The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  “What about our swords?”

  “Listen, Storm, all that swordplay onboard was good exercise and fun. It took our minds off our problems. But if you need to use those toothpicks on land, it’ll be too late for you already. You’d best leave your sword behind. It’s just extra weight that’ll slow you down.”

  “I’m taking mine.”

  Pankey shrugged. “Junior knows best.”

  Storm noticed that Jizogirl appeared about to second Storm’s objection to venturing forth unarmed. But then the doe relented, and said nothing.

  Storm slept only fitfully, so angry was he at Pankey’s rude dismissal of him. So when dawn was barely a rumour, Storm was already up, alone of the wardens, and defecating over the edge of the vessel.

  Looking sleepily into the dark foaming waters that had swallowed his scat, Storm hoped for a return of the dolphin diplomat, for more talk that might help him decide whose side he was really on. But instead he saw a sleek grey hand and arm emerge to grip a ridge halfway up the hull.

  He convulsively tumbled off his lavatory perch to the deck, then scrambled to his feet. A pair of hands now gripped the railing, then another pair, and another . . .

  These were no innocent emissaries. Mauna Loa’s promise not to interfere had been a lie. She had just been stalling, till she could outfit these attackers. Suddenly, Storm felt immense guilt at having kept the earlier visit a secret. The wardens could have been prepared for invasion by this route –

  “Foes! Foes! Help! Attack!”

  A wet torpedo face that seemed all teeth materialized between the first pair of hands. Gills flapped shut, and nostrils flared open.

  Storm made a dive for his sword. The other wardens were stirring confusedly. Storm kicked them, slapped them with the flat of his blade.

  “Swords! Swords! Get your swords!”

  Turning back toward the rail, Storm faced the intruders fully.

  The handsharks fused anthropoid and squaline designs into a bipedal monster all grey rugose hide and muscles. Neckless, their shark countenances thrust forward aggressively. Each wore the pebbled slave cap of the magma mind, clamped tight. A fishy carrion reek sublimed off them.

  Involuntarily bellowing his anger and fear, Storm rushed forward, sword at the ready.

  He got a deep resonant lick in on the ribs of a handshark at the same time he was batted powerfully across the chest. He went down and skidded on his butt across the wet deck. Leaping back to his feet, he confronted another monster – the same one? – and slashed out, blade landing with a squelch across its eyes.

  Screams, battlecries, the thunk of blade into flesh. Storm could get no sense of the whole battle’s tide, but only flail about in his little sphere of chaos.

  Somehow he slaughtered without being slaughtered himself, until the battle was over.

  Weeping, wiping blood from his face, his sword dripping gore, Storm reunited with his comrades.

  Those who still lived.

  That headless corpse was Bunter. The one with torn throat was Gumball. Half of Arp’s torso was gone in a single bite. Faizai lay in several pieces. They never found Shamrock; perhaps a dying handshark had dragged her overboard.

  Almost half their team dead, before they had even sighted their goal.

  There could be no question now of where Storm must place his allegiance. All his doubt and conflicts had evaporated with the lives of his friends. Guilt plagued him as well. He knew the only way to make up for such a transgression was to carry forth the assault on Mauna Loa with all his wit and bravery. Although beyond the assassination attempt his future still floated mistily.

  Only three handshark corpses littered the deck. Just one more attacker, and all the wardens would probably at this moment be dead.

  Storm pulled a bloody, sobbing Jizogirl to him, clutched her tightly. He tried to imagine why he had ever sought adventure, and how he could instantly transport himself and Jizogirl and the others safely home. But hard as he pondered, throughout the sad task of creating winding sheets from the UPD, bundling up the bodies of their friends, and consigning them to the sea with a few appeals to the Upflowered, Storm could find no easy solutions.

  Throughout the battle, and afterwards, their big-bellied kite had continued to pull the Squid onward, impelled by the insistent weather mind. The tropospheric intelligence seemed intent on throwing its agents against its rival without delay. And so by the time the surviving wardens had dumped the handshark corpses overboard, washed their clotted fur, disinfected their wounds and applied antibiotics and synthskin bandages, cleansed their swords, and sluiced the offal from the deck with seawater, the jade-green island of Hawaii had come dominantly into view, swelling in size minute by minute as their craft surged on.

