The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II

by David G. Hartwell

  The Lords turned back from the glances at Rambo.

  Said Starmount, icily: “And why did you do that?”

  “Because I wanted him to travel through space.”

  “Why?”

  “To show it could be done.”

  “And do you, my Lord Crudelta, affirm that this man has in fact traveled through space3?”

  “I do.”

  “Are you lying?”

  “I have the right to lie, but I have no wish to do so. In the name of the Instrumentality itself, I tell you that this is the truth.”

  The panel members gasped. Now there was no way out. Either the Lord Crudelta was telling the truth, which meant that all former times had come to an end and that a new age had begun for all the kinds of mankind, or else he was lying in the face of the most powerful form of affirmation which any of them knew.

  Even Starmount himself took a different tone. His teasing, restless, intelligent voice took on a new timbre of kindness.

  “You do therefore assert that this man has come back from outside our galaxy with nothing more than his own natural skin to cover him? No instruments? No power?”

  “I did not say that,” said Crudelta. “Other people have begun to pretend I used such words. I tell you, my Lords, that I planoformed for twelve consecutive Earth days and nights. Some of you may remember where Outpost Baiter Gator is. Well, I had a good Go-captain, and he took me four long jumps beyond there, out into intergalactic space. I left this man there. When I reached Earth, he had been here twelve days, more or less. I have assumed, therefore, that his trip was more or less instantaneous. I was on my way back to Baiter Gator, counting by Earth time, when the doctor here found this man on the grass outside the hospital.”

  Vomact raised his hand. The Lord Starmount gave him the right to speak. “My sirs and Lords, we did not find this man on the grass. The robots did, and made a record. But even the robots did not see or photograph his arrival.”

  “We know that,” said Starmount angrily, “and we know that we have been told that nothing came to Earth by any means whatever, in that particular quarter hour. Go on, my Lord Crudelta. What relation are you to Rambo?”

  “He is my victim.”

  “Explain yourself!”

  “I computered him out. I asked the machines where I would be most apt to find a man with a tremendous lot of rage in him, and was informed that on Earth Four the rage level had been left high because that particular planet had a considerable need for explorers and adventurers, in whom rage was a strong survival trait. When I got to Earth Four, I commanded the authorities to find out which border cases had exceeded the limits of allowable rage. They gave me four men. One was much too large. Two were old. This man was the only candidate for my excitement. I chose him.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Tell him? I told him his sweetheart was dead or dying.”

  “No, no,” said Starmount. “Not at the moment of crisis. What did you tell him to make him cooperate in the first place?”

  “I told him,” said the Lord Crudelta evenly, “that I was myself a Lord of the Instrumentality and that I would kill him myself if he did not obey, and obey promptly.”

  “And under what custom or law did you act?”

  “Reserved material,” said the Lord Crudelta promptly. “There are telepaths here who are not a part of the Instrumentality. I beg leave to defer until we have a shielded place.”

  Several members of the panel nodded and Starmount agreed with them. He changed the line of questioning.

  “You forced this man, therefore, to do something which he did not wish to do?”

  “That is right,” said the Lord Crudelta.

  “Why didn’t you go yourself, if it is that dangerous?”

  “My Lords and honorables, it was the nature of the experiment that the experimenter himself should not be expended in the first try. Artyr Rambo has indeed traveled through space3. I shall follow him myself in due course.” (How the Lord Crudelta did do so is another tale, told about another time.) “If I had gone and if I had been lost, that would have been the end of the space3 trials. At least for our time.”

  “Tell us the exact circumstances under which you last saw Artyr Rambo before you met after the battle in the Old Main Hospital.”

  “We had put him in a rocket of the most ancient style. We also wrote writing on the outside of it, just the way the Ancients did when they first ventured into space. Ah, that was a beautiful piece of engineering and archaeology! We copied everything right down to the correct models of fourteen thousand years ago, when the Paroskii and Murkins were racing each other into space. The rocket was white, with a red and white gantry beside it. The letters IOM were on the rocket, not that the words mattered. The rocket has gone into nowhere, but the passenger sits here. It rose on a stool of fire. The stool became a column. Then the landing field disappeared.”

