Silence. Tableau.
Another sing-song gabble, a threatening movement with the sword.
Ylva's Body Double stepped directly between me and all the sharp points, all the razor-like edges, and murmured, “I'll stall them. You make a run for it."
I said, “Run? Where, for Christ's sake?"
She turned on me with an agonized look. “Please, Mr. Zed. You are the Fountainhead. I'm not even real!"
It made me smile, though I think we were in serious danger just then, and said, “Now, what kind of a Fountainhead would pull a chickenshit stunt like that?"
I put my arm around her, looked the little man with his deadly little sword right in the eye, and said, “So. Komodoflorensal, I presume?” I raised one eyebrow, feeling idiotically Spocklike.
More gabble.
"No? All right. Take me to your leader, then."
The little men were starting to look at one another then, obviously puzzled by something. After a moment, the commander slipped his sword into its sheath, snapped off a sketchy sort of fascist salute, and said, slowly and distinctly, “Kali mera?"
I felt vaguely sick inside, and wanted to say, “It's Greek to me,” but kept my mouth shut.
The little commander sighed audibly, gestured toward the compound with his spear, and said something, another long string of tonal syllables. I shrugged, and we walked the way he said, the troops falling in behind, marching in step as pretty as you please. You know, when I was a kid, I dreamed this dream ten thousand times. Never thought I'd get here via Uranus, though.
Inside the walls of the compound, which were only around six feet high, they took our clothes away, shoes and all, and put us in a wire-mesh cage, a gaggle of little men gathering around to stare and stare. They seemed startled by me, maybe taking me for a sentient Venusian dinosaur whose existence they'd never suspected until now. Most of their attention went to Ylva's Body Double, and I can't say as I blamed them.
After a bit, some obviously high-ranking little men came out and shooed the rest away. The Body Double whispered, “They seem afraid."
"Whoever they are, I don't blame them. Imagine if the first crew had set down on Mars back in the 2020s, and found a giant alien lizard in the company of a twenty-foot-tall human female."
They addressed us in sing-song gabble, at first conversationally, then in ever louder tones. Finally, they fell to arguing with one another, and you could hear the utter scorn in one man's voice. I could imagine the dialogue: “What? You thought they'd speak [whatever]? Doofus!"
I stepped forward then, and said, “Guys? Do you speak anything else?” They shut up, turned and looked, wide-eyed. “Sprechen sie Deutsch? Ni hao bu hao? Cu vi povas diri al me, kie estas la stacio?” A soft whispergabble among them.
I looked at Ylva's Body Double, BD4048 ... Hell, I can't call her that. She said, “I don't think they've tried other languages, even similar sounding ones. The phonetic structures and tonal variation are too consistent."
"In a typical group of Americans from the mid-twentieth century, I guess you'd find some other languages. There was some instruction in Spanish and French in public school. And a lot of city kids would know some Italian or Yiddish, depending on who they were..."
They went away, leaving us alone but for one very wide-eyed guard, as the bloody sky turned gradually to black. No stars. No Moon. No nothing. Around what felt like midnight, floodlights went on in the distance, and you could see the silvery nose of the giant spaceship poking above the wall. Sounds of distant voices, shouting instructions, calling cadence, all of it sing-song pretty. Distant grumble of big diesel engines. After a while, a horde of little men came and let us out of the cage, little men backing away, pointing spears in our direction, herding us to the wall, where the gates were opening once again.
I said, “Hey, guys? It's chilly out here now.” I wrapped my arms round my chest and shivered theatrically. “How about our clothes?” Stern gabble of command, gestures with swords and spears. We were marched away naked in the darkness then, surrounded by an inward turning hedgehog of spears.
It took maybe an hour for us to get to the ship and its handling facilities, Body Double taking it all in stoical silence, me cussing whenever I stepped on something sharp or stubbed my toe on some root or rock. Once, there was a deep rumble from the scrubland beside the trail, huge, glowing yellow eyes rising above us, maybe a meter apart, maybe more, and a whole phalanx of spears turned away to face whatever it was.