  Storm confronted Pankey. “You’re not still thinking of hanging offshore till midnight, are you? Mauna Loa obviously knows we’re here. We can’t face another assault from more sharks.”

  Pankey appeared unsure and confused. “That plan can still work. We’ll just need to put in to shore further away from Kilauea. Let’s get the coastal maps . . .”

  Storm’s anger and anxiety boiled over. “Bugger that! The longer we have to travel overland, the more vulnerable we are!”

  His expression ineffably sad, Faizai-bereft Rotifero said calmly, “I agree with our young comrade, Pankey. We need a different plan.”

  “All right, all right! But what!”

  Jizogirl said, “Let’s get in a little closer to shore anyhow. Maybe something we see will give us an idea.”

  Pankey said, “That makes sense.”

  Catmaul asked, “How will we get the weather mind to stop blowing us along?”

  Normally, communication with the atmospheric entity was accomplished with programmed messenger birds that could fly high enough to have their brain states interpreted on the wing. But the wardens, overconfident about the parameters of their mission, had set out without any such intermediaries.

  Pankey’s voice conveyed less than total confidence. “Old Tropo is watching us. Surely he’ll bring us to a halt safely.”

  Larger and larger Hawaii bulked. Details along the gentle sloping shore became more and more resolvable.

  “Is that some kind of wall?”

  “I – I’m not sure . . .”

  As predicted and hoped, when the Squid had reached a point several hundred meters offshore, it came to a gradual stop. The weather mind had pinned the kite in a barometrically dead cell between wind tweezers that kept the parasail stationary but aloft.

  With their extremely sharp eyes, the wardens stared landward, unbelieving.

  Ranked along the beach was a living picket of animal slaves of the volcano queen. The main mass of the defence consisted of anole lizards. But not kawaii baseline creatures to be held with amusement in a paw. No, these anoles, unfamiliar to the main-landers, were evidently Upflowered creations, large as elephants. And atop each anole sat a simian carrying a crudely sharpened treebranch spear. Interspersed among the legs of the anoles were a host of lesser but still formidable toothed and clawed beasts. Blotches of stony grey atop the anoles were certainly slave caps, no doubt to be found on their companions as well. The huge gaudy dewlaps of the lizards flared and shrank, flared and shrank ominously, a prelude to attack.

  “This – this is not good,” murmured Wrinkles.

  Pankey said, “We’ll sail south or north, evade them – ”

  Storm grew indignant. He wanted to reach out and shake some sense into Pankey. “Are you joking? Those monsters can easily pace us on land, while we sail a greater distance than they need gallop.”

  Jizogirl interrupted the argument. “It’s academic, my bucks! Look!”

  The anoles and their riders were wading into the surf, making straight for the Squid.

  “This – this is even worse,” Wrinkles added – rather superfluously, thought Storm, in an uncanny interval of stunned calmness.

  Catmaul began yanking on one of the half-dozen kite tethers. “We have to g
et away! Now! Why doesn’t Tropo help us!”

  Rotifero gently pulled the doe away from the cables. “Old Tropo is a stern taskmaster. He brought us here to do a job, and do it we must.”

  Storm looked up in vain at the unmoving kite.

  The kite!

  “I have a plan! But we need to ditch our UPDs first. They’re too heavy for what I have in mind.”

  Suiting actions to words, Storm doffed his harness, detached the Proseity device, then redonned the bandolier with just logic bombs attached.

  “Stash your swords in your harnesses, and follow me!”

  Not waiting to see if they obeyed, Storm leaped onto the kite cables and began to climb. He felt a rightness and force to his actions, as he threw himself into battle without thought for his own safety, only that of his comrades, and the success of their necessary mission. Here, then, was the defining moment he had sought, ever since he left home.

  The angle of the cables permitted a fairly easy ascent. Soon, Storm bellyflopped onto the wind-stuffed mattress of the kite. Seconds later, his five comrades joined him, with plenty of room to spare.

