Tomorrow Lies in Ambush

by Bob Shaw

  She set the table for breakfast, really seeing things for the first time, testing her new powers. The chairs were all of sleek weightless metal—that was because the star ship would have had chairs and they were easily portable; but the big kitchen table and cupboards were wooden and home-made. The range on which she cooked with a log fire had been fashioned from some kind of heavy machine casing, but the cups and dishes were beautifully styled in brilliant, glass-smooth plastic. In a way she did not mind the changes, except for the fact that outside the window was a garden full of dark green things. She was going to miss the roses.

  “I’ve made your favourite this morning,” she said, carrying a smoking tray to the table. “Griddle cakes.”

  Carl stared down at them, pressing the back of his hand to his forehead. “That’s great. That’s really great. My favourite breakfast every day—every God-damned day in life. You’re some cook, Dumbo.”

  The older boys giggled appreciatively.

  Dumbo opened her mouth to hit back, then realised it would have been a mistake. Carl always spoke to her like that and she never answered back. That’s why she was called Dumbo instead of … her memory baulked … could it be Victoria? Anyway, the point was that Carl acted as though he hated her, and this made the mystery of their past even deeper. Suppose the star ship had made a forced descent on an empty world, with no hope of ever being found. Further suppose she had been the only woman on board, perhaps married to one of the crew, and Carl had murdered all the others so that he could have her. It might account for the use of the memory-killing, euphoria-producing drug—but it explained nothing else.

  The day was hot, sunny and uneventful.

  Carl spent most of the time working in his fields. Surveying her surroundings from the front of the house Dumbo noted that the sloping grain fields had not been part of the fantasy world. She wondered if the crop was indigenous to the planet or if star ships normally carried seed as part of a survival kit. Assuming the ship had been lost, they had been lucky to alight on this perfect pastoral world—but perhaps it had not been that way at all. Carl might have abducted her and brought her here purposely, to escape from something.

  Dumbo contented herself with the task of caring for the children and the house. It was, after all, woman’s work. She could lie low for another day or two and, provided the drug had had no permanent effect, simply wait for all answers to emerge from her memory. And perhaps the explanation would be sane and reasonable, and things would be wonderful again. Dumbo began to feel hopeful.

  During the night she remembered her brother.

  Crossing the river in daytime had been easy, but by starlight the flat stones of the ford were mere water-borne shadows of uncertain shape and position.

  Dumbo slipped once and went knee-deep in water with a splash. The noise frightened her. She stared about her in the darkness, suddenly aware that this was an alien world where at night even the vegetation might be hostile. The tree’s not a tree, she remembered a stray line, when there’s nobody there on the heath.

  Shivering unhappily, she stepped on to the bank and moved up the hill in the direction of the star ship.

  The mental pictures of her brother had appeared abruptly. At first she had thought they might be of a husband—this tall, rangy, fair-haired youngster with the intelligent eyes—but the emotional response was wrong. She knew the way a woman felt about her man, the way she felt about Carl. There was an immediate affection and warmth here, but an indefinable sexual blankness, the drawing of a line which meant womb-sharing. The same flesh and blood. At that point the need to know more had become too urgent to resist.

  From the crest of the hill the star ship was almost invisible in the darkness. As she walked down to it, dress slapping wetly on her shins, the ship’s outlines refused to be defined. It seemed to crawl on the ground, dissolve, shake like jelly, reach gleeful hands into the sky. Dumbo watched her own feet and kept walking until she was close enought for her eyes to map the hull’s contours. She had trouble finding the door but once the handle was in her hand instinct took over. The lever clicked sideways easily and the door opened towards her.

  There was light inside.

  Dumbo tensed to run but there was a cold stillness to the light which suggested that it always shone, even when there was nobody there to notice. She went up a narrow metal stair into a corridor which curved away for a short distance on each side, ending in featureless metal doors. The light came from a tube which ran the full length of the corridor ceiling. Two sections of it were fainter than the others, and a third had dulled to a cloudy amber.

  Dumbo hesitated, then went to the right. Cold air puffed out around her as she opened the door. The large room beyond it was dimly lit and filled with rack after rack of transparent plastic boxes. Dumbo slammed the door shut but not before she had glimpsed the rows of nameless organs—glistening brown, pale blue, red-veined.

  She pressed both hands to her lifting stomach and breathed deeply for a moment, snatching air.

  The other door opened into a shorter transverse corridor which led to several doorways at her level and, by way of an open metal stair and catwalk, to a similar set of rooms above. Some of the doors were closed, others lay open. Dumbo looked into the nearest room—it was tiny and contained a number of long metallic objects on a stand. Rifles, she thought, feeling the vivid stains of memory flow into yet another compartment of her mind. She opened two lockers and found pistols and grenades. She touched the luminous dials of the grenades’ time fuses, frowning thoughtfully—it appeared that not all her regained memories would be pleasant.