It shied quickly from the little men's ruddy flashlights, shied like a beast before fire, but I caught a glimpse of something that looked an awful lot like an allosaur.
Ylva's Body Double whispered, “I think the flashlights are the same wavelength as the lights in the ship."
The lost derelict floating in Uranus? I said, “If they can open doors in the air whenever they want, why do they need spaceships?"
When I was eleven or twelve, we had to write a short story as an assignment for seventh grade English class. I'd chosen to write one about a group of men having a desperate adventure on savage Venus, the Venus I still believed in until Mariner II wiped it away the following spring. In the story, the men had aircraft I called cloud skimmers, named after a bird I'd seen in a book, and as my principal plot device I'd had them experience an unusual number of air crashes.
When she handed it back, marked with a B+, the teacher said, “Good story, Alan.” Then she'd laughed. “Don't you think the cloud skimmers are a little unreliable?” This felt a little like that.
The spaceship, when we got near, was gorgeous, and really all of six hundred feet tall. What would that be, to the little men? Close to half a mile! Back in our own universe, if that's what was going on here, the biggest interplanetary freighters ERSIE was selling these days were maybe half that, spaceships the size of ocean liners, spaceships as big as the Hindenberg had been.
In the days of rockets, the biggest thing ever lifted off Earth had been a little more than four hundred feet tall. It put the little men's achievements in sobering perspective.
They got us aboard by lifting us up in the bucket of a huge T-crane, Body Double first, then me. More guards on me, and I guess it made sense from their perspective, me being a giant lizard and all. Maybe it said something about their culture as well, something that made them seem even more human.
We had to crawl through an obvious cargo hatch, into a space maybe four feet high, a wedge-shaped chamber that took up about an eighth of the ship's circumference, with a sealed, little-man size hatch in the narrow end. There were blankets the size of lap shawls on the floor, a few half-liter plastic containers of water in a wall-mounted rack, a couple of those little pillows they used to give you on long-range airliners, back in the day.
Thumpings outside.
Shiverings in the ship.
Ylva's Body Double was sitting with her back to one bare wall, knees drawn up, dark eyes on me. One look, and I felt a pulse of exasperation at myself. One of the irksome and ridiculous things about being a human male, even one who had been made into a goddam immortal lizard, is when the right cues are present, you can't think about anything else. And I could see, once again, the Body Double could tell exactly what I was thinking.
There was a deep rumbling from below, followed by a moment of silence, then a faraway whine, a soft shivering in the deck, a complex whipcrack thud from somewhere far below, and the ship swayed like it was about to topple, and a brilliant blue-violet glare started to build up in the portholes.
The ride to orbit was long and violent, spaceship rattling around us, as if threatening to shake right apart, rising through clouds and sky, up into starry black space, pinned to the floor by four or five gee.
The ship accelerated just that hard for many minutes while we slid this way and that as it twisted and turned with rough steering that made me realize how primitive its technology must be. Primitive? Hell, only compared to ERSIE's found firefox drive. From the placement of hatches and motors, this ship was no more t
han half its volume fuel. What would that be? Not fission or fusion, like what we'd had before the field modulus device made its magical debut.
Some ultra-dense fuel; some magically high specific impulse for the reaction engine? Working fluid injected through a quantum black hole on its way to the nozzle? Without direct control of the fundamental forces of the universe, space travel was hard bordering on impossible. And this ship was a wonder of engineering skill.
When the engine shut down, we floated off the deck, blankets and pillows rising around us like cartoon ghosts. I felt my stomach flipflop, my gorge rise, then my “space legs” reasserted themselves from decades of zero gee travel, and I pushed gently over to the nearest porthole.
Outside, swirly yellow Other Venus was shrinking visibly, letting us know how fast we were climbing away, bound for who knows where. Off to one side, the sun seemed a lot larger than it had from real Venus, when I'd visited the space station the Chinese had in orbit there. Bigger, and strangely colored. Though astronomers refer to our sun as a yellow star, the light from the sun is white, and it looks like a searing hole in the sky. This one? Orange maybe, tinged toward red. Still too bright to look at, though I supposed these portholes were tinted, and UV-opaque as well, but not ... hell. It looks like a star in a Bonestell painting.
