Collected Short Fiction, page 739
“Hello?” Gundersen called. “Hello, hello, hello?”
He received a moan by way of answer. Stumbling and slipping in the dimness, fighting a swelling nausea, he forced his way onward through a maze of unseen obstacles. He came to the source of the loud dripping sound. Something bright red and basketshaped and about the size of a man’s chest had established itself high on the wall, perpendicular to the floor. Through large pores in its spongy surface a thick black fluid exuded, falling in a continuous greasy splash. As the light of Gundersen’s torch probed it, the exudation increased, becoming almost a cataract of tallowy liquid. When he moved the light away the flow became less copious, though still heavy.
The floor sloped here so that whatever dripped from the spongy basket flowed quickly down, collecting at the far side of the room in the angle between the floor and the wall. Here Gundersen found the Earthmen. They lay side by side on a low mattress. Fluid from the dripping thing had formed a dark pool around them, completely covering the mattress and welling up over their bodies. One of the Earthlings, head lolling to the side, had his face totally immersed in the stuff. From the other one came the moans.
Both were naked. And only one was a man. The other was a woman, though Gundersen had some difficulty telling that at first. Both were so shrunken and emaciated that the sexual characteristics were obscured. They had no hair, not even eyebrows. Bones protruded through parchment like skin. The eyes of both were open, fixed in a rigid, seemingly sightless stare, unblinking, glassy. Lips were drawn back from teeth. Grayish algae sprouted in the furrows of their skins and the mobile fungoids roamed their bodies, feeding on this growth. With a quick automatic gesture of revulsion Gundersen plucked two of the sluglike creatures from the woman’s empty breasts. She stirred, moaned again.
In the language of the nildoror she murmured, “Is it over yet?”
Her voice was like a flute played by a sullen desert breeze.
Speaking English, Gundersen said, “Who are you? How did this happen?”
He got no response from her. A fungoid crept across her mouth, and he flicked it aside. He touched her cheek. A rasping whisper came as his hand ran across her skin. He felt he was caressing stiff paper.
“Is it over soon?” she asked, again in nildororu.
GUNDERSEN turned to her companion. Gently, half afraid the fragile neck would snap, Gundersen lifted the man’s head out of the pool of fluid. It appeared that he had been breathing it—it trickled from his nose and lips and after a moment he showed signs of being unable to cope with ordinary air. Gundersen let his face slip back into the pool. In that brief moment he had recognized the man as one Harold—or Henry—Dykstra, whom he had known distantly in the old days.
The unknown woman was trying to move one arm. She lacked the strength to lift it. These two were like living ghosts, like death-in-life, mired in their sticky fluid and totally helpless.
In the language of the nildoror Gundersen asked, “How long have you been this way?”
“Forever,” she whispered.
“Who are you?”
“I don’t—remember. I’m—waiting.”
“For what?”
“For the end.”
“Listen,” he said. “I’m Edmund Gundersen, who used to be sector chief. I want to help you.”
“Kill me first. Then him.”
“We’ll get you out of here and back to the spaceport. We can have you on the way to Earth in a week or ten days, and then—”
“No—please—”
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Finish it. Finish it.”
She found enough strength to arch her back, lifting her body halfway out of the fluid that nearly concealed her lower half. Something rippled and briefly bulged beneath her skin. Gundersen touched the taut belly and felt movement within—and that quick inward quiver was the most frightening sensation he had ever known. He touched the body of Dykstra. It also rippled inwardly.
Appalled, Gundersen scrambled to his feet and backed away from them. By faint torchlight he studied their shriveled bodies, naked but sexless, bone and ligament, shorn of flesh and spirit yet still alive. A terrible fear came over him.
“Na-sinisul,” he called. “Come in here—come in!”
The sulidor shortly was at his side.
Gundersen said, “Something’s inside their bodies. Some kind of parasite? It moves. What is it?”
