Infinity One

by Robert Hoskins (Ed. )

  Edward Wellen astonished the science fiction audience of the early and mid-fifties with a double handful of brilliant stories, then disappeared from view. It’s a pleasure to welcome him back with his first new story in many years; it’s to be hoped that he’ll be with us for many more to come.

  THESE OUR ACTORS

  Edward Wellen

  Two tired telecast beams crossed at a point in space. In time, a drifting plasmoid passed through—enveloped— the intersection. The plasmoid would have ignored either alone but the stereotaxic tickle wakened it out of its sub-dreaming state. The plasmoid scanned the signals dreamily.

  In mid-leap Aamm grew aware of himself leaping. Moving while trying to find the logic of his movements, he braced himself for the jolt of landing. Low-energy messages in his fibers . . . fibers? . . . triggered high-powered operations. His weary muscles . . . muscles? . . . were lifting him, pushing him, pulling him. Logic told him that the emotion arising from these bodily changes was fear. All in a flying split second he knew danger lay ahead. His long run had stitched him for a helpless moment to the valley floor, had held him in naked view. He had to—and was moving to—take cover.

  He landed in a crouch behind a clump of eess. The eess quivered in its sleep at his nearness, but to him the eess itself was the nightmare; that was what the quivering of his own body told him. Taking care not to touch any eess, he stretched slowly to look ... look? Let light strike his eye surface? ... up and around.

  Nothing. So much for logic. Then a slight stir on the verge of the slope caught his eye by the tail. Someone crept forward there, carefully parting the growth fringing the overhanging rim of the valley. The glearn of a fluted muzzle. A sniper. And at a point in line with the beckoning tip of Mount Stij beyond. And so between Aamm and what he suddenly knew to be his goal.

  Aamm pulled back out of sight and out of seeing but he could feel the sniper looking down. Feel? No, deduce. Logic told him the sniper was looking down ready to aim the fluted muzzle, ready to fire the water-slugs that would leach out Aamm’s marrow. Marrow? No matter, he had gained cover in time.

  But his tenseness told him he could not hide long. The blades of eess would come out of their midday sleep, would unsheathe and take leafy wing to impale flying insects—and stab anything in their way.

  Too, his whole form-pattern-set said Mount Stij summoned him. And here was a thing to wonder about: how did he know names, that eess was eess, that a mountain was a mountain, that that mountain was Mount Stij, that his own name was Aamm? Had memory diffused onto his very skin? He didn’t know. But he knew that before dark he had to reach the hubble-bubble of refuge atop Mount Stij, that its name was Viipoy, and that it was an obsidian city doming a volcanic pipe.

  To build strength for that last run he rested in the narrow shade of the eess. He lay back as if to dream he already breathed the smoke of forgetfullness.

  He stiffened. His eyes opened wide. Belu’s sun—Belu was the name of his world and it spun in space about a star—had shot ten degrees lower. A snuffling behind him had wakened him, one peril saving him from the others. His time had narrowed and the blades of eess were already loosening in their sheaths. Soon the air would be dark with daggers. But the snuffling itself pointed the nearest peril

  A klab had picked up his scent. The klab would drive him from his cover, would block the way he had chosen, would bring him in sight of the sniper. Aamm fought to keep from reeking with love.

  In his mind ... on his skin ... he heard the hard voice of his trainer. “When you approach love with fear or fear with love you approach your doom.”

  Without seeing the klab Aamm knew he had nothing to fend off that fiend with: nothing, not a blade of eess, would avail against the blood-rusty spikes. Nothing unless he made himself nothing.

  His eyes picked out a likely stalk of eess. He scooped soil away from the plant, digging down only till the soil grew rich with dead bugs. He bared enough for a hold between sting of root and thin sheath of blade, then grasped and pulled. The eess tore loose with a small shriek. The tiny rootlets writhed in the air, vainly seeking, then one by one died with a twitch. The klab snuffled nearer. Aamm made himself wait for all the rootlets to fall still. Then he parted them and dug his forenail into the middle bulb.