  The second room along the corridor was larger and much brighter lit than the others. In the centre of it was a long white table supported on a single, complicated pedestal. Around the walls were gleaming, incomprehensible machines and instruments, the sight of which failed to evoke any responsive wash of memory. I was a stranger here, she thought, even then. She closed the door.

  None of the other rooms on the bottom level was of interest, except the one which had obviously been a combined galley and mess. The chairs were all gone—they were back at the house—but one of the cupboards still contained cups and dishes. The sight of the familiar glowing utensils in the alien surroundings gave Dumbo a vague emotional wrench.

  On the upper level she chose the central room first.

  Her reaction to the five massively cushioned chairs and curving instrument arrays was so strong that it caused a moment of nearly physical pain. She crossed the faintly lit room to touch the dusty seats and blank grey screens. I knew this place, she thought wonderingly, and yet it’s so … mechanical. Only a trained engineer could have been at home in this room. Could she have been a pilot? Dumbo turned her head to drink in more of the strange yet almost familiar environment, then she glanced over her shoulder.

  In the shadows behind the door stood five helmeted figures.

  She leapt back awkwardly, but the figures were only empty suits clipped to the wall. Their hoses and cables hung loose, and behind the faceplates was nothing but gaping blackness. Two of the suits had triangular flashes on the shoulders and name plates cemented to the chests. Dumbo went close enough to read.

  The first said, SURG./CDR. CARL VAN BUYSEN. That would be Carl, Dumbo thought, moving to the next.

  The second said, LT./CDR. ROBERT V. LUCAS.

  Dumbo pressed both hands to her forehead. The name Lucas meant something to her—but what? This could be her brother’s suit, and if that were the case then one of the unmarked suits might have been hers. But there was something not quite right about the idea of brother and sister on the same military….

  “You haven’t been taking your medicine—have you, Dumbo?”

  The voice was Carl’s and it came from close behind.

  Dumbo spun, arms over her face, but Carl had his hands in his pockets. He was smiling unpleasantly.

  “I have been taking it,” Dumbo blurted instinctively. “You gave me a shot yourself.”

  “The
n you’ve been playing tricks with it. That’s bad, Dumbo, very bad.”

  Dumbo experienced a new emotion—resentment. “Don’t speak to me like that. And my name isn’t Dumbo. It’s …’

  “Go on,” Carl said interestedly, “I want to see how far you’ve got.”

  “I don’t know. That part is harder than the rest … but it isn’t Dumbo. Don’t call me that any more.”

  “Poor Dumbo!” Carl reached forward caressingly, grabbed a handful of Dumbo’s hair and twisted. His oval face was priestly with hatred. “Get back to the house,” he whispered.

  Dumbo sobbed with pain. “What did you do with my brother? And the others? You killed them!”

  Carl’s fingers relaxed their grip instantly. “You say that to me? You say that to … me!” He shuddered. “Carl is a giver of life. Understand that. Carl is a holy giver of life. He has never killed anything.”

  “Then where’s my brother? And the others?”

  “Why should I have killed anybody?”

  ‘Because,” Dumbo said triumphantly. “I was the only woman on the ship.”

  “You!” Carl stepped back slowly, appalled.

  “You wanted me to yourself.”

  “You’ll pay for saying that, Dumbo.” Carl raised his fist, then relaxed it deliberately, one finger at a time. “Listen to me—you never had a brother. There was nobody on this ship but you and me. We were in the thick of a tactical emergency, so we tried to take the ship to Lark IV by ourselves. The suit you were looking at when I came in was your own.”

  Dumbo looked at the stiffly leaning pressure skin with its black maw of a face and boldly stencilled nameplate.

  ‘But …’

  “That’s right.” Carl laughed softly. “Hello, Victor!”

  Somehow, incredibly, Dumbo was not angry. Almost of their own accord her hands crept down the front of her heavy dress and cradled the sagging, scarred belly. Perhaps it was too soon for a reaction, perhaps when she had recovered all her past and was able to compare it with the present….

  “There had been a surprise attack in the region of Lark IV,” Carl was saying. The losses were heavy and Sector Command was screaming for medical support, so you and I tried to get through with an organ bank. We almost made it but they hit us fair and square with a warp scrambler. You know what that means, Dumbo?”

  She shook her head.

  “I thought not, but you did then. For months after we limped down on to this world you sat up at nights with the ship’s ten-inch scope trying to catch a glimpse of our home galaxy. You should have known better. You and I were a setting on a billion-digit combination lock and somebody had spun the wheels. Somebody with a bad memory.”

  Carl pulled off his glasses and began polishing the lenses, blue eyes peering myopically into another existence.

  “There we were on a completely empty world. A clean, fresh world, ideally suited for life—and there was nothing for us to do but grow old and die.” Carl’s voice grew louder. “And Carl could not allow that. It would have been a terrible wrong—because the only obstacle standing in the way of life was a few ounces of redundant male flesh.

