The Year's Best Science Fiction 10 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  I crawled under overhangs. I leaped over ridges. I scraped my knees, an elbow. I heard my jacket tear.

  No answer, Malann? Do you really hate your people this much?

  Then I’ll try someone else. Vishnu, you’re the Preserver. Preserve her, please!

  Let me find her.

  Jehovah?

  Adonis? Osiris? Thammuz? Manitou? Legba? Where is she?

  I ranged far and high, and I slipped.

  Stones ground underfoot and I dangled over an edge. My fingers so cold. It was hard to grip the rock.

  I looked down.

  Twelve feet or so. I let go and dropped, landed rolling.

  Then I heard her scream.

  I lay there, not moving, looking up. Against the night, above, she called.

  “Gallinger!”

  I lay still.

  “Gallinger!”

  And she was gone.

  I heard stones rattle and knew she was coming down some path to the right of me.

  I jumped up and ducked into the shadow of a boulder.

  She rounded a cut-off, and picked her way, uncertainly, through the stones.

  “Gallinger?”

  I stepped out and seized her by the shoulders.

  “Braxa.”

  She screamed again, then began to cry, crowding against me. It was the first time I had ever heard her cry.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why?”

  But she only clung to me and sobbed.

  Finally, “I thought you had killed yourself.”

  “Maybe I would have,” I said. “Why did you leave Tirellian? And me?”

  “Didn’t M’Cwyie tell you? Didn’t you guess?”

  “I didn’t guess, and M’Cwyie said she didn’t know.”

  “Then she lied. She knows.”

  “What? What is it she knows?”

  She shook all over, then was silent for a long time. I realized suddenly that she was wearing only her flimsy dancer’s costume. I pushed her from me, took off my jacket, and put it about her shoulders.

  “Great Malann!” I cried. “You’ll freeze to death!”

  “No,” she said, “I won’t.”

  I was transferring the rose-case to my pocket.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “A rose,” I answered. “You can’t make it out in the dark. I once compared you to one. Remember?”

  “Yes—Yes. May I carry it?”

  “Sure.” I stuck it in the jacket pocket.

  “Well? I’m still waiting for an explanation.”

  “You really do not know?” she asked.

  “No!”

  “When the Rains came,” she said, “apparently only our men were affected, which was enough....Because I—wasn’t—affected—apparently—”

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

  We stood there, and I thought.

  “Well, why did you run? What’s wrong with being pregnant on Mars? Tamur was mistaken. Your people can live again.”

  She laughed, again that wild violin played by a Paginini gone mad.

  I stopped her before it went too far.

  “How?” she finally asked, rubbing her cheek.

  “Your people can live longer than ours. If our child is normal it will mean our races can intermarry. There must still be other fertile women of your race. Why not?”

  “You have read the Book of Locar,” she said, “and yet you ask me that? Death was decided, voted upon, and passed, shortly after it appeared in this form. But long before, before the followers of Locar knew. They decided it long ago. `We have done all things,’ they said, ‘we have seen all things, we have heard and felt all things. The dance was good. Now let it end.’”

  “You can’t believe that.”

  “What I believe does not matter,” she replied. “M’Cwyie and the Mothers have decided we must die. Their very title is now a mockery, but their decisions will be upheld. There is only one prophecy left, and it is mistaken. We will die.”

  “No,” I said.

  “What, then?”

  “Come back with me, to Earth.”

  “No.”

  “All right, then. Come with me now.”

  “Where?”

  “Back to Tirellian. I’m going to talk to the Mothers.”

  “You can’t! There is a Ceremony tonight!”

  I laughed.

  “A Ceremony for a god who knocks you down, and then kicks you in the teeth?”

  “He is still Malann,” she answered. “We are still his people.”

  “You and my father would have gotten along fine,” I snarled. “But I am going, and you are coming with me, even if I have to carry you—and I’m bigger than you are.”

  “But you are not bigger than Ontro.”

  “Who the hell is Ontro?”

  “He will stop you, Gallinger. He is the Fist of Malann

  .”

  IV

  I scudded the jeepster to a halt in front of the only entrance I knew, M’Cwyie’s. Braxa, who had seen the rose in a headlamp, now cradled it in her lap, like our child, and said nothing. There was a passive, lovely look on her face.

  “Are they in the Temple now?” I wanted to know.

  The Madonna-expression did not change. I repeated the question.

  She stirred.

  “Yes,” she said, from a distance, “but you cannot go in.”