The Body Double said, “Maybe a week to Earth, or just a little more. I can't say without a direct velocity measurement."
"As good as an ERSIE ship, in that regard.” I wondered what the Earth of these little men would be like, picturing everything from tiny American cities to the giant mounds of the Ant Men. Trohanadalmakus, Veltopismakus, all the wonders of that imaginary past. I figured we'd find out soon enough. Turned out to be a bad guess.
The week went by, then another, estimated by our consumption of water, by the delivery of meals in an otherwise empty elevator beyond the little axial door, by the steady shrinking of the red-orange sun outside. Nothing else moved, fixed stars staying far away as always.
Zero gee sex is fun, the same way swimming pool sex is fun, especially when you have a partner so utterly devoted to doing everything you want, just the way you want, and I eventually stopped imagining the little men greedily watching us over hidden cameras.
Hell, maybe by now we're the biggest porn stars in Minuni!
But everything gets old, too, like having pizza every day for a month. Sooner or later, you find yourself staring out the window, twiddling your toes, and wishing you had something else to do. Anything else.
The view out these windows wasn't too interesting either, once Venus dwindled away to a dot eventually lost in the sea of stars. I kept looking along what the Body Double and I agreed was the ecliptic, thinking this one or maybe that one might be Earth...
"Ylva..."
She drifted over to look out the porthole beside me. She'd gotten used to me calling her by that name sometimes, though I could tell she still didn't think it was right. But Body Double wasn't right either, nor Forty-Forty-Eight. I said, “That red spark over there. Mars?"
"Maybe.” Then she said, “Draw a line from the center of the visible sun to the red spark. See the two yellows in between?"
"Yeah?"
"One's the Venus we came from, and the other one, if I'm judging its movement correctly, would be Earth."
Huh? I said, “It's not blue enough to be Earth."
"No. And your vision is considerably better than an unmod human, Mr. Zed. Do you see the Moon?"
I looked hard. Averted my eyes a fraction of a degree, and looked harder. “No."
"It's in the right orbit to be Earth."
Okay. It's some other universe. No reason there shouldn't be something different in Earth's orbit. What was in Venus's orbit wasn't really Venus either.
She said, “Follow that same line to the left. See that orange dot?"
I did. “Jupiter? Seems awfully bright."
She nodded. “Saturn's probably on the other side of the ship. I can't find it, anyway."
"So...?"
She said, “I think that's where we're going."
I put my arm around her, holding her close, glad to feel her ever-so-human warmth, something I'd been doing more and more as the trip wore on. I think she liked it too, though it was hard to tell. Ylva Herself had done just too fine a job making the Body Doubles like what they did.
Sometimes I like to meditate before the urn of Sarah's ashes on the rare days I'm in my office at ERSIE headquarters. When I was a young man, I thought the “snuggling” women loved to bleat about was ridiculous, some bizarre mechanism, like social dancing, to claim a man's gift of intimacy without giving sex in exchange.
Sarah had taught me there might be something to it after all.
Sorry I got you killed, kiddo. It was an interesting old life.
I said, “Oddny."
The Body Double looked at me curiously. “Odd knee?” She showed just a spark of human amusement. “I've got two knees, Mr. Zed. Which is the odd one?"
I laughed, marveling at just how real she'd become. “Oddny was the name of one of Orm and Ylva's daughters. The quiet one."
Puzzled look. “Ylva Johanssen's daughter was named..."
I put a finger to her lips, silencing her. “Red Orm. Franz Gunnar Bengtsson."
"A book?” She got a faraway look then. “Ylva has read it, read it to her real children when they were young. The plot was never added to my memory store."
I felt a pang of sorrow for her then. “I think I may have read it fifty times when I was a boy. I'll tell you the story, if you like."
Eyes on me then, eyes very wide, something in them I couldn't read at all, a misty gloss, almost like unshed tears. “Tell me the story, Mr. Zed. Please."