“Look there,” said “Na-sinisul, indicating the spongy basket from which the dark fluid trickled. “They carry its young. They have become hosts. A year, two years, three—and the larvae emerge.”
Why aren’t they both dead?”
“They draw nourishment from this,” said the sulidor, swishing his tail through the black flow. “It seeps into their skins. It feeds them and it feeds that which is within them.”
“If we took them out of here and sent them down to the hotel on rafts—”
“They would die,” Na-sinisul said, “moments after they were removed from the wetness about them. There is no hope of saving them.”
“When does it end?” the woman asked.
Gundersen trembled. All his training told him never to accept the finality of death. Any human in whom some shred of life remained could be saved, rebuilt from a few scraps of cells into a reasonable facsimile of the original. But there were no facilities for such things on this world. He confronted a swirl of choices. Leave them here to let alien things feed upon their guts? Try to bring them back to the spaceport for shipment to the nearest tectogenetic hospital? Put them out of their misery at once? Seek to free their bodies himself of whatever held them in thrall? He kneeled again. He forced himself to experience that inner quivering again. He touched the woman’s stomach, her thighs, her bony haunches. Beneath the skin she was a mass of strangeness. Yet her mind still ticked, though she had forgotten her name and her native language. The man was luckier. Although he, too, was infested, at least Dykstra did not have to lie here in the dark waiting for the death that could come only when the harbored larvae erupted from the enslaved human flesh. Was this what they had desired when they refused repatriation from this world that they loved? An Earthling can become captured by Belzagor, the many-born nildor, Vol’himyor, had said. But this was too literal a capture.
The stink of bodily corruption made him retch.
“Kill them both,” he said to Na-sinisul. “And be quick about it.”
“This is what you instruct me to do?”
“Kill them. And rip down that thing on the wall and kill it, too.”
“It has given no offense,” said the sulidor. “It has done only what is natural to its kind. By killing these two I will deprive it of its young—but I am not willing to deprive it of life as well.”
“All right,” Gundersen said. “Just the Earthlings, then. Fast.”
“I do this as an act of mercy, under your direct orders,” said Na-sinisul.
He leaned forward and lifted one powerful arm. The savage curved claws emerged fully from their sheaths. The arm descended twice.
Gundersen compelled himself to watch. The bodies split like dried husks. The things within came spilling out, unformed, raw. Even now, in some inconceivable reflex, the two corpses twitched and jerked. Gundersen stared into their eroded depths.
“Do you hear me?” he asked. “Are you alive or dead?”
The woman’s mouth gaped but no sound came forth and he did not know whether this was an attempt to speak or merely a last convulsion of the ravaged nerves. He stepped his fusion torch up to high power and trained it on the dark pool.
I am the resurrection and the life, he thought, reducing Dykstra to ashes, and the woman beside him, and the squirming unfinished larvae. Acrid, choking fumes rose. Not even the torch could destroy the building’s dampness. He turned the torch back to illumination level.
“Come,” he said to the sulidor and they went out together.
“I feel like burning the entire building and purifying this place,” Gundersen said to Na-sinisul.
“I know.”
“But you would prevent me.”
“You are wrong. No one on this world will prevent you from doing anything.”
But what good would destroying the building do, Gundersen asked himself? The purification had already been accomplished.
The rain had stopped. To the waiting Srin’gahar, Gundersen said, “Will you take me away from here?”
They rejoined the other four nildoror. Then, because they had lingered too long here and the land of rebirth was still far away, they resumed the march, even though it was night. By morning Gundersen could hear the thunder of Shangri-la Falls, which the nildoror called Du’jayukh.
TO BE CONTINUED
1970
The Pleasure of Their Company
Robert Silverberg is a man of many talents: biographer, anthologist, novelist, popularizer of science ... and author of some of the most compelling and disturbing science fiction being written today. Happily for we as readers, he is a man yet young enough that we can look forward to many years of producing stories such as . . .
