The 13th Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 26 Great SF Stories!

by Lake, Jay

  She tried to protest against the injustice of it all, to roll back time enough never to have entered this room of death, to cry out, “Let me live! Oh, please! Let me live!” But it was too late. The drug was claiming her. She could not even gasp for another breath, though she could still hear the room’s fading words:

  “He didn’t even want an old-fashioned stone. He’d had enough, he said. Didn’t want to see things get even worse. But you’ll be around to see what happens. Your download’s done, very nice.”

  “Allie, Allie, Allie.”

  “Yes, Kirby?”

  “Were you a virgin when you died?”

  “How can you...?”

  “That’s pretty crude,” said Chandra. “We may be dead, but we can still show a few manners.”

  “I was just thinking,” said Kirby.

  “Didn’t sound like it.”

  “That’s one of the things I miss the most, you know?”

  “Me, too,” echoed several other voices.

  Avril broke the ensuing silence herself. “There was a guy....”

  “Did he make you scream?”

  “Not that way.” She hesitated, but she could not bring herself to explain. “He died.”

  “Ah.”

  As soon as she had awakened in her stone, she had wanted to let her scream burst forth at last. But she had refrained, contained herself. Her head had felt clearer than it had for months, and she had known immediately how futile that would have been. Perhaps she had even felt it would have been rude to disturb the peace of the cemetery, or to alarm her parents, who were standing, heads bowed, beside her grave.

  They had visited her for years. They had talked a little, and she had learned of wars and plagues that could no longer touch her. She had watched them age, and she had thought that perhaps one day she would see them installed in stones beside her.

  But they had just stopped coming.

  All love then was dust and thinning memory, one with Verona and Shakespeare and the past world’s greatest lovers.

  In time the cemetery’s other visitors had stopped as well, and the supply of news had ended. The weeds had grown. The buildings visible beyond the cemetery wall had fallen into ruins.

  The life of the stones continued:

  “Allie?”

  “Yes, Kirby?”

  “Do you think you could talk dirty for me?”

  “That’s all that’s left, isn’t it?”

  “Right out in public like this?” asked Chandra. “It’d be like an orgy. Don’t do it.”

  “Please,” said a voice, but it did not say whether it wanted them to do it or not to do it.

  “They should have wired us together,” said Ricky Moi. “A ghost-net. Private lines. Then we could....”

  Witnesses to eternal time, eternal presence, eternal chat, as long as the sun kept shining.

  Perhaps there was even something that could pass for eternal love.

  But where had all the people gone?

  THE GIRL IN HIS MIND, by Robert F. Young

  Originally published in Worlds of Tomorrow, April 1963.

  The dance that the chocoletto girl was performing was an expurgated version of the kylee sex ritual which the Louave maidens of Dubhe 7 practiced on the eve of their betrothal. Expurgated or not, however, it was still on the lascivious side. The G-string that constituted the chocoletto girl’s entire costume put her but one degree above the nakedness which the original dance demanded. Nathan Blake’s voice was slightly thick when he summoned the waiter who was hovering in the shadows at the back of the room. “Is she free?” he asked.

  “I do not know, mensakin. Perhaps.”

  Blake resumed watching. The girl’s movements were a delicate blend of love and lust. Her face accompanied her body, eyes half-lidded one moment to match the languid motion of her limbs, wide and feral the next to match the furious bump and grind of her hips. For a chocoletto she was light-skinned—more bronze, really, than brown. But then, the word “chocoletto”, coined by the early beche-la-mer traders, was misleading, and few of the natives of Dubhe 4’s southern-most continent lived up to it completely.

  She was beautiful too. Her high-cheekboned face was striking—the eyes dark-brown and wide-apart, the mouth sensuous, the teeth showing in a vivid white line between the half-parted purple lips. And her body was splendid. Blake had never seen anyone quite like her.

  He beckoned to her when the dance was over and, after slipping into a white thigh-length tunic, she joined him at his table. She ordered Martian wine in a liquid voice, and sipped it with a finesse that belied her cannibalistic forebears. “You wish a night?” she asked.

  Blake nodded. “If you are free.”

  “Three thousand quandoes.”

  He did not haggle, but counted out the amount and handed it to her. She slipped the bills into a thigh sheath-purse, told him her hut number and stood up to leave. “I will meet you there in an hour,” she said.

  * * * *

  Her hut was as good a place to wait for her as any. After buying a bottle of native whiskey at the bar, Blake went out into the Dubhe 4 night and made his way through the labyrinthine alleys of the native sector. In common with all chocoletto huts, Eldoria’s was uncared for on the outside, and gave a false impression of poverty. He expected to find the usual hanger-on waiting in the anteroom, and looked forward to booting him out into the alley. Instead he found a young girl—

  A human girl.

  He paused in the doorway. The girl was sitting cross-legged on a small mat, a book open on her lap. Xenophon’s Anabasis. Her hair made him think of the copper-colored sunrises of Norma 9 and her eyes reminded him of the blue tarns of Fornax 6. “Come in,” she said.

  After closing the door, he sat down opposite her on the guest mat. Behind her, a gaudy arras hid the hut’s other room. “You are here to wait for Eldoria?” she asked.

