The Year's Best Science Fiction 11 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  The long silence closed over them again. Semary’s smell was sweet.

  Dyak lay and looked up at the trees. He saw a cicada on a branch nearby, a gigantic beast that almost bent double the bough it rested on, its body at least as long as a man’s arm. They made good food, but he was full of a hunger beyond hunger just now. The sound and feel of his world cradled him and ran through him.

  Unexpectedly, she said, her voice warm in his ear, “Two people have become worn out today, in different ways. Utliff was one, Artet the other. Artet is a girl of my group. The cruncher got her. You know we are near the lair of the cruncher. He dragged Artet there, but her blood was already let.”

  “Did you forget to tell me before now?”

  “I was coming to tell you when the foul thing overcame Utliff. Then your warmth near me made me forget.”

  Sulkily, Dyak said, “The cruncher got across the river where the waters run shallow. It used to eat the quackers, for I watched it often from our hill. Now that it has come across to this side, it is too stupid to go back. Soon it will starve to death. Then we shall all be safe.”

  “It will not starve until it has eaten all of us. We cannot be safe with it, Dyak. You must let its blood and wear it out.”

  He sat up, and then crouched beside her, angry. “Get your men to do the work. Why me? Our group is safe up on the hill in our deep caves. The cruncher is no bother to me. Why do you say this to me, Semary?”

  She too sat up and stared at him. She brushed a remaining leaf from her breast. “I want you to do the thing because I want most to lie by you. I will always lie by you and not by our stinking men, if you shed the blood of the cruncher. If you will not do this for me, I swear I will go with the other stinking men and lie by them.”

  He grasped her wrist roughly. “You shall be with no men but me, Semary! You think I am afraid to let the blood of the cruncher? Of course I am not!”

  Semary smiled at him, as if she enjoyed his roughness.

  * * * *

  II

  Dr. Ian Swanwick was growing increasingly bored, and growing increasingly less reluctant to show it. Several times, he lifted his face from his scanner and looked at the gray head of Graham Scarfe, with its ears and face enveloped in the next scanner. He coughed once or twice, with increasing emphasis, until Scarfe looked up.

  “Oh, Dr. Swanwick. I forgot—you have a jet to catch back to Washington. Forgive me! Once I look into the scanner, I become so engrossed in their problems.”

  “I’m sure it must be engrossing if you can understand their language,” Swanwick said.

  “Oh, it’s an easy language to understand. Simple. Few words, you know. Few tenses, few conjugations. Not that I’m any sort of a language specialist. We have several of them dropping in on us, including the great Professor Reardon, the etymologist. . . . I’m just—well, I’m just a model maker at heart. Not a professional man at all. I started as a child of eight, making a model of the old American Acheson, Topeka and Santa Fe steam railway, as it would have been in the early years of last century.”

  Chiefly because he was none too anxious to hear about that, Dr. Swanwick said, “Well, you have done a remarkable job on this tridiorama.”

  Nodding, Scarfe took the theologian’s arm and led him away from the bank of scanners with their hand controls to the rail that fringed the platform on which they stood. They were high here, so high that the distant spires of New Brasilia could be seen framed between two mountain ranges. In the other direction stretched the South American continent, leaden with a heat that the air-conditioning did not entirely keep from their tower,

  “If I have done a remarkable job,” Scarfe said, gazing over the rail, “I copied it from a more remarkable one. From Nature itself.”

  Scarfe’s gentle old voice, and his woolly gesture as he pointed out at the landscape before them, contrasted with the urban manner and clothes and the brisk voice of Dr. Swanwick. But Swanwick was silent for a moment as he stared over the country through which a river wound. That river flowed from distant mountains now shrouded in heat and curved below the hill on which they stood. Over on the opposite bank lay a region of swamp.

  “You’ve made a good copy,” he said. “The tridiorama is amazingly like the real thing.”

  “I thought you would approve, Dr. Swanwick. You especially,” Scarfe said with an affectionate chuckle.

  “Oh? Why’s that?”

  “Come now, the Maker’s handiwork, you know ... As a theologian, I thought that angle would especially appeal to you. Mine’s a poor copy compared with His, I know.” He chuckled again, a little confused that he was not winning a responding chuckle from Swanwick.

  “Theology does not necessarily imply a sentimental fondness for the Almighty. Laymen never understand that theology is simply a science that treats of the phenomena and facts of religion. As I say, I admire the skill of your modeling, and the way you have copied a real landscape; but that is not to say that I approve of it.”

  Nodding his head in an old man’s fashion, Scarfe appeared to listen to the cicadas for a minute.

  Then he said, “When I said I thought you would approve, perhaps you got me wrong. What I meant was that the tridiorama could present you people at the St. Benedict’s Theological College with a chance to study a controlled experiment in your own line, as it has done to anthropologists and paleontologists and zoologists and pre-historians and I don’t know who else. I mean . . .” He was a simple man, and confused by the superiority of this man who, as he began to perceive, did not greatly like him. In consequence he slipped into a more lax way of talk. “What I mean is, that the goings-on down in the tri-di are surely something to do with you people, aren’t they?”

