Universe 2 - [Anthology] Read online

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  Universe 2

  Edited By Terry Carr

  Proofed By MadMaxAU

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  CONTENTS

  RETROACTIVE

  by Bob Shaw

  WHEN WE WENT TO SEE THE END OF THE WORLD

  by Robert Silverberg

  FUNERAL SERVICE

  by Gerard F. Conway

  A SPECIAL CONDITION IN SUMMIT CITY

  by R. A. Lafferty

  PATRON OF THE ARTS

  by William Rotsler

  USEFUL PHRASES FOR THE TOURIST

  by Joanna Russ

  ON THE DOWNHILL SIDE

  by Harlan Ellison

  THE OTHER PERCEIVER

  by Pamela Sargent

  MY HEAD’S IN A DIFFERENT PLACE, NOW

  by Grania Davis

  STALKING THE SUN

  by Gordon Eklund

  THE MAN WHO WAVED HELLO

  by Gardner R. Dozois

  THE HEADLESS MAN

  by Gene Wolfe

  TIGER BOY

  by Edgar Pangborn

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  Bob Shaw, a native of Belfast, North Ireland, is an sf writer whose star has been rising steadily for half a dozen years; he wrote the already-classic short story Light of Other Days and followed it with outstanding novels such as THE TWO-TIMERS and ONE MILLION TOMORROWS. Here he presents a solid, well thought out story of human contact with the natives of the planet Palador, who travel through time as easily as we do through space. And as usual with Shaw, his interest is in both the extrapolation of an alien world and people, and the individual humans who must deal with them.

  RETROACTIVE

  by Bob Shaw

  Much against his will, Surgenor was chosen as driver for the group which set out to capture the Paladorian woman....

  He stood by without speaking while part of the survey equipment was pulled out of Module Five to make room for two extra seats, then drove the heavy vehicle down the Sarafand’s ramp with unnecessary speed. Only a short distance separated the survey ship from the squat bulk of the military vessel Admiral Carpenter, but Surgenor selected ground-effect suspension and made the journey amid spectacular plumes of powdery sand. His course was marked by a blood-red gash in the white desert, which slowly healed itself as the phototropic sand returned to its surface color.

  One of the guards at the foot of the Admiral Carpenter’s ramp pointed to where he wanted Surgenor to park and said something into a wrist communicator. Surgenor slid Module Five into the indicated slot and killed the lift, allowing the beetle-shaped vehicle to settle on its haunches. He opened the doors and the hot, dry air of Palador gusted into the cabin.

  “Major Giyani’s party will be with you in two minutes,” the guard called.

  Surgenor gave a muted parody of a military salute and slouched further down in his seat. He knew he was behaving childishly, but the Sarafand had been grounded on this world for twenty-six days now—and Surgenor had not been at rest that long in all his years in the Cartographical Service. Waiting in one place, wasting the meager ration of time granted to humans, had the effect of making him pessimistic and morose. He stared resentfully at the sun-blazing white desert which stretched to the horizon and wondered why it had seemed beautiful the first morning he saw it. There had been a wind that day, of course, and its swift-moving patterns had been traced as intricate shadings of crimson-through-white sweeping across the dunes as buried layers were exposed to the sun and made their phototropic response to its light.

  The Sarafand had landed with the intention of carrying out a routine survey operation—putting down at the planet’s north pole, ghosting back into the sky for a half-circuit and landing at the south pole, while the six survey modules it had disgorged made their separate ways to rejoin it. There were no obvious difficulties in the terrain, which meant the modules could travel at top speed, and the survey would have been completed in less that three days had the totally unexpected not occurred.

  Three of the module crews reported seeing ghosts.

  The apparitions were of two kinds—people and buildings—which shimmered transparently and vanished in a way which would have prompted the observers to write them off as mirages but for the fact that a mirage has to have a physical counterpart somewhere. And an earlier orbital survey of Palador had established that it was a dead world, containing no intelligent life or traces of its former presence.

  “Wake up, driver,” Major Giyani said crisply. “We’re ready to go.”

  Surgenor raised his head with deliberate slowness and eyed the swarthy, black-moustached officer who was standing in the module’s entrance and somehow managing to look dapper in regulation battle kit. Behind him was a pink-faced lieutenant with apologetic blue eyes, and a heavily-built sergeant who was carrying a rifle.

  “We can’t move off until everybody gets in,” Surgenor pointed out reasonably, but in a way which expressed his distaste for being treated as a chauffeur. He waited stolidly until the lieutenant and sergeant were in the supernumerary seats in the rear, and the major had sat down in the vacant front seat. The sergeant, whose name Surgenor remembered as McErlain, did not set his rifle down but cradled it in his lap.

