Worldmakers

by Gardner Dozois

  Craig sat bolt upright. He stared straight ahead.

  “I foul the blood of Great Russel,” he said slowly and clearly. “I foul it with dung. I foul it with carrion. I foul—”

  Barim’s fist knocked Craig to the pillow and split his lip. The Huntsman’s face paled under his tan.

  “You’re mad, boy!” he whispered. “Not even in madness may you say those words!”

  Craig struggled up again. “You’re the crazy ones, not me,” he said. He tongued his lip and blood dripped on his thin pajama coat. “I’ll die an outlaw, that’s how I’ll die,” he said. “An outlaw, on Burton Island.” He met Barim’s unbelieving eyes. “I foul the blood—”

  “Silence!” Barim shouted. “Outlawry it is. I’ll send a party for you, stranger.”

  He whirled and stamped out. Miss Ames followed him.

  “You Mordinmen,” she said, shaking her head.

  Craig sat on the edge of his bed and pulled his sweat-soaked pajamas straight. The room blurred and swam around him. Papa Toyama’s smile was like a light.

  “I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed. Please forgive us, Papa Toyama,” Craig said. “All we know is to kill and kill and kill.”

  “We all do what we must,” the old man said. “Death cancels all debts. It will be good to rest.”

  “Not my debts. I’ll never rest again,” Craig said. “All of a sudden I know—Great Russel, how I know—I know I loved Midori Blake.”

  “She was a strange girl. Helen and I thought she loved you, in the old days on our island.” Papa Toyama bowed his head. “But our lives are only chips in a waterfall. Goodbye, Roy.”

  Jordan, in a black pro suit, came shortly after. His face was bitter with contempt. He jerked his thumb at the door.

  “On your feet, stranger! Get going!” he snapped.

  In pajamas and barefooted, Craig followed him. From somewhere in the infirmary he heard a voice screaming. It sounded like Cobb. They walked across the landing field. Everything seemed underwater. Men were rigging to fuel the emergency rocket. Craig sat apart from the others in the flyer. Cobb was missing. Wilde was flushed and shivering and his eyes glared with fever. Jordan took the controls. No one spoke. Craig dozed through colored dream-scraps while the flyer outran the sun. He woke when it grounded in early dawn on Burton Island.

  He climbed down and stood swaying beside the flyer. Thanasis straggled across the rubble heaps and bulked waist-high in the dim light along the paths. Phytos stirred on their stems and piped sleepily in the damp air. Craig’s eyes searched for something, a memory, a presence, a completion and rest, he did not know what. He felt it very near him. Wilde came behind him, shoving. Craig moved away.

  “Stranger!” Wilde called.

  Craig turned. He looked into the fever-glaring eyes above the grinning horse teeth. The teeth gaped.

  “I foul the blood of Midori Blake. I foul it with dung. I—”

  Strength from nowhere exploded into the bone and muscles of Roy Craig. He sprang and felt the teeth break under his knuckles. Wilde fell. The others scrambled down from the flyer.

  “Blood right! Blood right!” Craig shouted.

  “Blood right!” Wilde echoed.

  Jordan held back Rice and Whelan. Strength flamed along Craig’s nerves. Wilde rose, spitting blood, swinging big fists. Craig closed to meet him, berserk in fury. The world wheeled and tilted, shot with flashing colors, gasping with grunts and curses, but rock-steady in the center of things. Wilde pressed the fight and Craig hurled it back on him. He felt the blows without pain, felt his ribs splinter, felt the good shock of his own blows all the way to his ankles. Bruising falls on the rough slag, feet stamping, arms grappling, hands tearing, breath sobbing, both men on knees clubbing with fists and forearms. The scene cleared and Craig saw through one eye Wilde crumpled and inert before him. He rose unsteadily. He felt weightless and clean inside.

  “Blood right, stranger,” Jordan said, grim faced and waiting.

  “Let it go,” Craig said.

  He turned down the gorge path, ignoring his chest pains, crashing through the rank Thanasis. Home! going home! going home! a bell tolled in his head. He did not look back.

  Thanasis grew more sparsely in the shaded gorge. Craig heard the waterfall and old memories cascaded upon him. He rounded to view of it and his knees buckled and he knelt beside the boulder. She was very near him. He felt an overpowering sense of her presence. She was this place.