  Below, the swimming anoles had closed half the distance to the ship.

  “We have to do this just perfectly. We sever the four inner cables completely, and the two outer ones partially. Pankey and I will do the outer ones. Get busy!”

  The composite substance of the cables was only a few Mohs softer than the sword blades, making for an arduous slog. But with much effort, Wrinkles, Jizogirl, Rotifero and Catmaul got the four inner cables completely separated – they fell gracefully, with an ultimate splash! – causing the parafoil configuration to deform non-aerodynamically, attached to the ship now only by a few threads at either end.

  Storm spared a look down. The anoles were too big to clamber aboard the ship. But the simians weren’t. And the apes were approaching the remaining two tethers linking kite and ship.

  “Now!”

  Storm and Pankey sawed frantically and awkwardly in synchrony from their recumbent positions –

  Twin loud pops from the high-tensioned threads, and the kite was free. Instant winds sent by an alert weather mind grabbed it and pushed it toward land.

  Storm allowed himself the tiniest moment of relief and triumph and relaxation. Then he sized up what awaited them.

  The terrain below showed rampant greenery of cloud forest far off to every side. But the Kilauea caldera itself loomed off-centre in a barren zone of old and new lava flows: the Kau Desert. Twenty-four kilometers away, the mother volcano Mauna Loa reared almost four times higher.

  “Can we ride this all the way?” shouted Pankey.

  “I hope so!” Storm replied. “Maybe we can bomb one of the magma rifts from up here!”

  But his optimism soon received a dual assault.

  Several slave-capped gulls stalked their kite, relaying visual feeds to the magma mind. As the kite moved deeper inland, it met attacks.

  From an artificially built-up stone nozzle, under concentrated pressure, a laser-like jet of magma shot up high as the kite, narrowly missing the wardens, but spattering them with painful droplets on its broken descent. The kite fabric received numerous smelly burn holes. At the same time a fumarole unleashed billowing clouds of opaque choking sulfurous gases, which the kite sailed blindly through, at last emerging into clear air.

  Gasping for breath, wiping his reddened eyes, Storm finally found his voice again.

  “We’re a big easy target! We have to split up!”

  Wrinkles got to his hands and knees. “Me first! I’m the best glider!”

  Without any farewells, Wrinkles launched off the unsteady platform. He spread his unusually generous patagium and made graceful curves through the sky.

  Jizogirl cried, “Go, Wrinkles, go!”

  A lance of red-hot lava shot up from an innocuous spot, and incinerated Wrinkles’ entire left side. With a wailing cry he plummeted to impact.

  Storm felt gut-punched. “We all need to leap at once! Now! Find a rift and bomb it!”

  The remaining five wardens flung themselves free of the kite.

  Focused on his gliding, Storm could not keep track of the rest of the Fellowship. Heaven-seeking spears of hot rock burst into existence randomly, a gauntlet of fiery death. Deadly vog – the volcanic fog – stole his sight and breath. He lost track of his altitude, his goal. He thought he heard cries and screams –

  Out of the vog he emerged, to see the tortured ground much too close, an eye-searing, writhing active rift bisecting the terrain. He braced for a landing.

  His right paw-foot caught in a crevice, and he heard bones snap. The pain was almost secondary to his despair.

  Working to free his paw-foot, he heard two thumps behind him.

  Pankey and Jizogirl had landed, their fur smouldering, eyes cloudy and tearful.

  Jizogirl came to help free Storm’s paw-foot.

  “Rotifero, Catmaul – ?”

  Jizogirl just shook her head.

  Meanwhile, Pankey had detached a logic bomb from his bandolier, and now darted in towards the living rift. Its incredible heat stopped him some distance away. He made to throw the bomb.

  Overhead, the spy gulls circled low. One screeched just as Pankey threw.

  A whip of lava caught the bomb in mid-air, incinerating it but prophylactically detaching from the parent flow, frustrating the spread of the released antisense agents backward along its interrupted length.

  Pankey rushed back to his comrades. “It’s no use. The bombs have to be delivered by hand. It’s up to me!”

