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

by Lake, Jay

  “Then that death rate—?”

  “At eighteen the operation is performed. It is very quick and very simple. We saw destruction ahead. We had to force it through. In the beginning the deaths were frightening, there were so many of them. The stable ones survived, bred, reproduced. A lesser but still great percentage of the next generation went—and so on, until now it is almost static.”

  In Argonian Lambert said hotly, “Oh, it sounds fine! But what about children? What sort of heartless race can plant the seed of death in its own children?”

  Never before had he seen the faintest trace of anger on any Argonaut face. The single nostril widened and Soobuknoora might have raged if he had been from Earth. “There are other choices, Man Lambert. Our children have no expectation of being burned to cinder, blown to fragments. They are free of that fear. Which is the better love, Man Lambert?”

  “I have two children. I couldn’t bear to—”

  “Wait!” Soobuknoora said. “Think one moment. Suppose you were to know that when they reached the age of eighteen, both your children were to be operated on by our methods. How would that affect your present relationship to them?”

  Lambert was, above all, a realist. He remembered the days of being “too busy” for the children, of passing off their serious questions with a joking or curt evasion, of playing with them as though they were young, pleasing, furry animals.

  “I would do a better job, as a parent,” Lambert admitted. “I would try to give them enough emotional stability so that they would never—have that urge to kill themselves. But Ann is delicate, moody, unpredictable, artistic.”

  Poogla and Soobuknoora nodded in unison. “You would probably lose that one; maybe you would lose both,” Soobuknoora agreed. “But it is better to lose more than half the children of a few generations to save the race.”

  Lambert thought some more. He said, “I shall go back and I shall speak of this plan and what it did for you. But I do not think my race will like it. I do not want to insult you or your people, but you have stagnated. You stand still in time.”

  Vonk Poogla laughed largely. “Not by a damn sight,” he said gleefully. “Next year we stop giving the operation. We stop for good. It was just eight thousand years to permit us to catch our breath before going on more safely. And what is eight thousand years of marking time in the history of a race? Nothing, my friend. Nothing!”

  When Lambert went back to Earth, he naturally quit his job.

  HUMAN SPIRIT, BEETLE SPIRIT, by John Gregory Betancourt

  Originally published in Quest to Riverworld (1992).

  When I awoke by the water’s edge, I was naked as an animal. A polished stick as big around as my leg and made of wood—though from what tree it came I could not say—hung from my wrist by a thin cord. I threw the stick off, leaped to my feet, and gave a cry of alarm: “Ai-ai-ai!”

  The sound echoed up and down the river’s bank. Silence followed, then a hundred other throats picked it up and echoed it back in a thundering roar.

  “Ai-ai-ai-ai-ai—”

  The sound swelled like a chant to fill the air, and as I stood there, I could smell my sweat pouring forth like an animal’s musk.

  “Ai-ai-ai-ai-ai—”

  I had to be in the spirit-world, since I remembered my own death clearly. I could still hear our tribe’s spirit-man chanting over me, trying to drive the sickness from my body. I remembered pain in my gut like a knife, and I remembered a fever that made the world seem to shake like a tree in a storm.

  “Ngosoc,” I had whispered with my dying breath, naming the man who had bewitched me.

  Why was I here? What spirit or god was punishing me? Had I named the wrong man—had Ngosoc been innocent? I pressed my eyes shut and bit my lip until I tasted the warm sweetness of blood. Spirits go away go away go away!

  The cries of fear slowly died. I opened my eyes, but nothing had changed. Everyone on the bank of the river was looking around with fearful, panicked expressions. A few took tentative steps this way or that; far off, I heard a woman screaming on and on and on.

  Of all those around me, I stood nearest the river’s edge. I ran down to the water, squatted, and stared at my reflection. It was a nightmare. You can tell man from animal by his decorations, I knew: tattoos for cheeks and eyelids, paint for chests and arms. All those who had awakened with me had looked human enough in form—dark brown skin like mine, broad cheeks, flat noses—but they were completely hairless from head to crotch. Now, staring at my reflection, I touched my own bald scalp, felt the emptiness under my arms, gazed down at my naked male sex. I was hairless as a newborn, and my foreskin had been cut away, leaving my penis pink and exposed. Worse still, the hundreds of tattoos with which I had so carefully covered my body over the fifty-eight years of my life had vanished.

  I found I barely knew myself. What game was being played on me? What spirit would do such a thing?

  It must be Glasha the Snake, I thought, standing: he was the trickster. Who else would wake me in the spirit-world in such a manner? Or perhaps it was a test. Cocoti the beetle had always tested us, trying to prove man no better than the monkeys in the trees.

  Scowling, I strode up the river and tried to understand where I was, my bare feet splashing through shallows, small silvery fishes darting away before me. A clear area perhaps twenty paces wide extended between the river and a vast field of waist-high grass. We had all awakened on the river’s bank. Far across the grass I could see hills dotted with trees. Ahead I spotted a grove of thick old reeds that came down almost to the water’s edge.