  Dawn light shafted strongly into the gorge. It sparkled on the quartz ledge and made reflecting rainbows in the spray above the pool. Phytos lifted from ghost-silver stems to dance their own rainbow in the air. Something rose in Craig’s throat and choked him. Tears blurred his good eye.

  “Midori,” he said. “Midori.”

  The feeling overwhelmed him. His heart was bursting. He could find no words. He raised his arms and battered face to the sky and cried out incoherently. Then a blackness swept away his intolerable pain.

  Titanic stirrings. Windy rushings. Sharp violences swarming.

  Fittings-together in darkness. A trillion times a trillion times a trillion patient searchings. Filtering broken lights, silver, green, golden, scarlet.

  Bluntings. Smoothings. Transforming into otherness.

  Flickering awareness, planet-vast and atom-tiny, no focus between. The protosensorium of a god yearning to know himself. Endless, patient agony in search of being.

  Form and color outfolding in middle focus. Flashings of terrible joy and love unspeakable. It looked. Listened. Felt. Smelled. Tasted.

  Crystalline polar wastes. Wine of sweet. Gold-glint of sun on blue water. Perfumed wind caress. Thorn of bitter. Rain patter. Silver-green sweep of hill. Storm roar and shaking. Sharp of salt. Sleeping mountains. Surf beat. Star patterns dusted on blackness. Clear of sour. Cool moons of night.

  It knew and loved.

  Ragged line of men gaunt under beard stubble. Green plain. High golden sun. Roar. Shaggy redness bounding. Bow twangs. Whispering arrow lights. Deep-chested shouts of men. Lances thrusting. Bodies ripped. Thrown. Horn-impaled beating with fists. Great shape kneeling. Threshing. Streaming blood. Deep man-shouts dwindling to a silence.

  It knew and sorrowed.

  The woman bathing. Sunlight hair streaming. Grace beyond bearing. Beauty that was pain.

  It shook terribly with love.

  Rested readiness, whole and unblemished forever. The man newly-minted. Bursting excitement. HOME! coming HOME! coming HOME!

  It woke into its world.

  It was like waking up fresh and rested on the fine morning of a day when something glorious was going to happen. He was sitting up in a cavity at the base of a huge phyto stem. He brushed away papery shreds and saw the pool and heard the waterfall. With a glad cry, Midori came running. He stood up whole and strong to greet her.

  “Midori! Midori, when you die … ?” He wanted to know a million things, but one came first. “Can I ever lose you again now?”

  “Never again.”

  She was smiling radiantly. They were both naked. He was not excited and not ashamed.

  “We didn’t die, Roy,” she said. “We’re just made new.”

  “The plague killed everybody.”

  “I know. But we didn’t die.”

  “Tell me.”

  He listened like a child, believing without understanding. Somewhere in its infinite life-spectrum the planetary life had matched up a band for humans. “As if we were single giant molecules and it discovered our structural formula,” she said. “That’s how it thinks.” They had been resorbed into the planetary biomass, cleansed of Thanasis, and reconstituted whole and without blemish. “We’re immune to Thanasis now,” she said. “We’re made new, Roy.”

  The sunken red Thanasis scar was gone from his ankle. All of his other scars were gone. He held her hands and looked on her beauty and believed her.

  “We tried so long and hard to kill it,” he said.

  “It couldn’t know that. To it death and decay
are only vital changings,” she said, smiling wonderfully. “This life never split apart, Roy. In wholeness there is nothing but love.”

  “Love is making a wholeness,” he said. “I know about love now.”

  He told her about his visions.

  “I had them too. We were diffused into the planetary consciousness.”

  “Do we still eat and drink and sleep … and all?”

  She laughed. “Foolish Roy! Of course we do!” She pulled at his hands. “Come. I’ll show you.”

  Hand in hand they ran to the pool. The gravel hurt his feet. Beside the pool stems had fused ringwall fashion into a series of connecting rooms like hollow cones. He followed Midori through them. They were clean and dry and silvery with shadows. Outside again she pointed out brownish swellings on various stems. She tore one open, the covering like thin paper, to reveal pearly, plum-sized nodules closely packed in a cavity. She bit one nodule in two and held the other half to his lips.

