Another World

by Gardner Duzois

  After that, no more men came in except a couple of volunteer medicos. The billets and the planes and the mess were beginning to stink. That dysentery couldn’t be controlled after you got weak.

  What they did get was supplies. Every day or so another ton of stuff would drift down. Most of it was dragged to one side and left to rot. They were swimming in food. The staggering cooks pushed steak and lobster at men who shivered and went out to retch. The hospital even had ample space now, because it turned out that geegee really did kill you in the end. By that time you were glad to go. A cemetery developed at the far side of the strip, among the skeletons of the defoliated trees.

  On the last morning Hobie was sent out to pick up a forward scout team. He was one of the few left with enough stamina for long missions. The three-man team was far into Gué territory, but Hobie didn’t care. All he was thinking about was his bowels. So far he had not fouled himself or his plane. When he was down by their signal he bolted out to squat under the chopper’s tail. The grunts climbed in, yelling at him.

  They had a prisoner with them. The Gué was naked and astonishingly broad. He walked springily; his arms were lashed with wire and a shirt was tied over his head. This was the first Gué Hobie had been close to. As he got in he saw how the Gué’s firm brown flesh glistened and bulged around the wire. He wished he could see his face. The gunner said the Gué was a Sirionó, and this was important because the Sirionós were not known to be with the Gués. They were a very primitive nomadic tribe.

  When Hobie began to fly home he realized he was getting sicker. It became a fight to hold onto consciousness and keep on course. Luckily nobody shot at them. At one point he became aware of a lot of screaming going on behind him, but couldn’t pay attention. Finally he came over the strip and horsed the chopper down. He let his head down on his arms.

  “You O.K.?” asked the gunner.

  “Yeah,” said Hobie, hearing them getting out. They were moving something heavy. Finally he got up and followed them. The floor was wet. That wasn’t unusual. He got down and stood staring in, the floor a foot under his nose. The wet stuff was blood. It was sprayed around, with one big puddle. In the puddle was something soft and fleshy-looking.

  Hobie turned his head. The ladder was wet, too. He held up one hand and looked at the red. The other one, too. Holding them out stiffly he turned and began to walk away across the strip.

  Control, who still hoped to get an evening flight out of him, saw him fall and called the hospital. The two replacement parameds were still in pretty good shape. They came out and picked him up.

  When Hobie came to, one of the parameds was tying his hands down to the bed so he couldn’t tear the IV out again.

  “We’re going to die here,” Hobie told him.

  The paramed looked noncommittal. He was a thin dark boy with a big Adam’s apple.

  “But I shall dine at journey’s end with Landor and with Donne,” said Hobie. His voice was light and facile.

  “Yeats,” said the paramed. “Want some water?”

  Hobie’s eyes flickered. The paramed gave him some water.

  “I really believed it, you know,” Hobie said chattily. “I had it all figured out.” He smiled, something he hadn’t done for a long time.

  “Landor and Donne?” asked the medic. He unhooked the empty IV bottle and hung up a new one.

  “Oh, it was pathetic, I guess,” Hobie said. “It started ou . . . I believed they were real, you know? Kirk, Spock, McCoy, all of them. And the ship. To this day, I swear . . . one of them talked to me once, I mean, he really did. . . . I had it all figured out, they had left me behind as an observer.” Hobie giggled.

  “They were coming back for me. It was secret. All I had to do was sort of fit in and observe. Like a report. One day they would come back and haul me up in that beam thing; maybe you know about that? And there I’d be back in real time where human beings were, where they were human. I wasn’t really stuck here in the past. On a backward planet.”

  The paramed nodded.

  “Oh, I mean, I didn’t really believe it, I knew it was just a show. But I did believe it, too. It was like there, in the background, underneath, no matter what was going on. They were coming for me. All I had to do was observe. And not to interfere. You know? Prime directive . . . Of course after I grew up, I realized they weren’t, I mean I realized consciously. So I was going to go to them. Somehow, somewhere. Out there . . . Now I know. It really isn’t so. None of it. Never. There’s nothing. . . . Now I know I’ll die here.”

