Beneath Strange Stars: A Collection of Tales

by Ralph E. Vaughan

  “Let him go, child!” Josh grabbed her. “The Hounds will take him too. We’ll never see him or Jon Lazarus again. Rightly so!”

  Marcia wrenched out of her father’s grasp and shot across the fields. Josh Stephens started to run after her, to bring her back to the imagined safety of the house, but he stopped after a few steps. He watched the lights coming down, listened to the baying of the Hounds. He let his daughter vanish into the darkness.

  He returned to the house, bolted the door, and slapped his screaming wife silent. Their daughter was not worth angering the Great Old Ones. He shivered as he listened to the baying.

  Phil heard running feet behind him, a form crashing blindly through the woods, and he halted. Marcia stumbled into his arms.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to be with you. Had to.”

  “Then come on. Quietly.”

  Within moments the two lovers were at the edge of the woods, looking across the fields at Phil’s house.

  The purple and gold lights were very close now, close enough to see they were solid objects. They were circling the house, as if making sure that no one could leave the house without being seen. Except for the baying sound, the objects moved silently. They’re not Hounds at all, Phil thought.

  One of the objects separated from the other and settled on the front lawn of the house. In shape, the object was like a teardrop on edge, and when it landed, it touched down on three leglike projections. The objects seemed to be made of metal, but they glowed. A door slid open and the front of the house was lit by a brilliant blue light. Two man-shaped creatures mounted the steps to the house and knocked the front door clear off its hinges.

  “Whatever those things are,” Phil whispered, “they aren’t the Hounds of Tindalos. They’re people. Perhaps not quite like us, but people all the same.”

  “Quiet,” Marcia warned. “They’re coming out.”

  “Jon was right,” Phil murmured. “They are not gods. We’ve lived in fear and terror of lies all these years.”

  The beings came out of the house and reentered the object. The thing rose and joined the other two, still circling the house. Bright-red beams of light erupted from knobs on the undersides of the objects, lancing down toward the old house. It was as if the house had been struck simultaneously by many bolts of lightning. The beams played over the wooden surface of the house, causing fire and explosions to burst wherever they touched. A fierce firestorm swept through the house. The structure was gutted almost instantly. The objects circled the inferno for a few more moments, then they shot straight into the night sky in unison. They became as small as stars and vanished over the western horizon.

  “Do you think Jon Lazarus made it away before they came?” Marcia asked.

  “I don’t know. I hope he did,” Phil muttered numbly, his glazed eyes still trained on the burning house. “If he wasn’t there, they’ll be back for him. In any case, they’ll be back for me.”

  “Let’s go back to my house,” she suggested. “We’ll be safe if we hide there.”

  “I’d just be endangering your family,” he replied, shaking his head. “Anyway, your father probably already thinks we’re dead. If we went back, you know he’d turn us away.”

  “What will we do?”

  “There’s not a single place in Darby that will be safe for me once people learn of what happened here,” Phil pointed out. “I can’t stay in Darby.”

  “We can’t stay in Darby,” she corrected.

  “But…”

  “I love you,” she interrupted.

  He smiled. “I love you too.”

  “What are we going to do now?”

  “We can’t just start out with nothing,” he said. “Inside that house there is a journal and some maps that may help us. I saw Jon put them in a thick metal box. There’s a chance it survived. But I have to wait a while. Shouldn’t be too long I don’t think. There’s not much burning now.”

  “What do we do until then?”

  “Well, we’ll need food and clothing,” he said. “I want to stay here and keep an eye on things. Do you think you can get back into your house without being seen and get us some?”

  “I think so,” she replied. “My mother will help us.”

  “Good. I’ll wait here for you.”

  He hugged her and kissed her and she was gone, making her way through the woods back to her home, to the house that used to be her home. Phil settled down and watched.

  He did not have long to wait. If the fire had been a normal fire, it would have still been burning. But most of the burning had been done in an instant. Now the blackened structure was cooling.