  “And the landing field,” said Starmount quietly, “what was that?”

  “A modified planoform ship. We have had ships go milky in space because they faded molecule by molecule. We have had others disappear utterly. The engineers had changed this around. We took out all the machinery needed for circumnavigation, for survival or for comfort. The landing field was to last three or four seconds, no more. Instead, we put in fourteen planoform devices, all operating in tandem, so that the ship would do what other ships do when they planoform – namely, drop one of our familiar dimensions and pick up a new dimension from some unknown category of space – but do it with such force as to get out of what people call space2 and move over into space3.

  “And space3, what did you expect of that?”

  “I thought that it was universal and instantaneous, in relation to our universe. That everything was equally distant from everything else. That Rambo, wanting to see his girl again, would move in a thousandth of a second from the empty space beyond Outpost Baiter Gator into the hospital where she was.”

  “And, my Lord Crudelta, what made you think so?”

  “A hunch, my Lord, for which you are welcome to kill me.”

  Starmount turned to the panel. “I suspect, my Lords, that you are more likely to doom him to long life, great responsibility, immense rewards, and the fatigue of being his own difficult and complicated self.”

  The miters moved gently and the members of the panel rose.

  “You, my Lord Crudelta, will sleep till the trial is finished.”

  A robot stroked him and he fell asleep.

  “Next witness,” said the Lord Starmount, “in five minutes.”

  Vomact tried to keep Rambo from being heard as a witness. He argued fiercely with the Lord Starmount in the intermission. “You Lords have shot up my hospital, abducted two of my patients, and now you are going to torment both Rambo and Elizabeth. Can’t you leave them alone? Rambo is in no condition to give coherent answers and Elizabeth may be damaged if she sees him suffer.”

  The Lord Starmount said to him, “You have your rules, doctor, and we have ours. This trial is being recorded, inch by inch and moment by moment. Nothing is going to be done to Rambo unless we find that he has planet-killing powers. If that is true, of course, we will ask you to take him back to the hospital and to put him to death very pleasantly. But I don’t think it will happen. We want his story so that we can judge my colleague Crudelta. Do you think that the Instrumentality would survive if it did not have fierce internal discipline?”

  Vomact nodded sadly; he went back to Grosbeck and Timofeyev, murmuring sadly to them, “Rambo’s in for it. There’s nothing we could do.”

  The panel reassembled. They put on their judicial miters. The lights of the room darkened and the weird blue light of justice was turned on.

  The robot orderly helped Rambo to the witness chair.

  “You are obliged,” said Starmount, “to speak quickly and clearly to this court.”

  “You’re not Elizabeth,” said Rambo.

  “I am the Lord Starmount,” said the inves
tigating Lord, quickly deciding to dispense with the formalities. “Do you know me?”

  “No,” said Rambo.

  “Do you know where you are?”

  “Earth,” said Rambo.

  “Do you wish to lie or to tell the truth?”

  “A lie,” said Rambo, “is the only truth which men can share with each other, so I will tell you lies, the way we always do.”

  “Can you report your trip?”

  “No.”

  “Why not, citizen Rambo?”

  “Words won’t describe it.”

  “Do you remember your trip?”

  “Do you remember your pulse of two minutes ago?” countered Rambo.

  “I am not playing with you,” said Starmount. “We think you have been in space3 and we want you to testify about the Lord Crudelta.”

  “Oh!” said Rambo. “I don’t like him. I never did like him.”

  “Will you nevertheless try to tell us what happened to you?”

  “Should I, Elizabeth?” asked Rambo of the girl, who sat in the audience.

  She did not stammer. “Yes,” she said, in a clear voice which rang through the big room. “Tell them, so that we can find our lives again.”

  “I will tell you,” said Rambo.

  “When did you last see the Lord Crudelta?”