  “Try,” she said.

  He ate it. It was cool and crisp, with a delightful, unfamiliar flavor. He ate several more, looking at her in wonder.

  “There are hundreds of these vesicles,” she said. “No two of them ever taste the same. They’re grown just for us.”

  He looked at her and around at the beauty of the gorge in strong, transmuted sunlight and he could not bear it. He closed his eyes and turned away from her.

  “I can’t. I can’t, Midori,” he said. “I ain’t good enough for this.”

  “You are, Roy.”

  “You loved it before. But all I wanted was to kill it,” he said. “Now it’s done this for me.” The feeling flooded him agonizingly. “I want to love it back and I can’t. Not now. Not after. I just can’t, Midori!”

  “Roy. Listen to me.” She was in front of him again, but he would not open his eyes. “This life emerged with infinite potentialities. It mastered its environment using only the tiniest part of them,” she said. “It never split up, to fight itself and evolve that way. So it lay dreaming. It might have dreamed forever.”

  “Only we came, you mean? With Thanasis?”

  “Yes. We forced it to changes, genetic recombination, rises in temperatures and process speeds. Whatever happened at one point could be duplicated everywhere, because it is all one. One year to it is like millions of years of Earthly evolution. It raised itself to a new level of awareness.”

  He felt her hand on his arm. He would not open his eyes.

  “Listen to me, Roy! We wakened it. It knows us and loves us for that.”

  “Loves us for Thanasis!”

  “It loves Thanasis, too. It conquered Thanasis, with love.”

  “And me. Tamed. A pet. A parasite. I can’t, Midori!”

  “Oh no! Roy, please understand! It thinks us now, biochemically. Like each littlest phyto, we are thoughts in that strange mind. I think we focus its awareness, somehow, serve it as a symbol system, a form-giver … .” She lowered her voice. He could feel her warmth and nearness. “We are its thoughts that also think themselves, the first it has ever had,” she whispered. “It is a great and holy mystery, Roy. Only through us can it know its own beauty and wonder. It loves and needs us.” She pressed against him. “Roy, look at me!”

  He opened his eyes. She smiled pleadingly. He ran his hands down the smooth curve of her back and she shivered. He clasped her powerfully. It was all right.

  “I can love it back, now,” he said. “Through you, I love it.”

  “I give you back its love,” she whispered into his shoulder.

  Afterward, arms linked, dazed with their love, they walked down to the sea. They stood on sparkling sand and cool water splashed at their ankles.

  “Roy, have you thought? We’ll never be ill, never grow old. Never have to die.”

  He pressed his face into her hair. “Never is a long time.”

  “If we tire, we can be resorbed and diffuse through the planetary consciousness again. But that’s not death.”

  “Our children can serve.”

  “And their children.”

  “It could do this for anybody now, couldn’t it?” he asked her quietly.

  “Yes. For any old or ill human who might come here,” she said. “They could have youth and strength again forever.”

  “Yes.” He looked up at the blue, arching sky. “But there’s a rocket up there with a warning message, to scare them away. I wish. I wish they could know … .”

  “That they are their own plague.”

  He patted her head to rest again on his shoulder.

  “Someday they’ll learn,” he said.

  The Keys to December

  ROGER ZELAZNY

  Like a number of other writers, the late Roger Zelazny began publishing in 1962 in the pages of Cele Goldsmith’s Amazing. This was the so-called “Class of ’62,” whose membership also included Thomas M. Disch, Keith Laumer, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Everyone in that “class” would eventually achieve prominence, but some of them would achieve it faster than others, and Zelazny’s subsequent career would be one of the most meteoric in the history of SF. The first Zelazny story to attract wide notice was “A Rose for Ecclesiastics,” published in 1963 (it was later selected by vote of the SFWA membership to have been one of the best SF stories of all time). By the end of that decade, he had won two Nebula Awards and two Hugo Awards and was widely regarded as one of the two most important American SF writers of the sixties (the other was Samuel R. Delany). By the end of the 1970s, although his critical acceptance as an important science-fiction writer had dimmed, his long series of novels about the enchanted land of Amber—beginning with Nine Princes in Amber had made him one of the most popular and best-selling fantasy writers of our time, and inspired the founding of worldwide fan clubs and fanzines.