  If this were some spirit’s test, I would master it, I decided. I had led the two-hundred men, women, and children of my village through thirty-three rainy seasons, and I knew the ways of the spirits almost as well as our tribe’s elders. I had walked with the spirits of plants and animals more than a hundred times. They were sly, the spirits: some playful, some serious; some helpful, some not ... but they never did anything without cause. It would be my task to discover that cause if I could. Whether I helped that cause along or resisted it would depend on how it suited my own desires. Here, in the spirit-world, only one thing was certain: I could rely on little but my own wits.

  Several branches as big around as a man’s thumb had washed onto the river’s bank. I picked them up one by one and tried their strength. The first two snapped like twigs. The third felt strong as fire-hardened oak, and its edge came to a point suitable for digging. I quickly stripped it of leaves.

  If man is not animal, he must prove it with his decorations. That must be my first goal, I thought: decorating myself. Paint would do, since I had neither ink nor bone needles for tattoos.

  Twenty paces from the reeds I reached a place where the river had cut more deeply into its bank. I waded out cautiously until the water came to my knees. My toes curled deep in the warm, soft muck of the river’s bottom, feeling for sinkholes and stones, finding neither. It seemed a likely spot, so I dug into it with the pointy end of my stick until, a few handspans down, I reached clay. When I dug out a handful and held it up to the light, it was a pale gray, almost white. I fingered it skeptically. It was coarse and crumbled easily, but it would have to do.

  I spat into it, working my mucus into the clay until it had the right consistency, and dabbed circles and lines across my cheeks and nose. Then I painted four straight lines—warrior’s lines—across my chest and arms.

  Clothed in my decorations, no longer looking like an animal, I started to wade to shore—and came to an abrupt stop. A whole village worth of brown, hairless men and women were standing at the edge of the water, watching me.

  “Where are we?” one of them asked. His accent was strange, twisting the words so they were barely understandable, but I could figure them out. He was tall and broad of shoulder, with a warrior’s wary look in his eye, and I took an instant liking to him: t
his is a good man, something inside me said.

  “It is the spirit-world, of course,” I told him. “We are being tested.”

  Several of the women shrieked. I glared and they fell silent.

  “I am Hiwyan, son of Yagna,” I called to all of them, “headman of the Moboasi.”

  “You lie!” one woman called, coming to the front. She put her hands on her hips. “I knew Hiwyan. He was an old man!”

  I looked her up and down, and though she was thin as an eel and twenty years younger than when I’d last seen her, suddenly I knew who she was: “Maraga,” I told her, “your brother Kianano was my best friend when we were boys. Your husband Kotabi and I raided the Onomi a dozen times together. I am Hiwyan. Do you not recognize me?”

  She squinted, then said, “You are too young, too handsome. Hiwyan was old and scarred when he died.”

  “My body has been made new,” I said. “The spirits have done this to us all—even to you.”

  The warrior who had spoken to me had been nodding his hairless head all the while. “I have heard of the Moboasi,” he said slowly. “They are said to be fierce as enemies and generous as friends.”

  “This is true,” I told him.

  “I am Eona of the Avai, forty years a hunter.”

  “Forty?” I scoffed. “You are a stripling, barely a man.”

  “It seems the spirits have changed us all,” he said. He spread his arms to the heavens. “I thank you, spirits, for making me young again!”

  Someone called, “It is true. I had seen forty-five years when I died!”

  Someone else called, “And I had seen fifty-two!”

  “If we are all here,” I said, “it must be for a reason.” There were murmurs of agreement from everyone present. “We must make a village,” I continued, “and learn what that reason is. Only then will the spirits be content.”

  Maraga continued to study me. “You speak as Hiwyan spoke,” she admitted. “His soul burns within you. I see it in your eyes.”

  “Come help me, Maraga,” I told her. Bending, I scooped out a handful of clay and offered it to her. “We are men, not animals. We must paint ourselves, and then we must build a village.”

  Maraga waded out beside me, took the clay from my hand, and like a headwife, began calling orders to the women and girls watching from the riverbank. To my surprise nobody argued: they were all looking for someone to lead them, I realized. Several girls ran to fetch leaves from the trees, and still others fanned out into the waist-high grass, looking for maggots and berries to mix with the clay to make colored paints.

  Eona waded out beside me and began digging for clay with his bare hands. When a dozen more men waded out to help, I handed my stick to Eona so he could dig for them all.

  “You will be my right hand,” I whispered in his ear. “Gather enough clay to paint every man, woman, and child, then join me by the trees. We must select a place for our village.”

  He nodded and bent to the work, the muscles in his back rippling like wind in the grass. As I watched, sweat began to bead on his forehead and upper lip. He was very strong.

  I waded ashore, motioning to the men who had hung back. There were twenty or thirty of them, some as young as eight or ten, a few as old as I now looked. Reluctantly, it seemed, they approached. I saw fear and confusion in their eyes and knew these were people who needed a strong leader to guide them.

  “You will be our hunters and warriors,” I told them. I still had a little clay left on my hands, and I used it to dab circles under their eyes and draw lines down the bridge of their noses. Eona sent a boy to bring me more clay when I needed it, and I managed to paint every man there before it ran out. The marks weren’t much, but they would show these men as human for now.