  “When I was stripped and fitted to the rocket, four jumps out beyond Outpost Baiter Gator. He was on the ground. He waved goodbye to me.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “The rocket rose. It felt very strange, like no craft I had ever been in before. I weighed many, many gravities.”

  “And then?”

  “The engines went on. I was thrown out of space itself.”

  “What did it seem like?”

  “Behind me I left the working ships, the cloth and the food which goes through space. I went down rivers which did not exist. I felt people around me though I could not see them, red people shooting arrows at live bodies.”

  “Where were you?” asked a panel member.

  “In the wintertime where there is no summer. In an emptiness like a child’s mind. In peninsulas which had torn loose from the land. And I was the ship.”

  “You were what?” asked the same panel member.

  “The rocket nose. The cone. The boat. I was drunk. It was drunk. I was the drunkboat myself,” said Rambo.

  “And where did you go?” resumed Starmount.

  “Where crazy lanterns stared with idiot eyes. Where the waves washed back and forth with the dead of all the ages. Where the stars became a pool, and I swam in it. Where blue turns to liquor, stronger than alcohol, wilder than music, fermented with the red red reds of love. I saw all the things that men have ever thought they saw, but it was me who really saw them. I’ve heard phosphorescence singing and tides that seemed like crazy cattle clawing their way out of the ocean, their hooves beating the reefs. You will not believe me, but I found Floridas wilder than this, where the flowers had human skins and eyes like big cats.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked the Lord Starmount.

  “What I found in space3,” snapped Artyr Rambo. “Believe it or not. This is what I now remember. Maybe it’s a dream, but it’s all I have. It was years and years and it was the blink of an eye. I dreamed green nights. I felt places where the whole horizon became one big waterfall. The boat that was me met children and I showed them El Dorado, where the gold men live. The people drowned in space washed gently past me. I was a boat where all the lost spaceships lay drowned and still. Seahorses which were not real ran beside me. The summer month came and hammered down the sun. I went past archipelagoes of stars, where the delirious skies opened up for wanderers. I cried for me. I wept for man. I wanted to be the drunkboat sinking. I sank. I fell. It seemed to me that the grass was a lake, where a sad child, on hands and knees, sailed a toy boat as fragile as a butterfly in spring. I can’t forget the pride of unremembered flags, the arrogance of prisons which I suspected, the swimming of the businessmen! Then I was on the grass.”

  “This may have scientific value,” said the Lord Starmount, “but it is not of judicial importance. Do you have any comment on what you did during the battle in the hospital?”

  Rambo was quick and looked sane: “What I did, I did not do. What I did not do, I cannot tell. Let me go, because I am tired of you and space, big men and big things. Let me sleep and let me get well.”

  Starmount lifted his hand for silence.

  The panel members stared at him.

  Only the few telepaths present knew that they had all said, “Aye. Let the mango. Let the girl go. Let the doctors go. But bring back the Lord Crudelta later on. He has many troubles ahead of him, and we wish to add to them.”

  Between the Instrumentality, the Manhome Government and the authorities at the Old Main Hospital, everyone wished to give Rambo and Elizabeth happiness.

  As Rambo got well, much of his Earth Four memory returned. The trip faded from his mind.

  When he came to know Elizabeth, he hated the girl.

  This was not his girl – his bold, saucy, Elizabeth of the markets and the valleys, of the snowy hills and the long boat rides. This was somebody meek, sweet, sad and hopelessly loving.

  Vomact cured that.

  He sent Rambo to the Pleasure City of the Herperides, where bold and talkative women pursued him because he was rich and famous.

  In a few weeks – a very few indeed – he wanted his Elizabeth, this strange shy girl who had been cooked back from the dead while he rode space with his own fragile bones.

  “Tell the truth, darling.” He spoke to her once gravely and seriously. “The Lord Crudelta did not arrange the accident which killed you?”