  Zelazny’s early novels were, on the whole, well received (This Immortal won a Hugo, as did his most famous novel, Lord of Light), but it was the strong and stylish short work he published in magazines like F&SF and Amazing and Worlds of If throughout the middle years of the decade that electrified the genre, and it was these early stories—stories like “This Moment of the Storm,” “The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth,” “The Graveyard Heart,” “He Who Shapes,” “For a Breath I Tarry,” and “This Mortal Mountain,”—that established Zelazny as a giant of the field, and which many still consider to be his best work. These stories are still amazing for their invention and elegance and verve, for their good-natured effrontery and easy ostentation, for the risks Zelazny took in pursuit of eloquence without ruffling a hair, the grace and nerve he displayed as he switched from high-flown pseudo-Spenserian to wisecracking Chandlerian slang to vivid prose-poetry to Hemingwayesque starkness in the course of only a few lines—and for the way he made it all look easy and effortless, the same kind of illusion Fred Astaire used to generate when he danced.

  Here’s one of those eloquent and elegant stories written by Zelazny at the top of his form, demonstrating that the process of terraforming a world may only be the beginning—that your new world may turn up dangers and wonders that you never planned on, unexpected things that you now have to deal with, no matter what the consequences may be …

  Zelazny won another Nebula and Hugo Award in 1976 for his novella Home is the Hangman, another Hugo in 1986 for his novella 24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hosiki, and a final Hugo in 1987 for his story “Permafrost.” His other books include, in addition to the multi-volume Amber series, the novels This Immortal, The Dream Master, Isle of the Dead, Jack of Shadows, Eye of Cat, Doorways in the Sand, Today We Choose Faces, Bridge of Ashes, To Die in Italbar, and Roadmarks, and the collections Four for Tomorrow, The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth and Other Stories, The Last Defender of Camelot, and Frost and Fire. Among his last books are two collaborative novels, A Farce to Be Reckoned With, with Robert Sheckley, and Wilderness, with Gerald Hausman, and, as editor, two anthologies, Wheel of Fortune and Warriors of Blood and Dream. Zelazny died in 1995. Since his death, several po
sthumous collaborative novels have been published, including Psychoshop, with the late Alfred Bester, and Donnerjack and Lord Demon, both with Jane Llndskold. A tribute anthology to Zelazny, featuring stories by authors who had been inspired by his work, Lord of the Fantastic, was published in 1998.

  Born of man and woman, in accordance with Catform Y7 Coldworld Class (modified per Alyonal), 3.2-E, G.M.I. option, Jarry Dark was not suited for existence anywhere in the universe which had guaranteed him a niche. This was either a blessing or a curse, depending on how you looked at it.

  So look at it however you would, here is the story:

  It is likely that his parents could have afforded the temperature-control unit, but not much more than that. (Jarry required a temperature of at least–50°C to be comfortable.)

  It is unlikely that his parents could have provided for the air-pressure-control and gas-mixture equipment required to maintain his life.

  Nothing could be done in the way of 3.2-E grav-simulation, so daily medication and physiotherapy were required. It is unlikely that his parents could have provided for this.

  The much-maligned option took care of him, however. It safeguarded his health. It provided for his education. It assured his economic welfare and physical well-being.

  It might be argued that Jarry Dark would not have been a homeless Coldworld Catform (modified per Alyonal) had it not been for General Mining, Incorporated, which had held the option. But then it must be borne in mind that no one could have foreseen the nova which destroyed Alyonal.

  When his parents had presented themselves at the Public Health Planned Parenthood Center and requested advice and medication pending offspring, they had been informed as to the available worlds and the bodyform requirements for them. They had selected Alyonal, which had recently been purchased by General Mining for purposes of mineral exploitation. Wisely, they had elected the option; that is to say, they had signed a contract on behalf of their anticipated offspring, who would be eminently qualified to inhabit that world, agreeing that he would work as an employee of General Mining until he achieved his majority, at which time he would be free to depart and seek employment wherever he might choose (though his choices would admittedly be limited). In return for this guarantee, General Mining agreed to assure his health, education and continuing welfare for so long as he remained in their employ.