  “Sorry, I don’t get your meaning, Mr. Scarfe.”

  “Like we said in the letter to you, inviting you here. These stone-age people we’ve got—don’t you want to see how they get along with religion? I admit that as yet they don’t appear to have formed any—not even myths—but that in itself may be significant.”

  Turning his back on the hills, Swanwick said, “Since your little people are synthetic, their feelings are not of interest to St. Benedict’s. We study the relationship between God and man, not between men and models. That, I’m afraid, will probably be our ultimate verdict, when I give my report to the board. We may even add a rider to the effect that the experiment is unethical.”

  Stung by this, Scarfe said, “We have plenty of other backers, you know, if you feel like that. People come here from all over the world. We’ve been able to synthesize life for twenty-odd years, but this is the first time the methods have been applied to this sort of environment. I’m surprised you take the attitude you do. In these enlightened days, you know. I suppose you understand how we create those Magdalenian men and women, and the iguanodons and little compsognathi and the allosaurs?”

  As he began to answer, Swanwick started to pace toward the line of elevators, one of which had carried them up to the observation platform. Scarfe was forced to follow.

  “After the Russo-American gamete-separation experiments in the 2070’s,” Swanwick said remotely, “it was only a short while before individual chromosomes and then individual genes and then the import of the lineal order of the genes were tagged and understood. Successful synthetic life was created a couple of decades earlier. It was possible to use these crude ‘synthlifes’ to extract the desired genetic information. It then became possible to apply this information and form ‘synthlifes’ of any required combination of genes. You see, I have read the literature.”

  “That I never doubted,” Scarfe said humbly. As they stepped into the elevator, he added, “But it was Elroy’s discovery that geneanalyses of defunct species could be made from their bones—even fossil bones—that set the tridiorama project into action. It was the gene formula of an iguanodon he got first. Within a year, he was selling real live iguanodons to the world’s zoos. Do you find that unethical, Dr. Swanwick? I suppose you do.”

  “
No, I don’t. It was only when Elroy brought back ancient men and women by the same method that the religious bodies became interested in the question.”

  They had now traveled down the outside of the chamber that housed the tridiorama. When the elevator gates opened, they stepped out, both aware and glad in their different ways that they were about to part for good.

  They had started unhappily, with Swanwick teetotal, and none too good a lunch served in the canteen in his honor, and an antipathy between them that neither had quite the will to overcome.

  Standing, anxious to make a final pleasantry, Scarfe said, “Well, if an offense was committed, at least we lessened it here by insisting on a smaller scale. It solves so many problems, you know!”

  He chuckled again, the winning chuckle to which he knew few men failed to respond. He had learned his chuckle by heart. It was rich and fairly deep, intended to express appreciation of his own oddity as well as the wonder of the world. It never failed to disarm, but the theologian was not disarmed.

  “You see what I mean—size is controlled by genes like every other physical factor,” Scarfe said, his sallow cheeks coloring slightly. “So we cut our specimens down to size. It solves a lot of problems and keeps things simple.”

  “I wonder if the Magdalenian men see it quite like that?” Swanwick said. He put out a cold hand and thanked Scarfe for his hospitality. He turned and walked briskly out of the door toward the wingport where the St. Benedict trimjet lay awaiting him. With a puzzled expression on his face, Graham Scarfe stood watching him. A cold, unlovable man, he thought.

  Tropez, his Chief Assistant, came up, and scanned his chief sympathetically.

  “Dr. Swanwick was a tough nut,” he said.

  Shaking his head, Scarfe came slowly out of his trance. “We must not speak ill of a man of God, Tropez,” he said. “And I can see that we have yet to master some little details that may upset purists like Dr. Swanwick.”

  “You know we add something new every year, sir,” Tropez said. “You can’t do more than you are doing. I’ve got the attendance figures for the Open Gallery for last month and they’re up twelve point three per cent on the previous month. Though I still think we were perhaps mistaken to put in normal-size cicadas. It does spoil the illusion for some people.”

  “We may have to think again about the cicadas,” Scarfe said vaguely.

  “I’m sure whatever you choose will be best,” Tropez said. Saying things like that, he imagined, kept him his job.

  Scarfe was not listening.

  They had come to the door of the Open Gallery and pushed in. The Gallery was packed with paying customers to the tridiorama, staring from their darkness through the polaroid glass at the brightly lit scene within. Though they had a more restricted view than the specialists who, for higher prices, looked down through adjustable lenses from the observation platform above, there was a certain unique fascination at viewing that mocked-up world from ground level.

  “We’ve got too few species in there for it to be a credible reproduction of a past earth,” Scarfe complained. “Only five species—the Magdalenians, the three sorts of dinosaur, the iguanodons, the compsognathi, and the allosaurs—and the mice. I don’t count those cicadas.”