  Jizogirl said, “And me!”

  “No! Only if I fail. You and Storm – Just stay with him!”

  Before either Storm or Jizogirl could protest. Pankey had taken off at a run.

  Storm’s nose could smell the scorched flesh of Pankey’s paw-feet as the warden dodged one whip after another.

  “Remember me – !” the leader of the team called, as he hurled himself and his remaining logic bombs into the rift.

  The propagation of the antisense mind-killer agents was incredibly rapid, fueled by the high energies of the system. A deep subterranean rumble betokened the titanic struggle of intelligence against nescience. In a final spasm, the earth convulsed, rippling like a shaken sheet in all directions, tossing Jizogirl down beside Storm, then bouncing them both.

  The quake lasted for what seemed minutes, before dying away. Even when the shaking at ground zero had stopped, rumbles and tremors continued to radiate outward into the surrounding ocean, as the antisense assault propagated. Storm could picture undersea lava tubes collapsing, tectonic plates shifting far out to sea –

  Jizogirl got shakily to her paw-feet, and helped Storm stand on his one good leg.

  “Is Mauna Loa dead?” she asked.

  “I think so . . .”

  Big menacing shapes moved in the vog around them.

  “What now?” she asked hopelessly.

  Out of the vog, several anoles and their riders emerged. But they no longer exhibited any direction or purpose or malice. One ape clawed at his slave cap and succeeded in ridding himself of it.

  Jizogirl suddenly stiffened. “Oh, no! I just realized – We need to get inland, quickly! Up on the lizard!”

  The tractable anole allowed Storm to climb onboard, with an assist from Jizogirl. His broken bones throbbed. She got up behind him, grabbing him around the waist.

  “How do we make this buggered thing go?”

  Storm pulled his sword out and jabbed it into the anole’s shoulder. The lizard shot off, heading more or less into the interior.

  “Can you tell me why this ride is necessary?”

  “Tsunami! You prairie dwellers are so dumb!”

  “But how?”

  “The self-destruct information waves from the antisense bomb propagated faster than the physical collapse itself. When the instructions hit the furthest distal reaches of Mauna Loa out to sea, they rebounded back and met the oncoming physical collapse in mid-ocean
. Result: tsunami!”

  Up and up the anole skittered, leaving the Kau Desert behind and climbing the slopes of Mauna Loa. It stopped at last, exhausted, and no amount of jabbing could make it resume its flight.

  Storm and Jizogirl dismounted and turned back toward the sea, the doe supporting the buck.

  With the sea’s recession, the raw steaming seabed lay exposed for several hundred meters out from shore. They saw the Squid sitting lopsided on the muck.

  Then the crest of the giant wave materialized on the horizon, all spume and glory and destructive power.

  “Are we far enough inland, high enough up?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  The tsunami sounded like a billion lions roaring all at once.

  Storm turned his face to Jizogirl’s and said, “That kiss you gave me the other night – It was very nice. Can I have another?”

  Jizogirl smiled and said, “If it’s not our last, then count on lots more.”

  THE BLACK HOLE PASSES

  John Varley

  Back in 1975 I interested a British publisher in producing an annual selection of the year’s best science fiction. No sooner had I signed the contract than there were changes at the publisher’s, various editors moved on, and the idea for the annual series ceased. The first volume did appear, though a year late, as SF Choice ’77. I mention it because that anthology included this story, which I rated as one of the best that appeared in 1975. I still think that. At the time, John Varley was still a new name, but he was rapidly making a reputation for himself and was soon regarded as one of the major new names of the seventies. I remember the same thrill in discovering his work as I did with that of Roger Zelazny’s, ten years earlier. Varley’s work just oozed sense of wonder. Some of his best early stories were collected in The Persistence of Vision (1978), the title story of which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. More recently, the retrospective The John Varley Reader (2004) appeared – essential reading for anyone who has not read the earlier collections. Unaccountably, the following story was not included in that compendium, and since I haven’t reprinted it in over thirty years, it seems opportune to remind everyone what the excitement was all about.