He was the only man aboard the ship, one man inside a sleek shining cylinder heading away from Bradley’s World at ten thousand miles a second, and yet he was far from alone. He had wife, father, daughter, son for company, and plenty of others, Ovid and Hemingway and Plato, and Shakespeare and Goethe, Attila the Hun and Alexander the Great, a stack of fancy cubes to go with the family ones. And his old friend Juan was along, too, the man who had shared his dream, his utopian fantasy, Juan who had been with him at the beginning and almost until the end. He had a dozen fellow voyagers in all. He wouldn’t be lonely, though he had three years of solitary travel ahead of him before he reached his landfall, his place of exile.
It was the third hour of his voyage. He was growing calm, now, after the frenzy of his escape. Aboard ship he had showered, changed, rested. The sweat and grime of that wild dash through the safety tunnel were gone, now, though he wouldn’t quickly shake from his mind the smell of that passageway, like rotting teeth, nor the memory of his terrifying fumbling with the security gate’s copper arms as the junta’s storm-troopers trotted toward him. But the gate had opened, and the ship had been there, and he had escaped, and he was safe. And he was safe.
I’ll try some cubes, he thought.
The receptor slots in the control room held six cubes at once. He picked six at random, slipped them into place, actuated the evoker. Then he went into the ship’s garden. There were screens and speakers all over the ship.
The air was moist and sweet in the garden. A plump, toga-clad man, clean-shaven, big-nosed, blossomed on one screen and said, “What a lovely garden! How I adore plants! You must have a gift for making things grow.”
“Everything grows by itself. You’re—”
“Publius Ovidius Naso.”
“Thomas Voigtland. Former President of the Citizens’ Council on Bradley’s World. Now president-in-exile, I guess. A coup d’etat by the military.”
“My sympathies. Tragic, tragic!”
“I was lucky to escape alive. I may never be able to return. They’ve probably got a price on my head.”
“I know how terrible it is to be sundered from your homeland. Were you able to bring your wife?”
“I’m over here,” Lydia said. “Tom? Tom, introduce me to Mr. Naso.”
“I didn’t have time to bring her,” Voigtland said. “But at least I took a cube of her with me.”
Lydia was three screens down from Ovid, just above a clump of glistening ferns. She looked glorious, her auburn hair a little too deep in tone but otherwise quite a convincing replica. He had cubed her two years before; her face showed none of the lines that the recent troubles had engraved on it. Voigtland said to her, “Not Mr. Naso, dear. Ovid. The poet Ovid.”
“Of course. I’m sorry. How did you happen to choose him?”
“Because he’s charming and civilized. And he understands what exile is like.”
Ovid said softly, “Ten years by the Black Sea. Smelly barbarians my only companions. Yet one learns to adapt. My wife remained in Rome to manage my property and to intercede for me—”
“And mine remains on Bradley’s World,” said Voigtland. “Along with—along with—”
Lydia said, “What’s this about exile, Tom? What happened?”
He began to explain about McAllister and the junta. He hadn’t told her, back when he was having her cubed, why he wanted a cube of her. He had seen the coup coming. She hadn’t.
As he spoke, a screen brightened between Ovid and Lydia and the seamed, leathery face of old Juan appeared. They had redrafted the constitution of Bradley’s World together, twenty years earlier.
“It happened, then,” Juan said instantly. “Well, we both knew it would. Did they kill very many?”
“I don’t know. I got out fast once they started to—” He faltered. “It was a perfectly executed coup. You’re still there. I suppose you’re organizing the underground resistance by now. And I—And I—”
Needles of fire sprouted in his brain.
And I ran away, he said silently.
The other screens were alive now. On the fourth, someone with white robes, gentle eyes, dark curling hair. Voigtland guessed him to be Plato. On the fifth, Shakespeare, instantly recognizable, for the cube-makers had modeled him after the First Folio portrait: high forehead, long hair, pursed quizzical lips. On the sixth, a fierce, demonic-looking little man. Attila the Hun? They were all talking, activating themselves at random, introducing themselves to one another and to him. Their voices danced along the top of his skull. He could not follow their words. Restless, he moved among the plants, touching their leaves, inhaling the perfume of their flowers.
