New Writings in SF 18 - [Anthology] Read online

  A few tears made their way out from underneath his tightly closed lids and ran down his pale, quivering cheeks. His lips trembled and formed words that were echoed in his troubled mind.

  ‘Ah, love, let us be true to one another...’

  And, smiling, she took up the next line of Arnold’s poem.

  ‘For the world which seems to lie before us like a vale of dreams ...’

  ‘. ..so various, so beautiful, so new.,...’

  ‘... hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light...’

  ‘... nor certitude, nor peace, nor help from pain...’

  His voice broke and the image died in his mind. The words of the poem slipped away and he began to sob.

  Darling, what is it? I thought you loved Matthew Arnold...

  ‘No!’ His eyes were wild and filled with unshed tears. No—I mean — of course I do! But I love you Rekina...

  I know. Her smile was warm and consoling but it could not hold back the tide that threatened to engulf him, mind and body. And I love you, Arthur...

  No. You don’t understand!

  But I do. I must. Haven’t we discussed this many times before?

  No, not like this! I really love you, Rekina—can’t you see what I’m trying to say? I LOVE you!

  Now he understood his restless confusion and the nature of the dark demon which had haunted his days and weeks and months. His confusion had been a product of his mind struggling with his heart—and the demon something his conscience had dreamed up to frighten him away from the truth. But now he didn’t care about the consequences his love for Rekina entailed. He would follow it through until he found the consummation he devoutly wished: oneness.

  Wait, Arthur ...

  But he would not be put off. He rose unsteadily from his couch and walked towards her. His hands were outstretched like a figure half asleep and the wires trailed after him like the slack strings left dangling by an absent puppeteer.

  He knew what must be done.

  No, Arthur. Wait! You do not understand....

  Yes I do, he countered. I love you, Rekina, and that’s all that matters. And I have to have you. I need you...

  He longed to possess her, to make her his own, inviolably; to achieve the mystical catharthis his soul craved. And with it peace ... and oneness.

  His mind, like his arms, reached out to embrace her. You’re everything I wished for, everything I’ve ever wanted. I love you and I want to be with you always. Anything else is a poor substitute.

  His master tape whirred wildly next to her heart as she sought for some way to dissuade him from touching her, to discourage his mad dream. Her actions were almost akin to panic, an unlikely cybernetic reaction.

  Arthur, wait a moment! Step back. Sit down. We must talk this thing over ...

  But it was too late for any discussion: his grim compulsion drove him towards her.

  His wild eyes did not see her battered, grimy shell nor the red light blinking rapidly on her fascia. And somewhere in the distance an alarm wailed ... but he did not hear it.

  He saw instead a tall, dark woman with proud breasts and soft, unwavering eyes. And as he looked she opened her arms to him and bade him welcome into her. He stepped closer—his feet faltering—and he felt her arms reach out to embrace him.

  Rekina, his mind whispered. And then, aloud, ‘Rekina ...’

  He stepped forward to meet his consummation.

  Arthur, what you wish cannot be! Arthur...

  But he was no longer listening. Her voice was urgent and, perhaps, slightly wistful, but there was nothing she could do to stop him.

  His arms reached out for her shoulders, to draw her radiance into his influence ...

  ... and found the sharp corners of her shell underneath his trembling hands.

  He sobbed and crushed her to him.

  They embraced.

  And in spite of her protests—in spite of the overpowering sadness that surrounded this climactic meeting—he experienced a single moment of ecstatic happiness as his hands closed around her. It was a pleasure more intense, more real, than anything he had ever felt before. His mind seemed to disintegrate and he found ... oneness. And after that...

  Pain.

  Of blinding intensity, so great that his body seemed to burn and his mind was incinerated in one moment of incandescent agony.

  And left only blackness.

  The oneness to which he had always aspired.

  * * * *

  The Madam found him with his arms outstretched across the face of the console, his back towards her and his body fused to the machine in an attitude of crucifixion. An output terminal, they later ascertained, had come loose inside the cyber and had touched the external shell. The console had been alive with several thousand volts of electricity when Talbot had touched it and he had died instantly.

  The contact had almost welded his blackened body to the front of the machine. The juices had been boiled and sucked out of him and had sizzled and crackled in the grisly aftermath of his electrocution, and his limbs had congealed to the side of the machine.

  The Madam quickly summoned some of her assistants to the room to clean up the mess. She tsked, tsked quietly to herself and fell into a coarse harangue of her Maintenance crew.

  Accidents sometimes happened, she allowed, but they really should be more careful shifting these things around. Sometimes the business of keeping ahead of the law had unpleasant consequences, of which the temporary loss of revenue was the most regrettable.

  The Maintenance men pried loose his body and let it fall to the floor while they did a hasty patch-up job on the cyber so that it could be brought back into service as quickly as possible. The power was disconnected and the broken terminal replaced. Then somebody thought about cleaning up the mess.