  “Elroy Laboratories charge too much for their synthlifes,” Tropez said. “We are building up as fast as we can. Besides, the Magdalenian people are the real attraction— that’s what the crowds come to see. We’ve got ten of them now; they cost money.”

  “Eight,” Scarfe said firmly. “Two went today. One got eaten by the allosaur, the other disintegrated. You should keep in touch, Tropez. You spend too much time in the box office.”

  Having thus squashed his assistant, he nodded, turned and went slowly back to the elevator.

  It was the disintegration of the little figures that worried him; he could not resist a suspicion that Elroy Laboratories limited their life span deliberately to improve their turnover. Of course, the method had to be perfected as yet. The synthlifes were created full-grown and unable to age; they simply wore out suddenly, and fell into their original salts. That would no doubt be improved with time. But the Elroy people were not very cooperative about the matter, and slow to answer the letters he flashed them.

  The Elroy monopoly would have to be broken before real progress was made.

  Still shaking his gray head, Scarfe rode the elevator back to the peace of the observation platform. He liked to watch the scientific men at work over the scanners, taking notes or recording. They treated him with respect. All the same, life was complex, full of all sorts of knotty, nasty little problems that could never be discussed . . . like how one should really handle a man like Swanwick, the prickly idiot.

  Scarfe reflected, as he had so often done in the past, how much more simple it would be to be one of the synthetic Magdalenians imprisoned in the tridiorama. Why, they hadn’t even got any sex problems! Not that he had, he hurried to reassure himself, at his age. But there had been a time . . .

  Whereas the Magdalenians—

  With the complex modern processes, it was possible to create life, but not life that could perpetuate itself. One day, maybe. But not yet. So down in the chamber the little Magdalenians could never know anything about reproduction, would never have to worry at all about sex.

  “I suppose we’ve really created something like the garden of Eden here,” Scarfe muttered to himself, peering into the nearest vacant scanner. In his crafty old mind, he began to devise a new and more alluring advertisement for his establishment, one that would not offend his scientific customers, but would rope in the sensation-loving public. “Lost Tribes in the Pocket-Size Garden of Eden . . . They’re All Together in the Altogether . . .”

  He adjusted the binocular vision, checking to see where the little girl was that he particularly fancied. Watching her through the lenses, picking up her tiny voice in the headphones, you would almost imagine . . .

  * * * *

  III

  The artificial sun was sinking over the tridiorama world.

  Dyak and Semary had eaten. They had come across one of the giant cicadas lumbering along the ground, and Dyak had cut its head off. When they had eaten enough, they jumped in the river to remove the stickiness from their bodies. Now they were on the move again, more quietly, for they were near the lair of the big cruncher.

  In the distance ahead of them, Dyak saw the barrier. That was the end of the world; tomorrow, the sun would rise from it. Now that the light was less intense, he could almost imagine that he saw giant human-like faces through the barrier.

  He scoffed at the silly things that his head let happen inside it.

  Their path was less easy now, and huge boulders towered above them, twice or three times their height. The fleet cruncher could easily pounce on them in such a situation. Dyak halted and took Semary’s hand.

  “Semary, you must wait here. I will go on. I will find the big cruncher and kill him with my knife. Then I will return to you.”

  “I am frightened, Dyak!”

  “Don’t be frightened. Hug yourself to keep happy. If the thing runs away in your direction, I will call, and you must crawl into the cleft between these two rocks where he cannot get you.”

  “I am frightened more for you than for me.”

  He laughed. “When I come back, I will take hold of you and . . . and I will hug you very closely.” He did it to her then in parting, clutching her naked body against his and feeling the warm missing thing that was at once there and lacking. Then he turned lightly and ran in among the big boulders.

  It took him only a few minutes to locate the dinosaur. Dyak knew the ways of the animals in his world. They were always restless at sunrise and in the evening.

  He heard the creature moving in the bush. When he caught a glimpse of its greenish hide, he climbed, toe and finger, up one of the large boulders, and peered over the top at it.

  The cruncher lay on an exposed slab of rock, moving its tail slowly back and forth. To Dyak, it
seemed a vast beast, three times his length. Its head was large and cruel, built chiefly to accommodate its massive jaws. Its body, pressed now against the rock, was a beautiful functional shape. It had two pairs of legs, the great back legs on which it ran at speed, and the forelegs, which functioned as a pair of arms and ended in powerful talons. It was a formidable creature enough, even when its jaws were closed and you could not see its teeth!

  At present, the cruncher was not easy. It lay on one flank, its great legs hunched awkwardly, its yellow belly partly exposed to the rays of the sun. After a moment, it exposed its rump to the sun. Then it shuffled again and again lay supine. Its jaw opened and it began to pant, exposing its great fangs. Still uncomfortable, it finally moved into the shade and lay there absolutely still, only a pulse throbbing like an unswallowed boulder in its throat.

  Dyak knew it would not lie still for long. The creature was basking.