“To provide the next generation of host animals,” he
said, switching from contempt to bitterness.
“It’s more than that!” I countered. Was it?
“If it were going to happen to me, I’d want to believe it
was more, too.”
“It is more!” I felt like a kid. Stupid argument.
“Did you think so while T’Gatoi was picking worms
out of that guy’s guts?”
“It’s not supposed to happen that way.”
“Sure it is. You weren’t supposed to see it, that’s all.
And his Tlic was supposed to do it. She could sting him
unconscious and the operation wouldn’t have been as
painful. But she’d still open him, pick out the grubs, and
if she missed even one, it would poison him and eat him
from the inside out.”
There was actually a time when my mother told me to
show respect for Qui because he was my older brother. I
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walked away, hating him. In his way, he was gloating. He
was safe and I wasn’t. I could have hit him, but I didn’t
think I would be able to stand it when he refused to hit
back, when he looked at me with contempt and pity.
He wouldn’t let me get away. Longer-legged, he swung
ahead of me and made me feel as though I were following
him.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I strode on, sick and furious.
“Look, it probably won’t be that bad with you.
T’Gatoi likes you. She’ll be careful.”
I turned back toward the house, almost running from
him.
“Has she done it to you yet?” he asked, keeping up
easily. “I mean, you’re about the right age for implantation. Has she— ”
I hit him. I didn’t know I was going to do it, but I think
I meant to kill him. If he hadn’t been bigger and
stronger, I think I would have.
He tried to hold me off, but in the end, had to defend
himself. He only hit me a couple of times. That was
plenty. I don’t remember going down, but when I came
to, he was gone. It was worth the pain to be rid of him.
I got up and walked slowly toward the house. The back
was dark. No one was in the kitchen. My mother and
sisters were sleeping in their bedrooms—or pretending
to.
Once I was in the kitchen, I could hear voices—Tlic
and Terran from the next room. I couldn’t make out
what they were saying—didn’t want to make it out.
I sat down at my mother’s table, waiting for quiet. The
table was smooth and worn, heavy and well-crafted. My
father had made it for her just before he died. I remembered hanging around underfoot when he built it. He didn’t mind. Now I sat leaning on it, missing him. I
could have talked to him. He had done it three times in
his long life. Three clutches of eggs, three times being
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opened and sewed up. How had he done it? How did
anyone do it?
I got up, took the rifle from its hiding place, and sat
down again with it. It needed cleaning, oiling.
All I did was load it.
“Gan?”
She made a lot of little clicking sounds when she
walked on bare floor, each limb clicking in succession as
it touched down. Waves of little clicks.
She came to the table, raised the front half of her body
above it, and surged onto it. Sometimes she moved so
smoothly she seemed to flow like water itself. She coiled
herself into a small hill in the middle of the table and
looked at me.
“That was bad,” she said softly. “You should not have
seen it. It need not be that way.”
“I know.”
“T’Khotgif— Ch’Khotgif now— she will die of her
disease. She will not live to raise her children. But her
sister will provide for them, and for Bram Lomas.”
Sterile sister. One fertile female in every lot. One to keep
the family going. That sister owed Lomas more than she
could ever repay.
“He’ll live then?”
“Yes.”
“I wonder if he would do it again.”
“No one would ask him to do that again.”
I looked into the yellow eyes, wondering how much I
saw and understood there, and how much I only imagined. “No one ever asks us,” I said. “You never asked me.
She moved her head slightly. “What’s the matter with
your face?”
“Nothing. Nothing important.” Human eyes probably
wouldn’t have noticed the swelling in the darkness. The
only light was from one of the moons, shining through a
window across the room.
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“Did you use the rifle to shoot the achti?”
“Yes.”
“And do you mean to use it to shoot me?”
I stared at her, outlined in moonlight— coiled, graceful body. “What does Terran blood taste like to you?”
She said nothing.
“What are you?” I whispered. “What are we to you?”
She lay still, rested her head on her topmost coil. “You
know me as no other does,” she said softly. “You must
decide.”
“That’s what happened to my face,” I told her.
“What?”
“Qui goaded me into deciding to do something. It
didn’t turn out very well.” I moved the gun slightly,
brought the barrel up diagonally under my own chin. “At
least it was a decision I made.”
“As this will be.”
“Ask me, Gatoi.”
“For my children’s lives?”
She would say something like that. She knew how
to manipulate people, Terran and Tlic. But not this
time.