  “Oh now.” said the paramed. He got up and started to take things away. His fingers were shaky.

  “It’s clean there,” said Hobie in a petulant voice. “None of this shit. Clean and friendly. They don’t torture people,” he explained, thrashing his head. “They don’t kill—” He slept. The paramed went away.

  Somebody started to yell monotonously.

  Hobie opened his eyes. He was burning up.

  The yelling went on, became screaming. It was dusk. Footsteps went by, headed for the screaming. Hobie saw they had put him in a bed by the door.

  Without his doing much about it the screaming seemed to be lifting him out of the bed, propelling him through the door. Air. He kept getting close-ups of his hands clutching things. Bushes, shadows. Something scratched him.

  After a while the screaming was a long way behind him. Maybe it was only in his ears. He shook his head, felt himself go down onto boards. He thought he was in the cemetery.

  “No,” he said. “Please. Please no.” He got himself up, balanced, blundered on, seeking coolness.

  The side of the plane felt cool. He plastered his hot body against it, patting it affectionately. It seemed to be quite dark now. Why was he inside with no lights? He tried the panel, the lights worked perfectly. Vaguely he noticed some yelling starting outside again. It ignited the screaming in his head. The screaming got very loud—loud—LOUD—and appeared to be moving him, which was good.

  He came to above the overcast and climbing. The oxysupport tube was hitting him in the nose. He grabbed for the mask, but it wasn’t there. Automatically, he had leveled off. Now he rolled and looked around.

  Below him was a great lilac sea of cloud, with two mountains sticking through it, their western tips on fire. As he looked, they dimmed. He shivered, found he was wearing only sodden shorts. How had he got here? Somebody had screamed intolerably and he had run.

  He flew along calmly, checking his board. No trouble except the fuel. Nobody serviced the AX92’s any more. Without thinking about it, he began to climb again. His hands were a yard away and he was shivering but he felt clear. He reached up and found his headphones were in place; he must have put them on along with the rest of the drill. He clicked on. Voices rattled and roared at him. He switched off. Then he took off the headpiece and dropped it on the floor.

  He looked around. 18,000, heading 88-05. He was over the Atlantic. In front of him the sky was darkening fast. A pinpoint glimmer 10 o’clock high. Sirius, probably.

  He thought about Sirius, trying to recall his charts. Then he thought about turning and going back down. Without paying much attention, he noticed he was crying with his mouth open.

  Carefully he began feeding his torches and swinging the nose of his pod around and up. He brought it neatly to a point on Sirius. Up. Up. Behind him a great pale swing of contrail fell away above the lilac shadow, growing, towering to the tiny plane that climbed at its tip. Up. Up. The contrail cut off as the plane burst into the high cold dry.

  As it did so Hobie’s ears skewered and he screamed wildly. The pain quit; his drums had burst. Up! Now he was gasping for air, strangling. The great torches drove him on, up, above the curve of the world. He was hanging on the star. Up! The fuel gauges were knocking. Any second they would quit and he and the bird would be a falling stone. “Beam us up, Scotty!” he howled at Sirius, laughing, coughing—coughing to death, as the torches faltered—

  —And was still coughing as he spraw
led on the shining resiliency under the arcing grids. He gagged, rolled, finally focused on a personage leaning toward him out of a complex chair. The personage had round eyes, a slitted nose and the start of a quizzical smile.

  Hobie’s head swiveled slowly. It was not the bridge of the Enterprise. There were no view-screens, only a View. And Lieutenant Uhura would have had trouble with the freeform flashing objects suspended in front of what appeared to be a girl wearing spots. The spots, Hobie made out, were fur.

  Somebody who was not Bones McCoy was doing something to Hobie’s stomach. Hobie got up a hand and touched the man’s gleaming back. Under the mesh it was firm and warm. The man looked up, grinned; Hobie looked back at the captain.

  “Do not have fear,” a voice was saying. It seemed to be coming out of a globe by the captain’s console. “We will tell you where you are.”

  “I know where I am,” Hobie whispered. He drew a deep, sobbing breath.