  Blue juice spurted. He caught the vegetal blood in the cups of his hand and began to slap it silently on his pulse spots. He sniffed quietly and the logic of his reaction told him he fought gagging. No gainsaying the scent masked his own. But the klab’s sense of smell was sure to be keener than his.

  He held his breath, and not against eess-stink alone. He listened to the snuffling. It came nearer, though the sound seemed more the effect of logic or imagination than of hearing. Still, that seemed only to add to the eerie reality. Aamm noiselessly slipped the blade of eess from its sheath. As though it knew what a feeble weapon it was it trembled in his grip. Its leaves struggled to flap, then grew limp.

  The snuffling stopped, puzzled. Quick sharp inward snorts followed. But the klab had lost him at his leap. It began casting about. Once it faced him. Small animals would have yielded to the love in the terrible eyes and flung themselves into the spiky embrace. Aamm looked the klab in its useless eyes and held still. It turned. It had lost him. Regressing in frustration, it backtracked its own smell, its blind howling waving in the wind.

  Aamm quickened. Here was his chance. The sniper’s gaze would be following the klab away from this clearly tenantless clump. Aamm gathered for a dash to bring him under the overhang of the rim. Once he gained that he’d climb to nearly below the sniper, wait for eess-blades to bewilder the air, then swing up and over, take out the sniper, and be away on the easy lope to the hubble-bubble of refuge.

  Just as he bunched, something slashed across the world, sheared sun and overhang and mountain tip away, seamed the remaining landscape to a slice of indoors. The sun had gone from the sky, but not the light. The room too had its own light.

  That it was a room of some kind was clear once he allowed for its crazy tilt. He saw strange and strangely-clinging furnishings. It looked only a step to the join but he did not take the step.

  His impulse, his compulsion, was to dash for the invisible shelter of the overhang while making himself not see this visible manifestation. And almost he could feel the ghost of himself do that. But as if some interference had jarred his logical momentum and shocked him into free will—or free won’t—he held himself in his set crouch and stared. His grip tightened on the hilt of the eess-dagger.

  In the far corner of the room stood—or because it appeared to infract gravity, leaned—a being almost of his own kind. It slanted at him in profile. A female, in something sheer molded to her form. But her flow of red hair and her golden breast failed to answer to the tilt. She could not be real, then. She must be all one piece, not fluid flesh. And her stillness argued statue. Then he saw she was moving.

  Her motions were slow, hypnotically slow, dreamlike. Her foreshortened feet spun her with a slowness it was hard to believe tendons could stand. The face was not a Belurian face, the smile was not a Belurian smile, and her gaze did not meet his, but in an agony of time she faced him and smiled.

  It was a thing to make him think he had already reached the hubble-bubble of refuge and was dreaming. It was a trick to lure him into sniping range, a transfixed target. It had to be false. Test its reality.

  With his free hand he picked up a clod of the soil he had loosened around the plant he had torn out. He molded and firmed it in the double cup of his hand, then tossed the ball of dirt onto the slanting floor. The arc took a weird nodal turn in the air before the ball describing it struck the floor. The ball slid up the cant and stopped. It did not slide back down toward him and out into his landscape but stuck fast. The female had not started at the toss or the impact. Her smile remained fixed. If anything, it widened. A challenge? The rules were still the rules.

  Aamm drew breath, then straightened and stepped across the join.

  A sense of
torque seized him on the threshold, then another gravity took hold, and now as he found his balance and looked back his own landscape had the crazy tilt. The start of movement swung him around.

  With awful slowness, with painful grace, the female thrust her hand out as in greeting, palm up. Out of nowhere, a bumpy cylinder appeared. One moment it had never been, next moment it rested on the curiously flat palm. Tall as the hand was long, a bit narrower than the hand was wide, the cylinder had a coat of bright clashing colors. With like dreamy slowness her other hand floated up and a long finger pointed to the cylinder.