  “I had everything that was needed—the organ bank was in good condition then. The individual power cells are failing now and I’m discarding more and more units every week, but at that time I was able to produce a usable set of basic female organs and glands for you. One hypno session after the operations and a weekly shot of an LSD derivative took care of the rest.

  “That’s your illustrious background. How do you like it, mother?”

  Dumbo twisted the signet ring she wore on the third finger, left hand. It turned easily on bearings of perspiration, but she felt strangely untouched, strong.

  “I’m sorry, Carl—you can’t punish me like that. Don’t you see? The things you have just said might have destroyed Victor Lucas, but he can never hear them. He doesn’t exist any more. I’m … Victoria Lucas.”

  Carl shivered in the cool stale air. “You’re right. My logical faculty must be getting rusty. The whole idea of punishment assumes continuity of personality, and you won’t have that—not after your next shot. Are you going to walk back to the house, or do I drag you?”

  Dumbo took a deep breath. “Why bother with the shots when we don’t need them? There’s no point in pretending all this has made me feel deliriously happy, but I can take things as they are, without the illusions. I ought to hate you but you did too good a job on me with those glands. I really am a woman—and I’m prepared to go on being your wife.”

  Carl hit her back-handed, thick fingers hanging loose like flails.

  She dropped back against one of the control chairs and hung on to it, staring up at him in dismay.

  “My wife!” White coronas glowed around Carl’s eyes. “You freak!! You nothing! You think I ever touched you?”

  “I don’t remember … but what then? Our children?”

  “Our children!” Carl spoke eagerly, suddenly seeing the potency of the new weapon. “Three nice kids, but what a family! You for a mother, and three unknown soldiers for fathers. You looked into the organ bank for a moment, didn’t you, Dumbo? Recognise anybody?”

  The words took time to reach Dumbo. When they did she stood up and moved out on to the catwalk, past Carl.

  “That’s right, mother,” he whispered in her ear as she went by. He followed her down the metal stair towards the lower level. ‘But don’t take it so personally, Dumbo. There are sound genetic reasons in favour of the children having different fathers—it’s all for the good of our future community. Think instead of how lucky you are. Yes, lucky! No man could ever touch you and still keep his food down, yet, thanks to the wonders of medical science, you’ve had three children to as many different men. And you’ll go on having them until you produce the girls we need.” Carl hung on to the stair rail so that he could watch Dumbo’s face while he spoke.

  “Of course, I was lucky too. A ship like this doesn’t carry frozen semen, you know. If it wasn’t for the fact that the organ bank caters for even the most drastic type of injury there would only have been me—and that really would have been a fate worse than death.

  “You hear me, Dumbo? Why don’t you say something?”

  Dumbo reached the lower level and passed the door to the longitudinal corridor.

  “Not that way, mother.” Carl caught her shoulder from behind.

  She wrenched free and ran. Carl gave a startled grunt and came after her, his footfalls speeding up as he remembered the armoury. Dumbo burst through the door, throwing herself towards the rifle rack. Carl’s hand raked down her back. She snatched one of the weapons by the barrel and swung it blindly, hoping to find Carl’s belly. He had fallen forward on to his hands and knees, and the rifle butt opened his face like a purse. He rolled on to his back, unconscious, with a bright red bubble quivering at each nostril.

  Dumbo placed the rifle butt on his upturned throat and bore down with all the weight of her big, soft body.

  Morning sunlight streamed across the breakfast table, making it glow like an altar.

  Dumbo set out five dishes of hot porridge and went to fetch the children who were tumbling noisily outside. She hummed quietly to herself as she watched the boys eat, taking pride in the very smell of the good, simple food. As soon as she was sure the children had everything they needed she loaded a wooden tray and carried it into Carl’s room.

  “Come on, darling,” she said brightly. “I know you don’t feel like eating, but you must make the effort.”

  Carl sat up in the bed and touched his bandaged face. “What is this?” The words came slowly through swollen lips.

  “It’s your breakfast, of course. I’ve made your favourites today. Now eat up so you’ll get well quickly.”

  He stared up at Dumbo for a moment, then his face relaxed.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said wonderingly. “I thought you were going to kill me, but you must have realised you couldn’t make out here on your own.”


  “Eat up, darling. Don’t let your breakfast get cold.” Dumbo fluffed up the pillows to support Carl’s back.

  Carl shook his head, chuckling with relief. “Well, I’ll be damned. And you even had sense enough to go back on the shots.”

  Dumbo leaned down on the bed to get her face close to his.

  “Correction,” she said coldly. “I haven’t taken a shot. Not yet. I took a fresh lot of the drug from the store and primed the gun with it, but I haven’t taken the shot yet. I wanted to wait.” She glanced at the watch on her wrist.

  “Wait for what?” Carl pushed the tray away. “What are you doing with my watch?”