  “I’m HOME!” he yelled. Then he passed out.

  THE

  BARBARIAN

  Joanna Russ

  Sophistication and superiority are relative terms, shifting like sand with each change in cultural context, sometimes defining themselves in unexpected and unsettling ways.

  In “The Barbarian” Nebula-winner Joanna Russ, novelist and critic, gives us the sleek and darkly elegant story of a deadly battle of wits between a barbarian adventuress and a seemingly omnipotent time-traveler, some reflections on cultural relativism, and a word of caution for those in danger of confusing the weapon and the arm.

  ALYX, the gray-eyed, the silent woman. Wit, arm, kill-quick for hire, she watched the strange man thread his way through the tables and the smoke toward her. This was in Ourdh, where all things are possible. He stopped at the table where she sat alone and with a certain indefinable gallantry, not pleasant but perhaps its exact opposite, he said:

  “A woman—here?”

  “You’re looking at one,” said Alyx dryly, for she did not like his tone. It occurred to her that she had seen him before—though he was not so fat then, no, not quite so fat—and then it occurred to her that the time of their last meeting had almost certainly been in the hills when she was four or five years old. That was thirty years ago. So she watched him very narrowly as he eased himself into the seat opposite, watched him as he drummed his fingers in a lively tune on the tabletop, and paid him close attention when he tapped one of the marine decorations that hung from the ceiling (a stuffed blowfish, all spikes and parchment, that moved lazily to and fro in a wandering current of air) and made it bob. He smiled, the flesh around his eyes straining into folds.

  “I know you,” he said. “A raw country girl fresh from the hills who betrayed an entire religious delegation to the police some ten years ago. You settled down as a picklock. You made a good thing of it. You expanded your profession to include a few more difficult items and you did a few things that turned heads hereabouts. You were not unknown, even then. Then you vanished for a season and reappeared as a fairly rich woman. But that didn’t last, unfortunately.”

  “Didn’t have to,” said Alyx.

  “Didn’t last,” repeated the fat man imperturbably, with a lazy shake of the head. “No, no, it didn’t last. And now,” (he pronounced the “now” with peculiar relish) “you are getting old.”

  “Old enough,” said Alyx, amused.

  “Old,” said he, “old. Still neat, still tough, still small. But old. You’re thinking of settling down.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Children?”

  She shrugged, retiring a little into the shadow. The fat man did not appear to notice.

  “It’s been done,” she said.

  “You may die in childbirth,” said he, “at your age.”

  “That, too, has been done.”

  She stirred a little, and in a moment a short-handled Southern dagger, the kind carried unobtrusively in sleeves or shoes, appeared with its point buried in the tabletop, vibrating ever so gently.

  “It is true,” said she, “that I am growing old. My hair is threaded with white. I am developing a chunky look around the waist that does not exactly please me, though I was never a ballet-girl.” She grinned at him in the semidarkness. “Another thing,” she said softly, “that I develop with age is a certain lack of patience. If you do not stop making personal remarks and taking up my time—which is valuable—I shall throw you across the room.”

  “I would not, if I were you,” he said.

  “You could not.”

  The fat man began to heave with laughter. He heaved until he choked. Then he said, gasping, “I beg your pardon.” Tears ran down his face.

  “Go on,” said Alyx. He leaned across the table, smiling, his fingers mated tip to tip, his eyes little pits of shadow in his face.

  “I come to make you rich,” he said.

  “You can do more than that,” said she steadily. A quarrel broke out across the room between a soldier and a girl he had picked up for the night; the fat man talked through it, or rather under it, never taking his eyes off her face.

  “Ah!” he said, “you remember when you saw me last and you assume that a man who can live thirty years without growing older must have more to give—if he wishes—than a handful of gold coins. You are right. I can make you live long. I can insure your happiness. I can determine the sex of your children. I can cure all diseases. I can even” (and here he lowered his voice) “turn this table, or this building, or this whole city to pure gold, if I wish it.

  “Can anyone do that?” said Alyx, with the faintest whisper of mockery.