  Cautiously he ventured from his hiding place and headed for the house. He carried a stout tree limb with him. He moved quickly once he was inside the ruins of the house. He could feel the heat rising up through his shoes and radiating at him from every side, and he knew he would not be able to stay in the house for long. The tears that sprang to his eyes were as much from the heat and smoke as from the sadness of seeing gutted memories.

  He passed through rooms which had once been secret and found the metal box next to what had been the desk. It was charred. He pushed it along with the tree branch until he was outside, under the uncaring stars. He brought up a bucket of water from the well and dashed it over the still-hot box. He repeated that action several times, until the box was cool enough to touch. He opened the box. Some of the papers had charred edges, but other than that they were undamaged, having been protected by the insulation of the box.

  Marcia joined him before too much longer. She had food for them and clothing taken secretly from the wardrobes of her father and brother. Her family had been huddled fearfully in the living room. All of them had been crying, all except her father who stared into space with stony eyes, seeing nothing. Only her mother had spied her, but she held her silence.

  Keeping to the woodline, Phil and Marcia made their way to the western boundary of the farm, the limit of Darby’s extension to the west. There they paused a moment.

  “You could still go back,” Phil said. “It’s not too late for you.”

  “Go back?” she said. “To what? You’re here.”

  He smiled and hugged her.

  They entered the forest, leaving Darby behind. A horned moon rose above the trees. Soon they came to the remains of an ancient paved road, overgrown on every side.

  Hand in hand, they walked along the edge of that westward-leading road. They did not look back.

  Samurais, robots, alternate timelines, and Jerusalem—some of my favorite things come together in this story, which was published in the program book of a Midwestern science fiction convention. It’s, of course, a segment from the novel-length saga of Mitsuko’s flight from Nippon which also stands on its own as an alternate history story, one of the reasons I was surprised it found a home in what was essentially a one-shot publication. I think every author has novels which exist as fragments, vignettes and self-contained stories, but which, for one reason or another, have not come together into a publishable whole. But, as every writer knows, let things percolate in your brain long enough, and everything eventually comes together. Assuming, of course, the idea does not outlive the brain. Maybe one day Mitsuko and Kira will discuss it with Edwin Drood. And, yes, in case you are wondering, when I used the term ‘battle-rob’ I did have Magnus on my mind.

  Petals in the Wind

  A Tale of Mitsuko of Nippon

  The samurais rode hard across the desert wasteland west of the Dead Sea. The flying sand deepened the already-deep lines of their faces. The banner of their master fluttered. Their horses foamed and lathered but the thirteen warriors did not slacken their pace. The charts purchased in Baghdad, showed the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem just beyond the next rise or valley, or maybe the one after. There they would secure the head of the woman Mitsuko for Lord Zampachi Kunaishoyo and begin the long journey home.

  Just three days previously, Komurasaki, leader
of the warriors, had received information from a caravaneer that Mitsuko and her companions, the traitor Ikeda Yoshsaki and an antique battle-robot that had joined their party, had been seen traveling this way.

  At the summit of the next grey hillock, Komurasaki called the riders to a halt, reached into his saddlebags and brought out a pair of binoculars. He scanned the horizon, then allowed himself a grim smile. He replaced the opticals and turned in his saddle.

  “Jerusalem’s ahead,” he told his men. Like him, they were weary unto death, sweating under quilted armor, but none voiced a complaint, “If she’s there, we’ll take her.”

  Kusano, second in command, shielded his eyes and squinted at the great cit that was no more than a smear against the horizon. “It will be after nightfall when we arrive,” Kusano observed.

  Komurasaki nodded and stabbed the sides of his animal with his heels. The company flew toward the alien city like demons, or men pursued by demons. By the calendar observed in the Christian kingdoms before them, it was the Twenty-first day of November, Anno Domini One Thousand Nine Hundred Sixty-Three.

  Lady Mitsuko paused across the square from the Shrine of the Flagellates. Ikeda and the bronze battle-rob Dax also paused, scanning the crowd. At the shrine, the faithful beat themselves cruelly with whips and chains and wailed like hell-bound souls.

  Dax’s gleaming head swiveled atop his reticulated neck and his visual receptors glowed ruddy, “Why?”