  Blake nodded. “And you?”

  She laughed. “I am here because I live here,” she said.

  He tried to assimilate the information, but could not. Perceiving his difficulty, the girl went on, “My parents indentured themselves to the Great Starway Cartel and were assigned to the rubber plantations of Dubhe 4. They died of yellow-water dysentery before their indenture ran out, and in accordance with Interstellar Law I was auctioned off along with the rest of their possessions. Eldoria bought me.”

  Five years as a roving psycheye had hardened Blake to commercial colonization practices; nevertheless, he found the present example of man’s inhumanity to man sickening.

  “How old are you?” Blake asked.

  “Fourteen.”

  “And what are you going to be when you grow up?”

  “Probably I shall be a psychiatrist. Eldoria is sending me to the mission school now, and afterward she is going to put me through an institute of higher learning. And when I come of age, she is going to give me my freedom.”

  “I see,” Blake said. He indicated the book on her lap. “Homework?”

  She shook her head. “In addition to my courses at the mission school, I am studying the humanities.”

  “Xenophon,” Blake said. “And I suppose Plato too.”

  “And Homer and Virgil and Aeschylus and Euripides and all the rest of them. When I grow up I shall be a most well-educated person.”

  “I’m sure you will be,” Blake said, looking at the arras.

  “My name is Deirdre.”

  “Nathan,” Blake said. “Nathan Blake.”

  “Eldoria will be arriving soon. I must go and prepare her dais.”

  She got up, parted the arras, and slipped into the next room. Shame flamed in Blake’s cheeks, and for a moment he considered leaving; then he remembered Eldoria’s dance, and he went right on sitting where he was.r />
  Presently the girl returned, and not long afterward the cloying scent of native incense crept beneath the arras and permeated the anteroom. She sat sideways on the mat this time, and he caught her face in profile. There was a suggestion of saintliness in the line of the nose and chin, a suggestion made all the more poignant by the slender column of the neck. He shifted uncomfortably on the guest mat. She had taken up the Anabasis again, and silence was pounding silent fists upon the walls.

  He was relieved when Eldoria finally arrived. She ushered him into the next room immediately. It was slightly larger than the anteroom, and much more richly appointed. A thick carpet the color of Martian waterways lay upon the floor, contrasting pleasantly with the golden tapestries that adorned all four walls. The sleeping dais was oval and took up nearly half the floor space. It was strewn with scarlet cushions.

  Blake sat down upon it. Nervously he watched Eldoria slip out of her white street robe, his eyes moving back and forth from her smooth dark skin to the arras. The incense thickened around him.

  She noticed the back-and-forth movement of his eyes. “You need not fear the little one,” she said, laying her hand upon his knee. “She will not enter.”

  “It’s not that so much,” Blake said.

  “What?” The warm bronze shoulder was touching his....

  He rose up once in the night, thinking to find his hotel bed. His next awakening was in the grayness of dawn, and he got up and dressed and moved silently to the doorway. The girl slept just without the arras on a thin sleeping-mat, and he had to step over her to gain the anteroom. In sleep, a strand of her copper-colored hair had tumbled down across her forehead and lay like a lovely flower upon the virginal whiteness of her skin. There was something saintly about her quiet face.

  When he reached the alley he began to run, and he did not stop running till the chocoletto sector was far behind him.

  * * * *

  The hill was a memory-image and Aldebaran 12 rain-country hills were notoriously steep. Blake was breathing hard when he reached the crest.

  Before him lay a memory-image of a section of Deneb 1 wasteland. The image extended for no more than half a mile, but Blake was annoyed that he should have remembered even that much of the wretched terrain. Ideally, a man’s mind-country should have been comprised only of the places and times he wanted to remember. Practically, however, that was far from being the case.

  He glanced back down into the rain-pocked valley that he had just crossed. The rain and the mist made for poor visibility. He could only faintly distinguish the three figures of his pursuers. The trio seemed a little closer now.

  Ever since he had first set foot into his mind, some ten hours ago, they had been on his trail, but for some reason he had been unable to bring himself to go back and find out who they were and what they wanted. Hence he was as vexed with himself as he was with them.

  After resting for a few minutes, he descended the hill and started across the Deneb 1 wasteland. It was a remarkably detailed materialization, and his quarry’s footprints stood out clearly in the duplicated sand.

  Sabrina York did not even know the rudiments of the art of throwing off a mind-tracker. It would have done her but little good if she had, for twelve years as a psycheye had taught Blake all the tricks. Probably she had taken it for granted that the mere act of hiding out in her tracker’s mind was in itself a sufficient guarantee of her safety. After all, she had no way of knowing that he had discovered her presence.

  Mind-country was as temporally inconsecutive as it was topographically incongruous, so Blake was not surprised when the Deneb 1 wasteland gave way to an expanse of boyhood meadow. Near the meadow was the house where Blake had lived at a much later date. In reality, the places were as far apart in miles as they were in years, but here in the country of his mind they existed side by side, surrounded by heterogeneous landscapes from all over the civilized sector of the galaxy and by the sharply demarcated spectra of a hundred different suns. A few of the suns were in the patchwork sky—Sirius, for example, and its twinkling dwarf companion. Most of them, however, were present only in their remembered radiance. To add to the confusion, scattered night memories interrupted the hodge-podge horizon with columns of darkness, and here and there the gray column of a dawn or dusk memory showed.