  Talbot had watched them with his blackened body and his ruptured eyes and now they swathed him in a sheet and carried him away from the room while somebody else tidied it up and made it ready for the next client.

  One of the men from Maintenance was obliged to seek out Talbot’s car and drive it to a remote corner of suburbia where its possible discovery would not be incriminating. The disposal of the body was another matter that might have proved troublesome.

  If the effluent treatment plant hadn’t been situated so conveniently.

  <>

  * * * *

  FRONTIER INCIDENT

  Robert Wells

  First-contact-with-alien-life stories are always intriguing because primarily the plot must revolve around communication in some form or another. New author Robert Wells approaches the problem in a fascinating manner.

  * * * *

  Things were distinctly strange from the start. There were those unexpected orange lights peeling back off the hull like fish scales. Then the complete radio blackout falling like a curtain between the ship, its base, and its destination, and the navigation panel playing tricks on its exasperated crew.

  Jerman, a landlubber, wanted to turn back at once, but the Captain only grinned at his consternation. You never knew what you might meet out here in the enormous, empty mind of space. Besides, the Jubilee was the only shot for New Erin in thirty days and was carrying Cornel, a sick man whose sickness couldn’t wait for the next home-bound ship. ‘We keep going,’ said the Captain. ‘Nothing stops an ambulance. You’ll get used to meeting the unaccountable out here.’

  But whatever it was didn’t give them a chance to change their minds. After an interval which ensured that they were too far out to be able to return, it struck again decisively.

  The analog course computers went first. The duty rating reported the warning light as soon as it flashed in the monitor, but before the Captain could even get to the flight deck the instrument panel blew up. There was a nerve-jarring arc of light and all the pointers swung to zero across the control console.

  In the navigation cockpit the maps of stars and the highways plotted across them dissolved, leaving the screens blank, the veiled, milky eyeballs
of a blind man.

  At the same moment power in two of the main propulsion units ceased and when the craft could be brought under control again it was already deep into a chartless region.

  The sick mind of Cornel seemed to have some means of perceiving this turning of the tables on the plans of his sane companions. Lashed to a couch in his cabin, he began to cry the same phrase over and over again in the voice of a dishonoured prophet. Its five words made no sense to anyone but him, yet still had a sinister ring for the Jubilee’s crew in their predicament. ‘Into the waters ...” he proclaimed. ‘Into the waters of night!’

  ‘Shall I quiet him?’ asked Jerman. He was a psychiatrist detailed to accompany Cornel from the frontiers back home for treatment.

  ‘Leave him. We need you here,’ said the Captain. He ran a hand through his short-cropped grey hair, looking around at the crewmen still stunned and injured by the incident. He was very experienced. He had been through emergencies before, but never one thrust upon him so startlingly. Behind the determination in the hard, ice-blue eyes the mind was racing, calculating.

  The voyage was about one hundred and fifty space-days old. Prior to the accident there had been maybe another forty ahead of them before they got to the settled areas of New Erin.

  The Captain put on a pressurised work-suit and spent an hour with his chief engineer inspecting the ship. Afterwards he dropped back lightly into the cockpit of the flight deck.

  He betrayed no emotion. Since before birth his society had conditioned him and trained him as a spacer and he had seen worse damage and ships that had survived it on much more arduous journeys than the Jubilee’s routine run. What was really worrying him was the apparent deflection from the recognised warp into unexplored voids and the inexplicable readings on the instruments which had resumed their function. Of course they weren’t working correctly, but if they had been the indications they gave would have meant that somehow Jubilee and its crew had disappeared from the regular space-time ellipse.

  The fission fuel they carried was virtually indestructible, but it might become debilitated if serious loads were placed on it in an effort to realign the ship to its correct course.

  Basic training and the manuals set out rigid procedures to be followed in any emergency. The Captain talked to his lieutenant over the ship’s radio. ‘Bell, test the crash generators. If they’re still working see if you can beam a message to Fallada for relay to the Agency Control. Tell them we’ve been thrown off course. I think that basically it’s a feed failure causing stress debilitation in the propulsion units. There’s a serious power loss. Several input sections are completely unresponsive. I shall have to stabilise to repair and conserve power. Ask if they can plot our position; what kind of boost we’ll need to get back on track; whether there’s any known landfall site handy.’

  It was two hours before the radio-link man got any response. When the reply did come the words were faint after the oceans of emptiness they had swum. Sometimes they were obliterated altogether by hurtling swarms of meteorites or the huge messages of exploded stars hurrying between galaxies to no particular destination. The words had a strange ring about them, too.

  ‘You-er estimated plot five one six blank blank in Hydra. Three four degrees blank of track. Region not mapped. Regret no precise asteroidal data. If-er situation hazardous advise if tug required in which case fade fade fade outlined procedure three-er six.’