  “You must make spears from the reeds,” I told them. “The life of the village depends on you and what game you can catch. We will set up our village while you hunt. Be back before dark. Now go!”

  They slapped their chests and took off for the reeds at a run. My gaze lingered on the last to leave, a lanky young man of perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three, hairless as the rest, but with an angry cast to his dark brown eyes. There was something familiar about the way he moved, I thought, something that made me distinctly uneasy. Had I known him back in the real world? frowned. If so, we must have been enemies—truly, I thought, I would have to watch my back around that one.

  As headman of my village for thirty-three years I had learned well the dangers of treachery. Many had spoken against me over the years, but I talked with a monkey’s limber tongue. I could out-speak any man in the village, so crafty and convincing were my arguments.

  Strong of arm and sharp of eye, I had assumed the feathered mantle of the headman in my twenty-fifty year and brought my people their greatest power. Fearless were the Moboasi under me, and well feared by their enemies. It was my leadership that helped us seize new hunting grounds from the Gonaci and the Acoloas. It was my leadership that stole canoes and women from the despised Mowando and drove them from their shit-stinking village forever. The spirits had smiled over my leadership, and by the time I died the name Hiwyan already lived on in many songs and stories.

  As I paused at the top of the river’s bank, I noticed another cluster of hairless men and women gathered far to my left. They weren’t brown-skinned, but white as a coconut’s meat.

  Are they ghosts? I wondered. Could they be the spirits who brought us here?

  They all stood around a strange tree like none I had ever seen before. The tree’s surface was the silver color of a fish’s scales, but not so shiny. It was low but broad—its top covered the space a whole village would take up—and it had holes cut deep into its silver surface. Its trunk was small and scarcely seemed strong enough to hold it up.

  Several of the white-skinned men were climbing across its lightly sloped surface, sticking their hands in the holes. Like my own people, they seemed to have strange wooden sticks attached to their arms by ropes. As I watched, first one then another of them fitted their sticks into the tree. The sticks seemed to slide into place naturally.

  Ah, I said to myself, that must be what the sticks are for. But why bother to fit them into holes? It made no sense to me.

  Perhaps the spirits who had brought us here would make the tree’s purpose clear later. For an instant I regretting casting my own stick away, but then I realized it would still be where I had thrown it ... after all, who would take it?

  Swallowing, I got up my courage to speak to the white-skinned ghosts or spirits or whatever they were. As I walked toward them, several noticed me and pointed, jabbering in a harsh, flat language I did not understand. They seemed excited to see me, and not unfriendly.

  Halting twenty paces away, I studied them. Although their skins were white, they did not look like ghosts: their faces had a strange sharpness to them, and their noses stuck out too far. They also seemed just as confused as my own people had been. Perhaps they were from a distant tribe?

  I moved closer very slowly, opening my hands with the palms up to show I meant no harm. The white-skins had no spears or knives that I could see, but they could throw rocks and use their hands against me ... or even those sticks attached to their wrists. Perhaps a few of them spoke my language, I thought. Perhaps they could explain what the spirits meant by bringing us all here.

  Their headman and what must have been two of his spear carriers, though they had no spears, came forward to talk with me. The headman had a huge nose—I tried not to stare, but it stuck out at me like a pointing finger and his eyes were the blue of a shallow pool of water. Pale reddish-brown speckles covered his shoulders. Truly I had never seen his like before.

  “Haitheyr,” he said to me in a low, soothing voice. He stuck out his hand cautiously, and when I looked at it, he slowly reached out, took my right hand in his, and moved them both u
p and down a moment before letting go.

  “I am Hiwyan of the Moboasi,” I told him.

  He shook his head and touched his chest. “William Byrd,” he said. “Byrd. Sahvie? Byrd.”

  “Burd,” I said, nodding solemnly; I could follow that much. I pointed to myself. “Hiwyan.”

  “Hi-wee-an,” he said.

  I smiled and he smiled back. I pointed to the strange tree.

  “Did the spirits send it here?” I asked.

  He shook his head and said something incomprehensible. I shook my head back. We were going to have to teach him our language if we were going to get anywhere. Still, he was clearly headman of these strange white-skinned people, since he had come to talk with me, so I decided to show him all the courtesies his position called for. He might prove to be a valuable ally if another tribe or wild animals attacked, I thought. If his people proved dangerous, we could always drive them away.

  He pointed to the man to my left, who was equally pale-skinned and with an equally big nose, though his eyes were the brown of over-ripe bananas. “Carver.” Then he pointed to the man to my right, who was smaller and thinner, with eyes as brown as my own. “Shay,” Burd said.

  “Carvar. Shay,” I repeated, nodding, and the two white-skins nodded back.

  “Come,” I told Burd. I pointed to part of the river where Eona was still digging out clay for the women to mix. I took a step toward it. “Come, Burd.”

  He seemed to understand what I wanted; he turned and spoke quickly to Carvar, and Carvar turned and trotted back to stand by the strange silver tree.