  Not trusting her, he kept his eyes on her face, but the edge of vision made the cylinder out to be of some plastic material and to have a thin tube, as long as the finger, curving out from the top. Her mouth opened slowly and in a low oozy voice she spoke in some language he did not know. Then with the same behindhand play of expression she smiled again toward him as though waiting for him to answer.

  She listened to his silence, then with an intense languidness nodded. In a stunning absence of action he found they were all at once three paces nearer each other. He blinked. But she was again in the mode of dreamy slowness, so that he did not notice until a spray came out of the tip of the tube that she was squeezing the cylinder.

  The spray drifted his way but, as though striking an invisible barrier, formed a plane of gas that transformed into a patch of sheer fabric hanging in the air, a curtain between them. He touched it. It was real. It had the feel of a drumhead, though with much more give. He backed away. A grosser squeeze might spray out a net to entangle and entrap him.

  But as he gave himself more room all angles suddenly shifted. Fighting dizziness, he looked around. No trace of the open way he had come in. A wall of blankness where his valley had been. Trapped. He whirled. He was right up against the membranous curtain.

  Through it he saw the female, still nearer, slowly twirl the cylinder a quarter turn on her palm and point to what seemed to be an inscription on the side. But he would not let her distract him again. He saw now that a door stood open behind her, showing the edge of what appeared to be a sleeping platform. A way out or a way deeper in, but a way.

  A slash of his eess-dagger rent the membrane. Now the female seemed to see him for the first rime. Her eyes widened in a slow explosion as he passed through the tom veil and made to strike her aside and gain the doorway. She froze smiling and pointing to the inscription.

  Then abruptly she vanished, instantaneously changing to huge palm and huge cylinder which grew and grew as if to fill the world.

  In mid-speech Walter Domrow grew aware of himself speaking.

  “—ember how it was the first rime, darling?”

  Domrow fought flop sweat. The words didn’t feel right and the tensors of smile on his face had no inner justification. At first this rime seemed no different from the many other times he had experienced this sense of awakening out of the mechanical, of coming back to himself. On stage it was part of the long-run syndrome. In a taping session like this it grew out of doing retake after deadening retake and still having to come across freshly. You had to give the illusion of the first time. How? That was the question.

  Self-feedback wasn’t the answer. A child listened to itself cry and gave its cry a musical rhythm. That was the beginning of art. But that didn’t work here and now. He wasn’t a child crying. He had listened to himself and it had felt wrong. But he couldn’t change his reading. He hadn’t found his Motivation. That was why. He was still only skin deep in his role. That was it.

  But the director hadn’t called “Cut!” So maybe it would pass. Maybe it was enough to be himself, so natural in voice and gesture that you realize at once he’s a wonderful actor. Apparently the director thought that of him. Now it was up to the girl—girl? ha!—not to blow up.

  At the cue he had just given she should whirl, flash a smile, and—

  The set sheared apart. It opened up on the damascene shimmer of a steely landscape, strange scenery that chewed the girl and half the room away. In their place a bloody sun sailed like a slow discus across an off-blue sky toward a tilted horizon, a sky filling with dark flashing of flying daggers, a sky backgrounding an overhang of slope and a bubble-topped hill.

  He fought the panicky feeling that millions of eyes were watching him go up in his part. The director knew what he was doing. The director had thrown Domrow into a process shot, had put him up against a projection of a scene out of some fantastic space opera. This was the director’s way of jolting him into finding his Motivation. That must be so, because he felt it work.

  His Motivation was to go limp with sadness now she was gone, to long for her return, to swell with love and cherish her anew. He had an overriding sense that his life had found purpose and form.

  Turning his face slightly away from where the girl should be and toward where the lens would be, what they called cheating the camera, he held his look of utter longing and of utter lust. A blur of motion in the growth fringing the overhanging rim caught his eye by the tail. A burst of liquid slugs struck him, drank through his chest wall, left him empty and dissolving.

  A voice-over filled the air with soft thunder.