  ‘Reply,’ said the Captain tersely. ‘Thanks. See we’re on our own. Couldn’t survive tug wait. Must try for landfall to save all power during repair. Will coast. If no suitable site appears will consult again. All here in good spirits. Until next message—so long.’

  But this courageous response was stripped of all meaning almost as soon as it had been sent, for the radio blanket fell again, more thoroughly than ever, and the Jubilee’s apparatus could receive nothing more.

  They were alone. Every second carried them farther away on their thirty-four degree variation. The attendant shoals of lights returned and flowed back along the hull into the deeps behind them.

  ‘Into the waters of night!’ Cornel screamed. ‘Into the waters of night!’

  Double watches were set at all tele-observation posts and the chief engineer coaxed enough power from the domestic circuits to operate Jubilee’s scanners.

  On the second space-day after the emergency Bell reported the craft moving into a scattered planetary system.

  Jerman and the Captain joined him at one of the forward screens and watched the ponderous approach of the nearest body. The Captain had to use some of the ship’s power to hold off from the gravitational field drag.

  He looked with his unemotional eyes moving slowly across the scanner screen. ‘One of them may provide a landfall.’ He turned to the engineer. ‘Can we make a landing manoeuvre?’

  ‘Should be possible with care, sir. The Fernlock brake-systems aren’t affected. As long as we can get a kick from at least two of the prop units I think she’ll make it.’

  ‘They’ll send a search team from Fallada anyway if they don’t hear anything from us,’ said the Captain to no one in particular. ‘Never mind. We must try to make a landfall to get repairs under way. If any suitable place presents itself, Bell, call me at once. I’ll take the controls myself.’

  Jerman went with the Captain to his cabin. They fastened themselves to the relaxation couches. ‘Chess?’ the Captain inquired. He touched the fingertip control on the arm of his couch and above him the board lit up set with the last position of their unfinished game.

  ‘I’d rather talk,’ said the psychiatrist after a couple of indecisive moves. He was a lot younger than the Captain and his thin, straw-coloured hair wasn’t cut short enough to prevent it often falling forward over his forehead, giving him a rakish, student look.

  He found it difficult to converse with spacers. They were trained not to deal in imagination, speculation, hypothesis, or pure abstraction. But in their present plight Jerman felt unequal to the inevitable chess defeat.

  ‘I guess you’ve seen a number of these worlds, Captain?’

  ‘Seven planetary systems around suns,’ the Captain recited. ‘Two dead masses without known orbit. A long time ago. When I was still young enough to be a pioneer.’ He sighed and closed his eyes. He was quite prepared to sleep if Jerman didn’t want to play chess with him.

  ‘Any of them carry life?’

  ‘None. Not our sort of life. Sometimes primitive botanical or chemical structures. Why?’

  ‘Only because this is an unexplored region,’ said Jerman uncomfortably, ‘and it gives me the creeps. I begin to wonder what we might find....’

  ‘You’ve never explored, of course,’ said the Captain. “You know, the more we push the frontiers forward the more we become convinced that no form of life equal to homo sapiens has evolved anywhere in the approachable parts of the galaxy.’

  It was a predictable answer from a member of the Captain’s profession. It appeared (Jerman figured) somewhere between page three and page seven of any Cosmonaut Manual.

  The Captain continued: ‘There were the Kappa II voles and in remote history the sub-human Troitans. I guess you know the lay branch of Space History anyway. The Abeniatiks—they even developed a primitive form of hydro-propulsion in their tepid seas. They were the only reasoning organisms Man encountered. Everywhere we’ve been welcomed and adulated as superior beings. On the evidence that’s what we are. We have no serious rivals.’

  ‘All the species you mentioned are extinct now?’

  ‘They ceased to evolve.’ The Captain re-extinguished them with a wave of his hand. ‘Contact with more complex and more highly developed organisms proved fatal to them.’

  ‘Exactly. What I was trying to suggest is that perhaps some day, beyond the present frontiers or off the beaten space tracks—maybe right here, for example—we may be the ones to get an unpleasant shock.’ Jerman’s boyish face was puckered up with his concern to get his worry across to the spacer. He sh
oved his hair out of his eyes.

  The Captain yawned. ‘I only know what is or has been. Go to sleep or you’ll end up like that poor, deranged creature we’re supposed to be hurrying to New Erin.’

  ‘And that’s another thing,’ the psychiatrist persisted. ‘We’ve got millions of years of evolution behind us and here we are, the superior beings, still with a flaw which makes a nonsense of our greatest asset—our unique asset— the power to reason. Cornel’s mind is broken...’

  ‘Complex machinery breaks down,’ snapped the Captain. ‘At New Erin cephologists will analyse the fault. Cornel will be restored if the damage isn’t too great. His sort of defeat is slowly being eliminated—the way we’ve eliminated all the others.’