Out of the chaos came Lydia’s voice.
“Where are you heading now, Tom?”
“Rigel XIX. I’ll wait out the revolution there. It was my only option once hell broke loose. Get in the ship and—”
“It’s so far,” she said. “You’re traveling alone?”
“I have you, don’t I? And Mark and Lynx, and Juan, and Dad, and all these others.”
“Cubes, that’s all.”
“Cubes will have to do,” Voigtland said. Suddenly the fragrance of the garden seemed to be choking him. He went out, into the viewing salon next door, where the black splendor of space glistened through a wide port. Screens were mounted opposite the window. Juan and Attila seemed to be getting along marvelously well; Plato and Ovid were bickering; Shakespeare brooded silently; Lydia, looking worried, stared out of her screen at him. He studied the sweep of the stars.
“Which is our world?” Lydia asked.
“This,” he said.
“So small. So far away.”
“I’ve only been traveling a few hours. It’ll get smaller.”
He hadn’t had time to take anyone with him. The members of his family had been scattered all over the planet when the alarm came, not one of them within five hours of home—Lydia and Lynx holidaying in the South Polar Sea, Mark archaeologizing on the Westerland Plateau. The integrator net told him it was a Contingency C situation: get offplanet within ninety minutes, or get ready to die. The forces of the junta had reached the capital and were on their way to pick him up. The escape ship had been ready, gathering dust in its buried vault. He hadn’t been able to reach Juan. He hadn’t been able to reach anybody. He used up sixty of his ninety minutes trying to get in touch with people, and then, with stunner shells already hissing overhead, he had gone into the ship and taken off. Alone.
But he had the cubes.
Cunning things. A whole personality encapsulated in a shimmering plastic box a couple of centimeters high. Over the past few years, as the likelihood of Contingency C had grown steadily greater, Voigtland had cubed everyone who was really close to him and stored the cubes aboard the escape ship, just in case.
It took an hour to get yourself cubed; and at the end of it, they had your soul in the box, your motion habits, your speech patterns, your way of thinking, your entire package of standard reactions. Plug your cube into a receptor slot and you came to life on the screen, smiling as you would smile, moving as you would move, sounding as you would sound, saying things you would say. Of course, the thing on the screen was unreal, a computer-actuated mockup, but it was programmed to respond to conversation, to absorb new data and change its outlook in the light of what it learned, to generate questions without the need of previous inputs; in short, to behave as a real person would.
The cube-makers also could supply a cube of anyone who had ever lived, or, for that matter, any character of fiction. Why not? It wasn’t necessary to draw a cube’s program from a living subject. How hard was it to tabulate and synthesize a collection of responses, typical phrases, and attitudes, feed them into a cube, and call what came out Plato or Shakespeare or Attila? Naturally a custom-made synthesized cube of some historical figure ran high, because of the man-hours of research and programming involved, and a cube of someone’s own departed great-aunt was even more costly, since there wasn’t much chance that it could be used as a manufacturer’s prototype for further sales. But there was a wide array of standard-model historicals in the catalog when he was stocking his getaway ship; Voigtland had chosen eight of them.
Fellow voyagers. Companions on the long solitary journey into exile that he knew that he might someday have to take. Great thinkers. Heroes and villains. He flattered himself that he was worthy of their company. He had picked a mix of personality types, to keep him from losing his mind on his trip. There wasn’t another habitable planet within a light-year of Bradley’s World. If he ever had to flee, he would have to flee far.
He walked from the viewing salon to the sleeping cabin, and from there to the galley, and on into the control room. The voices of his companions followed him from room to room. He paid little attention to what they were saying, but they didn’t seem to mind. They were talking to each other. Lydia and Shakespeare, Ovid and Plato, Juan and Attila, like old friends at a cosmic cocktail party.