  “We’ll see.”

  I circled and helped her down.

  I led her by the hand, and she moved as if in a trance. In the light of the new-risen moon, her eyes looked as they had the day I had met her, when she had danced. I snapped my fingers. Nothing happened.

  So I pushed the door open and led her in. The room was half-lighted.

  And she screamed for the third time that evening: “Do not harm him, Ontro! It is Gallinger!”

  I had never seen a Martian man before, only women. So I had no way of knowing whether he was a freak, though I suspected it strongly.

  I looked up at him.

  His half-naked body was covered with moles and swellings. Gland trouble, I guessed.

  I had thought I was the tallest man on the planet, but he was seven feet tall and overweight. Now I knew where my giant bed had come from!

  “Go back,” he said. “She may enter. You may not.”

  “I must get my books and things.”

  He raised a huge left arm. I followed it. All my belonging lay neatly stacked in the corner.

  “I must go in. I must talk with M’Cwyie and the Mothers.”

  “You may not.”

  “The lives of your people depend on it.”

  “Go back,” he boomed. “Go home to your people, Gallinger. Leave us!”

  My name sounded so different on his lips, like someone else’s.

  How old was he? I wondered. Three hundred? Four? Had he been a Temple guardian all his life? Why? Who was there to guard against?

  I didn’t like the way he moved. I had seen men who moved like that before.

  “Go back,” he repeated.

  If they had refined their martial arts as far as they had their dances, or worse yet, if their fighting arts were a part of the dance, I was in for trouble.

  “Go on in,” I said to Braxa. “Give the rose to M’Cwyie. Tell her that I sent it. Tell her I’ll be there shortly.”

  “I will do as you ask. Remember me on Earth, Gallinger. Good-bye.”

  I did not answer her, and she walked past Ontro and into the next room, bearing her rose.

  “Now will you leave?” he asked. “If you like, I will tell her that we fought and you almost beat me, but I knocked you unconscious and carried you back to your ship.”

  “No,” I said, “either I go around you or go over you, but I am going through.”

  He dropped into a crouch, arms extended.

  “It is a sin to lay hands on a holy man,” he rumbled, “but I will stop you, Gallinger.”

  My memory was a fogged window, suddenly exposed to fresh air.

&n
bsp; Things cleared. I looked back six years.

  I was a student of the Oriental Languages at the University of Tokyo. It was my twice-weekly night of recreation. I stood in a thirty-foot circle in the Kodokan, the judogi lashed about my high hips by a brown belt. I was Ik-kyu, one notch below the lowest degree of expert. A brown diamond above my right breast said “Jiu-Jitsu” in Japanese, and it meant atemiwaza, really, because of the one striking-technique I had worked out, found unbelievably suitable to my size, and won matches with.

  But I had never used it on a man, and it was five years since I had practiced. I was out of shape, I knew, but I tried hard to force my mind tsuki no kokoro, like the moon, reflecting the all of Ontro.

  Somewhere, out of the past, a voice said “Hajime, let it begin.”

  I snapped into my neko-ashi-dachi cat-stance, and his eyes burned strangely.

  He hurried to correct his own position—and I threw it at him!

  My one trick!

  My long left leg lashed up like a broken spring. Seven feet off the ground my foot connected with his jaw as he tried to leap backward.

  His head snapped back and he fell. A soft moan escaped his lips.

  That’s all there is to it, I thought. Sorry, old fellow.

  And as I stepped over him, somehow, groggily, he tripped me, and I fell across his body. I couldn’t believe he had strength enough to remain conscious after that blow, let alone move. I hated to punish him any more.

  But he found my throat and slipped a forearm across it before I realized there was a purpose to his action.

  No! Don’t let it end like this!

  It was a bar of steel across my windpipe, my carotids. Then I realized that he was still unconscious, and that this was a reflex instilled by countless years of training. I had seen it happen once, in shiai. The man had died because he had been choked unconscious and still fought on, and his opponent thought he had not been applying the choke properly. He tried harder.

  But it was rare, so very rare!

  I jammed my elbow into his ribs and threw my head back in his face. The grip eased, but not enough. I hated to do it, but I reached up and broke his little finger.

  The arm went loose and I twisted free.

  He lay there panting, face contorted. My heart went out to the fallen giant, defending his people, his religion, following his orders. I cursed myself as I had never cursed before, for walking over him, instead of around.

  I staggered across the room to my little heap of possessions. I sat on the projector case and lit a cigarette.