“ I don’t want to be a host animal,” I said. “Not even
yours.”
It took her a long time to answer. “We use almost no
host animals these days,” she said. “You know that.”
“You use us.”
“We do. We wait long years for you and teach you and
join our families to yours.” She moved restlessly. “You
know you aren’t animals to us.”
I stared at her, saying nothing.
“The animals we once used began killing most of our
eggs after implantation long before your ancestors arrived,” she said softly. “You know these things, Gan.
Because your people arrived, we are relearning what it
means to be a healthy, thriving people. And your ancestors, fleeing from their homeworld, from their own kind
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who would have killed or enslaved them— they survived
because of us. We saw them as people and gave them the
Preserve when they still tried to kill us as worms.”
At the word “worms” I jumped. I couldn’t help it, and
she couldn’t help noticing it.
“I see,” she said quietly. “Would you really rather die
than bear my young, Gan?”
I didn’t answer.
“Shall I go to Xuan Hoa?”
“Yes!” Hoa wanted it. Let her have it. She hadn’t had
to watch Lomas. She’d be proud . . . Not terrified.
T’Gatoi flowed off the tab
le onto the floor, startling me
almost too much.
“I’ll sleep in Hoa’s room tonight,” she said. “And
sometime tonight or in the morning, I’ll tell her.”
This was going too fast. My sister. Hoa had had almost
as much to do with raising me as my mother. I was still
close to her— not like Qui. She could want T’Gatoi and
still love me.
“Wait! Gatoi!”
She looked back, then raised nearly half her length off
the floor and turned it to face me. “These are adult
things, Gan. This is my life, my family!”
“But she’s . . . my sister.”
“I have done what you demanded. I have asked you!”
“But— ”
“It will be easier for Hoa. She has always expected to
carry other lives inside her.”
Human lives. Human young who would someday
drink at her breasts, not at her veins.
I shook my head. “Don’t do it to her, Gatoi.” I was not
Qui. It seemed I could become him, though, with no
effort at all. I could make Xuan Hoa my shield. Would it
be easier to know that red worms were growing in her
flesh instead of mine?
“Don’t do it to Hoa,” I repeated.
She stared at me, utterly still.
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I looked away, then back at her. “Do it to me.”
I lowered the gun from my throat and she leaned
forward to take it.
“No,” I told her.
“It’s the law,” she said.
- “Leave it for the family. One of them might use it to
save my life someday.”
She grasped the rifle barrel, but I wouldn’t let go. I was
pulled into a standing position over her.
“Leave it here!” I repeated. “If we’re not your animals,
if these are adult things, accept the risk. There is risk,
Gatoi, in dealing with a partner.”
It was clearly hard for her to let go of the rifle. A
shudder went through her and she made a hissing sound
of distress. It occurred to me that she was afraid. She was
old enough to have seen what guns could do to people.
Now her young and this gun would be together in the
same house. She did not know about our other guns. In
this dispute, they did not matter.
“ I will implant the first egg tonight,” she said as I put
the gun away. “Do you hear, Gan?”
Why else had I been given a whole egg to eat while the
rest of the family was left to share one? Why else had my
mother kept looking at me as though I were going away
from her, going where she could not follow? Did T’Gatoi
imagine I hadn’t known?
“ I hear.”
“Now!” I let her push me out of the kitchen, then
walked ahead of her toward my bedroom. The sudden
urgency in her voice sounded real. “You would have
done it to Hoa tonight!” I accused.
“ I must do it to someone tonight.”
I stopped in spite of her urgency and stood in her way.
“Don’t you care who?”
She flowed around me and into my bedroom. I found
her waiting on the couch we shared. There was nothing
in Hoa’s room that she could have used. She would have
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done it to Hoa on the floor. The thought of her doing it to
Hoa at all disturbed me in a different way now, and I was
suddenly angry.
Yet I undressed and lay down beside her. I knew what
to do, what to expect. I had been told all my life. I felt the
familiar sting, narcotic, mildly pleasant. Then the blind
probing of her ovipositor. The puncture was painless,
easy. So easy going in. She undulated slowly against me,
her muscles forcing the egg from her body into mine. I
held on to a pair of her limbs until I remembered Lomas
holding her that way. Then I let go, moved inadvertently,
and hurt her. She gave a low cry of pain and I expected to
be caged at once within her limbs. When I wasn’t, I held
on to her again, feeling oddly ashamed.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
She rubbed my shoulders with four of her limbs.