Oddny's not your name, my dear Body Double, but it'll do. And Mr. Zed? Not my name, but it'll do as well. No sense in you calling me Alan Burke. He died in prison, some time in the late 2020s.
Then I said, “'Many restless men rowed north from Skania with Bue and Vagn, and found ill fortune at Jorundfjord; others marched with Styrbjorn to Uppsala and died there with him...’”
Before the story was finished, Other Jupiter grew vast and orange in the porthole, lit from within, hanging like a Chinese lantern in the black sky, then a blue-yellow-white world swelled below us, and the ship's engines went on, pressing us to the floor.
Before the story was finished, I could see, Oddny became real to herself. I wondered how that story would turn out, too.
The ship made a rough landing, shuddering as it backed down through thickening air and the sky turned blue-violet outside. I wondered which world this was supposed to be in the table of otherwhen equivalents, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto. None of those, surely. What it looked like was a terraformed Luna, set in orbit around a not-quite-stellified Jupiter, even to the five interconnected seas on the side facing us.
Once the ship was down, three wary little men dressed in feathers and leather came from the axial elevator door, two holding us unnecessarily at swords’ point while the last put us in cuffs and leg irons that, on the scale of little men, might have been suitable for King Kong.
The cargo hatch in the side of the ship opened and we were lowered to the ground one at a time, down to the burnt and cracked concrete of the landing apron, where I stood gaping at the sky. Deep blue indigo violet, with skerries of soft pastel clouds, beyond, banded Jupiter hanging aglow, while the sun was a shrunken red orb settled above the horizon.
Gabbling little men with spears marched us over to what was unmistakably a flatbed truck, made us get aboard and sit down. When the engine grumbled to life, she sniffed and said, “Diesel."
"You'd think they could do better."
The city streets were lined with staring little people, voices like a trillion warbling birds. Once again, they seemed much more interested in Oddny than in me. Would it be that way on Earth? Would goggle-eyed throngs ignore the captive dinosaur in favor of gazing enraptured at a beautiful naked giant woman? Of course they would.
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The city itself ... strange. Call it Russo-Sino-Mayan architecture, with blue-painted onion domes and golden spires mixed among the step pyramids and pagodas.
Eventually, they backed the truck through a big door in the side of a cavernous empty building, a warehouse maybe, made us get off onto the grease-stained concrete floor, and brought down the overhead doors. There was a heavy thudding of massive latches slamming home, then nothing more.
"Christ, wouldn't've hurt them to take off the cuffs and give us blankets to sit on."
Oddny said, “They're treating us badly by any reasonable standard."
Who's to know what's reasonable treatment to them? “They're not really human so..."
"I think they are."
"Really? Midgets?"
She smiled and shrugged, splendid to behold. “More like Pygmies."
"Hmh. Pretty little for Pygmies. Puny even as Hobbits go..."
There were windows running around the upper part of the walls, much too high for a little man to see out, so obviously meant to admit daylight. I could see out by standing on tiptoe, out into the city and landscape beyond. “We're in some kind of industrial park, I think. Probably the best they could do.” Until a cage in the city zoo is ready, maybe?
I reached up and tapped the glass, which seemed pretty sturdy. From outside, I heard a faint singsong gabble, and a couple of spearpoints waved into view.
She said, “Does it seem odd to you they have high acceleration interplanetary spacecraft, and run around with swords, spears, no guns?"
I said, “Nothing since we went through the hyperdoor back on Uranus has seemed anything but absurd."
She smiled. “I think the leg irons are going to make sex a little difficult."
Made me laugh. “I'll live, Oddny."
A shadow crossed her face. “You have to.” Then she whispered, “Thank you for the name."
In the morning, I was a little stiff and tired, Oddny, being merely human but for the now-silent radio link in her head, perhaps a little more so. We'd talked far into a night of unknown length, about where we were, where we'd been, what we'd seen since coming through the hyperdoor from the derelict ship on Uranus.
Asimov's SF, October-November 2009 Page 28