly.

  THE NEXT GENERATION, by Ardath Mayhar

  The infant never breathed.

  Noura, tensed over her control board in the observation station, bent forward, her fingers ready over the keyboard.

  The staff in the birth cubicle was superbly competent, their electronic nervous systems incredibly swift, their pseudo-flesh fingers agile. There was a Nan on duty, her padded shape warmed to comfort the child, if it should breathe on its own.

  Yet Noura, in her role as observer and representative human being, knew that at times only flesh-and-blood intelligence could step in with necessary insights.

  Golden hands, made of an amalgam of plastic and metal, drew the child from its mother’s body; the eyes opened in the blood-streaked face. For one instant they stared into the monitor, seeming to look directly into Noura’s. Then the umbilicus was snipped and tied, and at the instant of severing the eyes went dull. The tiny lungs never fluttered. No blip on the monitors offered any hope.

  Noura pressed the SALVAGE key, her fingers going down too hard, too fast. One of the staff slid the gurney on which the sweating, exhausted mother lay into the tube leading to Post-Delivery, and the others closed in about the table on which the child had been placed.

  Noura touched another key, sending the Skull-System down from its position in the oval top of the cubicle. Golden figures moved, placing the infant beneath the cupped protrusion, which opened like a flower to reveal petals of keen metal. It moved down onto the small head, closing the features, still streaked with birth fluids, from Noura’s view. She winced, knowing that the blades were slicing away the soft skull like the peel of a fruit, exposing the mass of the brain to those ready to link the life-support systems.

  While the machine was cautiously severing the brain’s connections to the dead body of the infant, Noura’s fingers were racing, ordering up the components of the body for this newly salvaged child. By the time the leads and the tubes of nourishing fluids were in place, the tiny, shining body came sliding down the delivery tube into the hands of the attendants.

  Her part was done now. It would be some time before the child would be secured in his new environment, and Noura found that she could not sit there, watching, waiting, until that was completed. No, she would go and observe the School. It would make her, perhaps, feel a bit more cheerful.

  She rose, her old joints creaking and painful, and turned to the Slip, which carried those who lived in the Laboratory Complex wherever they wanted to go. All were almost as old as she, and they were grateful for that effortless manner of getting about.

  She touched a button on a map of the interior of the Lab, and the strip began to move, smoothly, slowly, along the dim hallways. She could remember when all this had been sparkling new, shiny-clean with steel and paint.

  She could recall when human children were born with the ability to breathe on their own, to live with pleasure and pain in the bodies they should have, instead of plasmoid and metal shells. The woman now recovering from childbirth was the last one of fertile years in all the small remaining enclave of their kind, and she was forty-three.

  The birth had been hard, and there would be no more pregnancies for Lisha. This was almost to be considered a wasted effort, except for the fact that there was one more human mind available to their dwindling complement.

  Noura came to a corner and touched another point on the map, riding the Slip smoothly around and down another angled branch. She wondered, for the thousandth time, what error her species had made, here in its third millennium of technology, that had doomed its children. Was it the artificial manipulation of viruses? Was it the experimental use of radiation to spur growth and intelligence?

  The Slip came to a halt beside a long rank of windows. Noura stepped off and moved to lean against the glass. No matter how alien the School might be, the sight of all those small bodies, playing, learning, creating, always made her feel less despairing.

  The human brain being conditioned over the generations to exist at each step in its development in a body of a certain size, the robot bodies into which the salvaged brains went were made in various dimensions, from infant to adult.

  The oldest Salvaged child was now twenty, and it was now a teacher of its younger kindred. Noura saw Estil bending over a youngster who was manipulating shapes and colors into intricate patterns, its gleaming metallic skull reflecting the clean pinkish light.

  Estil would have been a woman now. Instead, she was a sexless creature cased in a body without sensation. There had been a great deal of hesitation before the Elders had agreed to put Salvaged brains into mechanical bodies. Some feared the resulting intelligent and emotionless personality. Some felt that it was better for their species to die out entirely, instead of creating what might become a race of monstrous semi-robots.

  One of the smaller children glanced up and noticed her face at the window. The face, of course, was a smooth curve with only the eye-cells breaking its symmetry, so it could not smile, but one hand went up in a shy wave.

  Noura felt a surge of pain rise in her chest. She remembered the warm, heavy feel of a baby in her arms, the milky smell, the mutual comfort of physical contact with her own flesh and blood. Even diapers and spit-ups had been worth it, she now knew.

  The light in the Schoolroom turned blue. The dozen children, all sizes from toddler to teenager, stopped immediately, shutting off computers, closing down holo-generators, putting away tapes and viewers. Bodiless children had no feelings. They did not object to stopping their play or to going to bed, though once there they lay wakeful, needing no sleep.

  What did they think, in those long reaches of the night while their parents slept? Noura was grateful, sometimes, that she didn’t know.

  Now the line of parents, here to take away their young for the evening, was slipping smoothly into the hall beside her. She smiled at Lotta and Wim, who came to stand beside her at the window, watching their nine-year-old, identified by an orange dot on the upper front of the metal skull, pick its way out of the room.

  One of the toddlers tripped and fell, and Orange-dot bent and set it gently onto its feet. Noura recalled with sudden intensity a time, eighty years in the past, when she had tripped in the schoolroom and a larger boy had taken great delight in stepping onto her outflung hand. There had been no gentleness there.

  Had there ever been that sort of caring among her flesh-and-blood schoolmates? She tried to think, but her memories of childhood were a long, cold corridor of misery and competition.

  She and her peers had been taught to excel, and those teaching them had lost sight, she now knew, of the thing that made the species work best. Cooperation, tenderness, mutual understanding, and effort had not been a
part of the human condition for centuries before her birth.

  She had often watched the Schoolroom here in the Labs. She had never seen one of the children assault or tease another or otherwise disrupt the even tenor of life there.

  In their chilly, unfeeling bodies, did the human brains, nourished with uncontaminated and perfectly formulated nutrients, fed exactly the correct amount of oxygen, cleansed of waste with mechanical efficiency, still long for contact? For love?

  Noura shivered. The parents, holding small metal hands in their own, were leading their young away, sliding effortlessly along the corridor amid a light hum of conversation. The small one who had waved, a Blue-dot, passed her, and she heard the speaker that was its voice say, “Goodbye, Ma’am Noura.”

  “Goodbye,” she said, straining to recall the name. “Goodbye, Petro. Perhaps I shall see you tomorrow.” Then it was gone, and she knew that the time had come to return to her terrible task.

  In the main corridor again, she found herself moving along beside Andre, who once had been her mate. He was bent—more than she, she noted with satisfaction—and his wrinkled hands were spotted with brown. He glanced aside and his narrow mouth thinned in a smile.

  “The child—it is born?” he asked her, keeping his gaze away from her face. “It is…normal?”

  “Normal for the present,” she said. “They are making the transfer now. It should be finished by the time I return. Lisha is alive, though her vital signs were alarming during the delivery. But she will recover, though never again will I ask her to undergo this. And she—she was the last woman capable of conceiving.”

  Andre’s fingers clenched on his loose robe. He had paled, his face going gray. “No. There is no point in going on. Those back there in the Schoolroom will carry on, when their time comes.” She could see his pain in the set of his frail body.

  “How?” The question came almost as a cry. “For what? And how could they ever carry on the species, without bodies, without even hormones and ova?” She caught his robe as he prepared to step off at his own workspace.