“Do you care?” I asked. “Do you care that it’s me?”
She did not answer for some time. Finally, “You were
the one making choices tonight, Gan. I made mine long
ago.
“Would you have gone to Hoa?”
“Yes. How could I put my children into the care of one
who hates them?”
“It wasn’t . . . hate.”
“I know what it was.”
“I was afraid.”
Silence.
“I still am.” I could admit it to her here, now.
“But you came to me . . . to save Hoa.”
“Yes.” I leaned my forehead against her. She was cool
velvet, deceptively soft. “And to keep you for myself,” I
said. It was so. I didn’t understand it, but it was so.
She made a soft hum of contentment. “I couldn’t
believe I had made such a mistake with you,” she said.
“I’ll chose you. I believed you had grown to choose
me.”
“I had, b u t . . . ”
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“Lomas.”
“Yes.”
“I have never known a Terran to see a birth and take it
well. Qui has seen one, hasn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Terrans should be protected from seeing.”
I didn’t like the sound of that— and I doubted that it
was possible. “Not protected,” I said. “Shown. Shown
when we’re young kids, and shown more than once.
Gatoi, no Terran ever sees a birth that goes right. All we
see is N’Tlic— pain and terror and maybe death.”
She looked down at me. “It is a private thing. It has
always been a private thing.”
Her tone kept me from insisting— that and the knowledge that if she changed her mind, I might be the first public example. But I had planted the thought in her
mind. Chances were it would grow, and eventually she
would experiment.
“You won’t see it again,” she said. “I don’t want you
thinking any more about shooting me.”
The small amount of fluid that came into me with her
egg relaxed me as completely as a sterile egg would have,
so that I could remember the rifle in my hands and my
feelings of fear and revulsion, anger and despair. I could
remember the feelings without reviving them. I could
talk about them.
“I wouldn’t have shot you,” I said. “Not you.” She had
been taken from my father’s flesh when he was my age.
“You could have,” she insisted.
“Not you.” She stood between us and her own people,
protecting, interweaving.
“Would you have destroyed yourself?”
I moved carefully, uncomfortably. “I could have done
that. I nearly did. That’s Qui’s ‘away.’ I wonder if he
knows.”
“What?”
I did not answer.
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“You will live now.”
“Yes.” Take care o f h
er, my mother used to say. Yes.
“I’m healthy and young,” she said. “ I won’t leave
you as Lomas was left— alone, N’Tlic. I’ll take care of
you.”
Richard Matheson (b. 1926)
D uel
Richard Matheson won instant notoriety in 1950 with his
first short story, "Born of Man and W om an,” published in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. There
followed a number of clean, sharp stories of dark fantasy
and horrific science fiction, enough to fill several collections
in the fifties alone. His first novel, I Am Legend (1954), the
classic science fiction vampire story, and his second, The
Shrinking Man (1956), basis for the popular fifties’ film,
established him as the premier science fiction horror writer
o f the decade. He w ent on to a career'in Hollywood and is
recognized as scriptwriter of stories for “The Twilight
Zone" and many television movies. His contemporary
classic horror novel, Hell House (1971), was successfully
filmed. Bid Time Return (1975) won the World Fantasy
Award for best novel. “ Duel” was the basis of a notable
1971 television movie directed by Steven Spielberg, for
which Matheson wrote the teleplay. He is one of the finest
living writers of horror. Without a hint of science fiction or
an overt whiff of the supernatural, “ Duel" manages to
invoke both the science fiction tradition of the menace of
the intelligent machine and the monster tradition of the
horror genre. It is a psychological monster story, subtly
shocking, compelling, fantastic.
Duel
199
A t 11:32 am, Mann passed the truck.
He was heading west, en route to San Francisco. It
was Thursday and unseasonably hot for April. He had
his suitcoat off, his tie removed and shirt collar opened,
his sleeve cuffs folded back. There was sunlight on his
left arm and on part of his lap. He could feel the heat of it
through his dark trousers as he drove along the two-lane
highway. For the past twenty minutes, he had not seen
another vehicle going in either direction.
Then he saw the truck ahead, moving up a curving
grade between two high green hills. He heard the grinding strain of its motor and saw a double shadow on the road. The truck was pulling a trailer.
He paid no attention to the details of the truck. As he
drew behind it on the grade, he edged his car toward
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