  Lady Mitsuko shook her head in confusion. She wanted to turn away from the sight, knew they had better be on their way, but she could not shift her gaze.

  “This is where Joshua, son of the Christian god, accepted the Cross of Humanity,” Ikeda explained, his voice low. “They punish themselves for his murder almost two thousand years past.”

  “Joshua…Jesus called the Christ,” Dax said in his clipped tone. “It is for his blood that soldiers shed theirs. I understand.”

  Mitsuko understood little of these western peoples and nothing of their religious impulses. She had seen little during her flight to dissuade her from the truth of the prevailing opinion in Nippon, that all westerners were barbarians, was false.

  The wails echoed in her ears. Some people circled the shrine, others walked before the entrance or stood in place. A few crawled upon bloody knees. Clothing hung in tatters, some were naked. Ashes and sackcloth. Chains rattled. Whips snapped. Flesh was removed by layers and the blood flew, staining the cobbled pavement like scattered red flowers.

  “Let us be away from this place,” Mitsuko said finally, averting her gaze. “This is not good.”

  “Yes,” Ikeda agreed, misunderstanding her “This place is too open. Far too many eyes and tongues.”

  Lady Mitsuko drew her hood forward and clutched her cloak with a pale hand. She continued on her way. The elderly scholar and the robot stayed close.

  Jerusalem thronged with the rabble of myriad lands.

  There were, of course, pilgrims from all parts of the Christian world, as well as Mussulmans and Jews in their own quarters by leave of King John XIX. In the lanes and back alleys of David’s City there lurked travelers and merchants, thieves, poets, murderers, jugglers, harlots, prophets, beggars, cripples, lunatics, demi-gods, soldiers, priests, magicians, and people who were strange in many ways. Even so, Lady Mitsuko and her companions stood out, memorable to public informers whose tongues could be loosened for only a few coppers.

  They found lodging at the Inn of Three Cups, where no questions were asked and people were accustomed to fleeting memories. They passed through the vined doorway of the inn. A beggar on the street, a young man with a scar down his right cheek like a ragged lightning bolt, squatted behind a cracked alms bowl. He suddenly picked up his bowl and walked around the corner into a narrow alley. He walked toward a stone wall and vanished.

  The three travelers procured rooms on the fourth floor of the dilapidated structure. They rested and counted coins between them, all that remained of the travel-worn ponies on which they had journeyed for so long. The ponies were by now meat before some nobleman’s hunting dog. On the morrow, they would travel by rail to Jaffa, where they would book passage on a galley or steamer bound for some safe port like Rome or London, or even the Western Lands where the Catholic King now ruled with a tolerant hand.

  The other inhabitants of the Inn of Three Cups were merchants and mendicants, pilgrims and knights on lost causes, those looking for new lives or a place to die. In such a maelstrom of humanity, two foreigners and even the battle-rob were beneath notice.

  Twilight settled over Jerusalem, Ikeda sat cross-legged on the floor, tossing little pieces of carved bones across the rough wood. Dax sat near the window, gleaming in the sunset rays, a sculpture of burnished brass.

  Lady Mitsuko asked: “What do the gods say of our future?”

  Ikeda paused in mid-cast. “As always, the gods laugh.” He finished the cast and studied the positions and attitudes of the carved shapes. “A period of decision, when the paths of what could be and what will be are not so resolutely fashioned by what has been.”

  “Are we yet followed?”

  Ikeda looked up. “Don’t need the oracle bones to answer that question, and you do not need to ask.”

  Mitsuko nodded. “Lord Zempachi will not let his son’s death go unavenged, no matter he was the author of its circumstances. His warriors yet ride.”

  Ikeda gathered the bones, carefully replaced them in their silk pouch, and felt his stomach rumble. “I’m hungry,” he announced. “I am going downstairs from something to eat and drink. Mitsuko?”

  She hesitated, glanced through the window, then back at the old man getting to his feet. “What of the danger?”

  Ikeda shrugged. “Danger remains part of our lives whether we huddle here or move among others. Besides, I am sure we attracted notice.” He cast a wan smile toward Dax. “Despite our best efforts.”