  “I can,” he said. “Come outside and let us talk. Let me show you a few of the things I can do. I have some business here in the city that I must attend to myself and I need a guide and an assistant. That will be you.”

  “If you can turn the city into gold,” said Alyx just as softly, “can you turn gold into a city?”

  “Anyone can do that,” he said, laughing; “come along,” so they rose and made their way into the cold outside air—it was a clear night in early spring—and at a corner of the street where the moon shone down on the walls and the pits in the road, they stopped.

  “Watch,” said he.

  On his outstretched palm was a small black box. He shook it, turning it this way and that, but it remained wholly featureless. Then he held it out to her and, as she took it in her hand, it began to glow until it became like a piece of glass lit up from the inside. There in the middle of it was her man, with his tough, friendly, young-old face and his hair a little gray, like hers. He smiled at her, his lips moving soundlessly. She threw the cube into the air a few times, held it to the side of her face, shook it, and then dropped it on the ground, grinding it under her heel. It remained unhurt.

  She picked it up and held it out to him, thinking:

  Not metal, very light. And warm. A toy? Wouldn’t break, though. Must be some sort of small machine, though God knows who made it and of what. It follows thoughts! Marvelous. But magic? Bah! Never believed in it before; why now? Besides, this thing is too sensible; magic is elaborate, undependable, useless. I’ll tell him—but then it occurred to her that someone had gone to a good deal of trouble to impress her when a little bit of credit might have done just as well. And this man walked with an almighty confidence through the streets for someone who was unarmed. And those thirty years—so she said very politely:

  “It’s magic!”

  He chuckled and pocketed the cube.

  “You’re a little savage,” he said, “but your examination of it was most logical. I like you. Look! I am an old magician. There is a spirit in that box and there are more spirits under my control than you can possibly imagine. I am like a man living among monkeys. There are things spirits cannot do—or things I choose to do myself, take it any way you will. So I pick one of the monkeys who seems brighter than the rest and train it. I pick you. What do you say?”

  “All right,” said Alyx.

  “Calm en
ough!” he chuckled. “Calm enough! Good. What’s your motive?”

  “Curiosity,” said Alyx. “It’s a monkeylike trait.” He chuckled again: his flesh choked it and the noise came out in a high, muffled scream.

  “And what if I bite you,” said Alyx, “like a monkey?”

  “No, little one,” he answered gaily, “you won’t. You may be sure of that.” He held out his hand, still shaking with mirth. In the palm lay a kind of blunt knife which he pointed at one of the whitewashed walls that lined the street. The edges of the wall burst into silent smoke, the whole section trembled and slid, and in an instant it had vanished, vanished as completely as if it had never existed, except for a sullen glow at the raw edges of brick and a pervasive smell of burning. Alyx swallowed.

  “It’s quiet, for magic,” she said softly. “Have you ever used it on men?”

  “On armies, little one.”

  So the monkey went to work for him. There seemed as yet to be no harm in it. The little streets admired his generosity and the big ones his good humor; while those too high for money or flattery he won by a catholic ability that was—so the little picklock thought—remarkable in one so stupid. For about his stupidity there could be no doubt. She smelled it. It offended her. It made her twitch in her sleep, like a ferret. There was in this woman—well hidden away—an anomalous streak of quiet humanity that abhorred him, that set her teeth on edge at the thought of him, though she could not have put into words just what was the matter. For stupidity, she thought, is hardly—is not exactly—

  Four months later they broke into the governor’s villa. She thought she might at last find out what this man was after besides pleasure jaunts around the town. Moreover, breaking and entering always gave her the keenest pleasure; and doing so “for nothing” (as he said) tickled her fancy immensely. The power in gold and silver that attracts thieves was banal, in this thief’s opinion, but to stand in the shadows of a sleeping house, absolutely silent, with no object at all in view and with the knowledge that if you are found you will probably have your throat cut—! She began to think better of him. This dilettante passion for the craft, this reckless silliness seemed to her as worthy as the love of a piece of magnetite for the North and South poles—the “faithful stone” they call it in Ourdh.