  “They say he wasn’t there,” said Elizabeth. “They say it was an actual accident. I don’t know. I will never know.”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” said Rambo. “Crudelta’s off among the stars, looking for trouble and finding it. We have our bungalow, and our waterfall, and each other.”

  “Yes, my darling,” she said, “each other. And no fantastic Floridas for us.”

  He blinked at this reference to the past, but he said nothing. A man who has been through space3 needs very little in life, outside of not going back to space3. Sometimes he dreamed he was the rocket again, the old rocket taking off on an impossible trip. Let other men follow! he thought. Let other men go! I have Elizabeth and I am here.

  Another World

  J. H. ROSNY AÎNÉ

  Translated by Damon Knight

  J. H. Rosny aîné was the pseudonym of the important French (Belgian) writer Joseph-Henri Boëx (1856–1940). He was the author of 107 novels, essays, plays, memoirs, etc., a friend of Alphonse Daudet, and a President of the Académie Goncourt. He wrote a small number of SF works, including prehistoric romances such as The Giant Cat (1918; translated 1924)and The Quest for Fire (1901; translated 1967), from which the film Quest for Fire (1981) was made. Only three of his important SF stories have been translated into English, but he is the most important French SF writer between Jules Verne and the contemporary period. This story has only appeared once before in English, in an early 1960s anthology. So his influence on the evolution of the genre in English has thus far been indirect.

  Damon Knight, the well-known SF critic and the translator of this piece, said that while only a few of Rosny’s works were science fiction, “those few were precedent-making, germinal works. Rosny, not Verne, is considered the father of French science fiction.” Knight goes on to say, “I love this story for its human warmth, and for what it has to tell us, not only about one superman, but about the adolescence of all gifted, ‘different’ human beings. I admire it for many reasons, but chiefly for the absolute, circumstantial conviction with which it describes an imaginary order of living creatures. Few writers have even attempted this most difficult kind of fictional invention: fewer still have succeeded so brilliantly.”

  This is both a unique “fourth dimension” story
and a superman story, set in a small village in France where the events have no impact on the outside world. It is the earliest story in this anthology, published the same year as Wells’s The Time Machine, 1895. It is every bit as powerfully imaginative as Wells, and gives evidence of the substantial trend in literature in the 1890s toward the themes and ideas of science fiction in works that later coalesced into the founding documents of the genre in a work by an early Modern writer.

  ———————————

  I

  I was born in Gelderland, where our family holdings had dwindled to a few acres of heath and yellow water. Along the boundary grew pine trees that rustled with a metallic sound. The farmhouse had only a few habitable rooms left and was falling apart stone by stone in the solitude. Ours was an old family of herdsmen, once numerous, now reduced to my parents, my sister and myself.

  My fate, dismal enough at the beginning, became the happiest I could imagine: I met the one who understands me; he will teach those things that formerly I alone knew among men. But for many years I suffered and despaired, a prey to doubt and the loneliness of the soul, which nearly ended by eating away my absolute faith.

  I came into the world with a unique constitution, and from the very beginning I was the object of wonder. Not that I seemed ill-formed; I was, I am told, more shapely in face and body than is customary in newborn infants. But my color was most unusual, a sort of pale violet – very pale, but quite distinct. By lamplight, especially by the light of oil lamps, this tint grew paler still, turned to a curious whiteness, like that of a lily submerged in water. That, at least, was how I appeared to others (for I saw myself differently, as I saw everything in the world differently). To this first peculiarity others were added which only revealed themselves later.

  Though born with a healthy appearance, I developed poorly. I was thin, and I cried incessantly; at the age of eight months, I had never been seen to smile. Soon my life was despaired of. The doctor from Zwartendam declared I was suffering from congenital weakness; he could think of no remedy but a strict regimen. Nonetheless I continued to waste away; the family expected me to disappear altogether from one day to the next. My father, I think, was resigned to it, his pride – the Hollander’s pride in regularity and order – little soothed by the grotesque appearance of his child. My mother, on the contrary, loved me all the more for my strangeness, having made up her mind that the color of my skin was pleasing.