  The house was flanked on one side by a section of a New Earth spaceport and on the other by an excerpt of an Ex-earth city-block. Behind it flowed a brief blue stretch of Martian waterway.

  Sabrina’s footsteps led up to the front door, and the door itself was ajar. Perhaps she was still inside. Perhaps she was watching him even now through one of the remembered windows. He scanned them with a professional eye, but saw no sign of her.

  Warily he stepped inside, adjusting the temperature of his all-weather jacket to the remembered air-conditioning. His father was sitting in the living room, smoking, and watching 3V. He had no awareness of Blake. At Blake’s entry he went right on smoking and watching as though the door had neither opened nor closed. He would go right on smoking and watching till Blake died and the conglomeration of place-times that constituted Blake’s mind-world ceased to be. Ironically, he was watching nothing. The 3V program that had been in progress at the time of the unconscious materialization had failed to come through.

  * * * *

  The memory was a treasured one—the old man had perished in a ‘copter crash several years ago—and for a long while Blake did not move. He had never been in his own mind before. Consequently he was more affected than he might otherwise have been. Finally, stirring himself, he walked out into the kitchen. On a shelf above the sink stood a gaily colored box of his mother’s favorite detergent with a full-length drawing of Vera Velvetskin, the company’s blond and chic visual symbol, on the front. His mother was standing before the huge automatic range, preparing a meal she had served twenty-three years ago. He regarded her with moist eyes. She had died a dozen years before his father, but the wound that her death had caused had never healed. He wanted to go up behind her and touch her shoulder and say, “What’s for supper, mom?” but he knew it would do no good. For her he had no reality, not only because he was far in her future, but because in his mind-world she was a mortal and he, a god—a picayune god, perhaps, but a real one.

  As he was about to turn away, the name-plate on the range caught his eye, and thinking that he had read the two words wrong, he stepped closer so that he could see them more clearly. No, he had made no mistake: the first word was “Sabrina”, and the second was “York”.

  He stepped back. Odd that a kitchen range should have the same name as his quarry. But perhaps not unduly so. Giving appliances human names had been common practice for centuries. Even a name like “Sabrina York”, while certainly not run-of-the-mill, was bound to be duplicated in real life. Nevertheless a feeling of uneasiness accompanied him when he left the kitchen and climbed the stairs to the second floor.

  He went through each room systematically, but saw no sign of Sabrina York. He lingered for some time in his own room, wistfully watching his fifteen-year-old self lolling on the bed with a dog-eared copy of The Galaxy Boys and the Secret of the Crab Nebula, then he stepped back out into the hall and started to descend the stairs.

  At the head of the stairs a narrow window looked out over the front yard and thence out over the meadow. He glanced absently through the panes, and came to an abrupt halt. His three pursuers were wading through the long meadow grass less than a quarter of a mile away—not close enough as yet for him to be able to make out their faces, but close enough for him to be able to see that two of them were wearing dresses and that the third had on a blue skirt and blouse, and a kepi to match. He gasped. It simply hadn’t occurred to him that his pursuers might be women. To his consternation he discovered that he was even more loath to go back and accost them than he had been before. He actually had an impulse to flee.


  He controlled it and descended the stairs with exaggerated slowness, leaving the house by way of the back door. He picked up Sabrina’s trail in the back yard and followed it down to the Martian waterway and thence along the bank to where the waterway ended and a campus began. Not the campus of the university which he had visited two days ago to attend his protegee’s graduation. It was not a place-time that he cared to revisit, nor a moment that he cared to relive, but Sabrina’s trail led straight across the artificially stunted grass toward the little bench where he and Deirdre Eldoria had come to talk after the ceremony was over. He had no choice.

  * * * *

  The bench stood beneath a towering American elm whose feathery branches traced green arabesques against the blue June sky. A set of footprints slightly deeper than its predecessors indicated that Sabrina had paused by the trunk. Despite himself Blake paused there too. Pain tightened his throat when he looked at Deirdre’s delicate profile and copper-colored hair, intensified when he lowered his eyes to the remembered blueness of her graduation dress. The diamond brooch that he had given her as a graduation present, and which she had proudly pinned upon her bodice for the whole wide world to see, made him want to cry. His self-image of two weeks ago shocked him. There were lines on the face that did not as yet exist, and the brown hair was shot with streaks of gray that had yet to come into being. Lord, he must have been feeling old to have pictured himself like that!

  Deirdre was speaking. “Yes,” she was saying, “at nine o’clock. And I should very much like for you to come.”

  Blake Past shook his head. “Proms aren’t for parents. You know that as well as I do. That young man you were talking with a few minutes ago—he’s the one who should take you. He’d give his right arm for the chance.”

  “I’ll thank you not to imply that you’re my father. One would think from the way you talk that you are centuries old!”