  “You too can know the joys of—”

  The two tired telecast beams, one the Revirginate commercial that had left the horizons of Terra thousands of light years behind, the other the swift-paced sportscast from long-dead Belu, faded from the brainscreen of the plasmoid. The signals that had briefly met and mingled now unkissed and uncrossed and streaked away on their long loopings of the universe. The plasmoid drifted on.

  For the shortest of whiles it had made the signals aware of themselves. Now it let them be. With sadness and longing it continued on its journey toward itself. The universe was a flux of uncertain interactions and these occasional nexuses of beams, these airless nothings with their ghosts of being, helped pass the time of space.

  At this time nothing is known of the author of the following story: even his/her sex is a matter of speculation. Whether man or woman, it is certain that Pat De Graw is talented, and to be hoped that there'll be many more such stories to come ...

  INSIDE MOTHER

  Pat De Graw

  “Do you come back inside Mother often?” the girl asked; her name was Twelve.

  Because he had known she was near, her voice did not startle Four. He acknowledged her presence with a squinted glance, saw her against the sun’s brilliant halo and then turned back to enter Mother.

  “Why do you come back here, Four? We don’t need Mother anymore.”

  “There are voices here,” he said, turning back to face Twelve. “I come to listen to the voices in Mother.” He sat on the front step of mother and waited for Twelve to leave.

  “What do the voices say?” She hunkered down beside Four, obviously not intending to leave.

  “They are hard to hear. They whisper, like this. You wouldn’t be interested, anyway. Just like the others.” A beetle struggled to climb a beetle’s mountain of sand beside Four’s left big toe.

  “The others laugh at you for coming back to Mother.” She saw the beetle.

  “See how the sun touches the beetle’s back?” Four said to her, testing her for comprehension.

  “It is a bug.”

  “Yes.” He looked at her eyes and was startled to find such intense concentration there. Her brown hand, a falling leaf, slid down the sand hill, and for an instant-

  beetle year, Four thought the girl was going to destroy the bug. Instead she fattened her fingers to form a bridge for its passage.

  “The word for the color of the beetle’s back is ‘yellow,’ ” Four said, letting the melliferous word tumble from his lips. Twelve looked up, into his eyes: he saw himself, microscopically in the colored part of her eyes.

  “How do you know that’s what that color is?’’ She brought the quivering creature up to her face, stared past its antennae.

  “Mother says.”

  “Mother doesn’t talk. Four,” Twel
ve said.

  “Yes. I found a thing to make Mother talk.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “I don’t know what you call it, but it is like a little finger. It pushes down.” Four dug a trench in the air with a pointed finger to illustrate.

  “So, what does Mother say?” Light-stung wings lifted from Twelve’s open palm; then, melting into the sunlight, the beetle disappeared.

  “Mother says the words we always have known, like tree and bug and Mother and land and sky. But Mother also says other words.”

  “Which words?”

  “Like the song Five sings, you know the rhyme?”

  She nodded.

  “Words like those. Did you ever wonder about all the words we know, but don’t ever use? Words there are no things for.”

  “No.”

  “Well, I have. I’ve wondered what it means when you say . . .” He scraped the tunnels of his remembering to break away one of the useless sounds. “. . . field drive theory.”

  “I’ve never thought of that one before.” She smiled, half-expecting a joke.

  “You haven’t?” He was surprised.

  “No. Are there any more?”

  “Well, all the ones Five sings about. But the way 190

  Mother says them, they don’t rhyme. They come out strung together like ordinary words like so and to and dirt and the—”

  “Apogee, apogee, apogee!” Twelve finished the traditional rhyme with delight, clapping her hands together in time.

  “But not to rhyme,” Four was quick to add. “Do you want to hear it whisper, right now?” He stood, a brown, slim sapling in the sun. His hair, a golden cap of fourteen years of growth, was tied at his neck with a flexible vine.

  Twelve smiled and nodded her assent. Four took her by the hand, and entered Mother.