  I couldn’t go into the Temple until I got my breath back, until I thought of something to say.

  How do you talk a race out of killing itself?

  Suddenly—Could it happen! Would it work that way? If I read them the Book of Ecclesiastes—if I read them a greater piece of literature than any Locar ever wrote—and as somber—and as pessimistic—and showed them that our race had gone on despite one man’s condemning all of life in the highest poetry—showed them that the vanity he had mocked had borne us to the Heavens—would they believe it—would they change their minds?

  I ground out my cigarette on the beautiful floor, and found my notebook. A strange fury rose within me as I stood.

  And I walked into the Temple to preach the Black Gospel according to Gallinger, from the Book of Life.

  There was silence all about me.

  M’Cwyie had been reading Locar, the rose set at her right hand, target of all eyes.

  Until I entered.

  Hundreds of people were seated on the floor, barefoot. The few men were as small as the women, I noted.

  I had my boots on.

  Go all the way, I figured. You either lose or you win—everything!

  A dozen crones sat in a semicircle behind M’Cwyie. The Mothers.

  The barren earth, the dry wombs, the fire-touched.

  I moved to the table.

  “Dying yourselves, you would condemn your people,” I addressed them, “that they may not know the life you have known—the joys, the sorrows, the fullness. —But it is not true that you all must die.” I addressed the multitude now. “Those who say this lie. Braxa knows, for she will bear a child—”

  They sat there, like rows of Buddhas. M’Cwyie drew back into the semicircle.

  “—my child!” I continued, wondering what my father would have thought of this sermon.

  “...And all the women young enough may bear children. It is only your men who are sterile. —And if you permit the doctors of the next expedition to examine you, perhaps even the men may be helped. But if they cannot, you can mate with the men of Earth.

  “And ours is not an insignificant people, an insignificant place,” I went on. “Thousands of years ago, the Locar of our world wrote a book saying that it was. He spoke as Locar did, but we did not lie down, despite plagues, wars, and famines. We did not die. One by one we beat down the diseases, we fed the hungry, we fought the wars, and, recently, have gone a long time without them. We may finally have conquered them. I do not know.

  “But we have crossed millions of miles of nothingness. We have visited another world. And our Locar had said `Why bother? What is the worth of it? It is all vanity, anyhow.’

  “And the secret is,” I lowered my voice, as at a poetry reading, “he was right! It is vanity, it is pride! It is the hubris of rationalism to always attack the prophet, the mystic, the god. It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us. —All the truly sacred names of God are blasphemous things to speak!”

  I was working up a sweat. I paused dizzily.

  “Here is the Book of Ecclesiastes,” I announced, and began: “`Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all if vanity. What profit hath a man...’”

  I spotted Braxa in the back, mute, rapt.

  I wondered what she was thinking.

  And I wound the hours of the night about me, like black thread on a spool.

  Oh, it was late! I had spoken till day came, and still I spoke. I finished Ecclesiastes and continued Gallinger.

  And when I finished there was still only a silence.

  The Buddhas, all in a row, had not stirred through the night. And after a long while M’Cwyie raised her right hand. One by one the Mothers did the same.

  And I knew what that meant.

  It meant, no, do not, cease, and stop.

  It meant that I had failed.

  I walked slowly from the room and slumped beside my baggage.

  Ontro was gone. Good that I had not killed him....

  After a thousand years M’Cwyie entered.

  She said, “Your job is finished.”

  I did not move.

  “The prophecy is fulfilled,” she said. “My people are rejoicing. You have won, holy man. Now leave us quickly.”

  My mind was a deflated balloon. I pumped a little air back into it.

  “I’m not a holy man,” I said, “just a second-rate poet with a bad case of hubris.”

  I lit my last cigarette.

  Finally, “All right, what prophecy?”

  “The Promise of Locar,” she replied, as though the explaining were unnecessary, “that a holy man would come from the Heavens to save us in our last hours, if all the dances of Locar were completed. He would defeat the Fist of Malann and bring us life.”

  “How?”

  “As with Braxa, and as the example in the Temple.”

  “Example?”

  “You read us his words, as great as Locar’s. You read to us how there is `nothing new under the sun.’ And you mocked his words as you read them—showing us a new thing.

  “There has never been a flower on Mars,” she said, “but we will learn to grow them.

  “You are the Sacred Scoffer,” she finished.

  “He-Who-Must-Mock-in-the-Temple—you go shod on holy ground.”

  “But you voted `no,’” I said.