  “Very well,” Mitsuko sighed. “I’ll accompany you downstairs, but you will not find me much of a dinner companion.” She glanced at the robot. “Will you be all right here, Dax?”

  “I must perform maintenance,” the robot replied. “It has been a hard journey and this is the first opportunity I have had to rest.” He opened a section of his torso and removed a set of instruments, still gleaming despite their age. “A good soldier cares for his body, just as he does for his weapons. Replacement parts are hard to come by for both.”

  Mitsuko and Ikeda left the battle-rob alone. On the landing, as Mitsuko’s small hand closed upon the railing of the stairway, she paused and looked back at the closed door, then at her companion. The only light was that which drifted up the stairwell from gaslamps in the common room. Ikeda was all but lost in shadow.

  “He is sad and lonely,” Mitsuko said.

  Ikeda opened his mouth, then closed it without saying anything. Dax was naught but a simulation of a man, though even Ikeda could not deny there might be more.

  “Yes, I know he is supposedly immune from the emotions that destroy our hearts,” Mitsuko continued. “Yet I think a heart of metal and fire may be no less wracked than our own.”

  “A machine yearning for the glorious death denied at the end of the Great Conflagration,” Ikeda mused. “Programmed to kill or be killed in service to the Empire of Gaul. But the war ended and he lived, his final program unfulfilled. The ignoble end of Napoleon’ dream has undone him. He wanders, seeking a suitable death, but finds none. Sand and lonely? Yes, perhaps so.”

  Mitsuko descended the shadow-infested stairs. “Two hundred years,” she whispered.

  And in those two hundred years the world had changed. A series of wars in Europe had engulfed the world, had even touched Nippon with tongues of fire, causing monstrous births among the Ainu, the Eta, and even the pure-blooded. Despite the passage of time, poison still ran trough the land. Just the previous year a baby born of man and woman howled like a wolf in the streets of Edo till stoned by frightened peasants. But, Mitsuko thought with a shudder, the most mon
strous beings with those who were outwardly men and inwardly beasts, such as the murdered son of Lord Zempachi. His blood was pale, and when she cut him as he attacked it was as if she were showered with chrysanthemums.

  Ikeda caught he slender arm as she started to fall. “Are you ill, Mitsuko-san?”

  “No,” she replied. “Weariness grips me.” She gazed at the grim face of her mentor, knowing he saw through the veils of her lies, but refusing to withdraw her words. “All I need is a cup of wine.”

  They continued to the common room, taking a dim-lit table far from the bar and the customers clustered around it. A man with one eye and nothing covering the socket, wearing rough clothing and a greasy apron, placed a clay plate bearing brown bread, too-ripe fruit, and goat’s cheese on the table. He turned without taking an order, returning moments later with bitter ale in pewter mugs.

  Scowling at the man’s impudence, but not wanting to cause any trouble, Ikeda gave the man four coppers, and not a copper more. Their host returned the scowl, but shambled off with the coins.

  “It is what it is,” Ikeda said. “A hungry men cannot complain.”

  The din of conversation was overpowering in its persistence, in the way the words filled the space. Dozens of languages and dialects were mixed with inarticulate grunts and growls. Now and then voices shrilled above the tide of noise, either exhorting the repentance of sins or offering them for purchase. But for every person who spoke there were several who held silence, staring blanking into cups of ale, into the flames of the hearth, or into nothingness.

  The door of the inn opened. In from the blackness came a young man wearing the leather clothing of a traveler. Over his shoulders her wore a drown cloak adequate for nights that were not too cold. His handsomeness was marred by a scar across his right cheek, a scar whitened by age and appearing as a bolt of lightning. He took a table on the other side of the room from Mitsuko and Ikeda and watched them discreetly over his mug of ale.

  The battle-rob sat in the darkening room and gazed over the ancient city he had visited once before, when he saved the life of a Knight Templar. Stars scarred the velvet sky and meteors flew across the blackness, some natural, others decaying satellites placed into orbit before the wars.