  “This is our destination,” Giyani said, handing Surgenor a sheet of paper on which was written a set of grid coordinates. “The straight-line distance from here is about...”

  “Five-fifty kilometers,” Surgenor put in, performing a rapid mental calculation.

  Giyani raised his black eyebrows and looked closely at Surgenor. “Your name is . . . Dave Surgenor, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then, Dave.” Giyani gave a prolonged smile which said, See how I humor touchy civilians? and pointed at the grid reference. “Can you get us there by eight hundred hours, ship time?”

  Surgenor decided, too late, that he preferred Giyani when he was being officious. He started the module rolling, switched to ground-effect and set a course that took them almost due south. There was little conversation during the two-hour journey, but Surgenor noted that Giyani addressed Sergeant McErlain with undisguised dislike, while the lieutenant—whose name was Kelvin-avoided speaking to the big man at all. The sergeant answered Giyani in flat monosyllables. Surgenor tried to remember the wisps of mess-table gossip he had picked up about McErlain, but most of his thoughts were taken up with the objective of the present expedition.

  When the first reports of “ghosts” had gone in to Captain Aesop, as the Sarafand’s central computer was known to the module crews, a check was made of the geodesic map of Palador which was being built on the computer deck. It revealed evidence of bedrock reshaping having been carried out three hundred thousand years earlier in locations which corresponded closely with those of the ghostly sightings. At that stage Aesop had withdrawn the survey modules—the Cartographical Service’s charter entitled it to deal only with uninhabited worlds—and a tachyonic transmission was sent to Sector HQ. As a result the cruiser Admiral Carpenter, which had been traversing that volume of space, arrived two days later and assumed control.

  One of the first orders issued by Colonel Nietzel, commander of the ground forces, was that Aesop was to treat all information about Palador as classified and to withhold it from civilian personnel. This should have meant that the Sarafand’s men were completely in the dark about subsequent events, but there was human contact between the two ships’ complements, and Surgenor had heard the rumors. Scanner satellites thrown into orbit by the Admiral Carpenter were reputed to have recorded thousands of partial materializations of buildings, strange vehicles, animals and heavily-robed individual figures right across the face of Palador. It was also said that some buildings
and figures had materialized into full solidity, but had vanished again before any of the military vessel’s fliers could reach them. It was as if another civilization existed on Palador—one which had withdrawn beyond an incomprehensible barrier at the approach of strangers, and was determined to remain aloof.

  Surgenor, who had not seen any apparitions, did not give much credence to the rumors, but he had seen the Admiral Carpenters fliers scream across the desert at high supersonic speed, only to return empty-handed. And he knew that the cruiser’s central computer was working on a round-the-clock basis correlating and analyzing the vast amounts of data coming in from the network of scanner satellites. He also knew that the grid coordinates Giyani had shown him corresponded to one of the ancient bedrock excavations discovered in the initial survey.

  “How much further do you make it?” said Giyani, as the sun touched the low range of hills on the western horizon.

  Surgenor glanced at his mapscope, which was beginning to glow with the onset of darkness. “Just under thirty kilometers.”

  “Good. Our timing is exactly right.” Giyani let his hand fall on the butt of his sidearm.

  “Going to shoot some ghosts?” Surgenor said casually.

  Giyani glanced down at his hand and then at Surgenor. “Sorry. The orders are that I can’t discuss the operation with you. In fact, if we had suitable ground transport of our own you wouldn’t be here.” -

  “But I am here and I’m going to see what goes on.”

  “That puts you ahead of the game, doesn’t it?”

  “I hadn’t noticed.” Surgenor stared gloomily at the expanses of sand unfolding in the module’s viewscreens, watching them turn from white to blood-red as the last traces of light fled from the sky. In a few minutes there would be the typical Paladorian night scene of black-seeming desert and clear sky so packed with stars that the normal order of things seemed to be reversed, that the land was dead and the sky above was the seat of life. He experienced an intense longing to be back on board the Sarafand, traveling to far suns.

  Lieutenant Kelvin leaned forward and spoke softly to Giyani. “When can we expect to see something?”

  “Any time now—assuming the computer prediction is accurate.” Giyani stared at Surgenor for a moment, obviously deciding whether to release information in his hearing, then shrugged. “There is some geodesic evidence that bedrock reshaping was done in this area about a third of a million years ago, just around the time we think the Paladorians were in their city-building phase. The scanner satellites have glimpsed a city here seven times in the past ten days, but there’s no guarantee that the pattern of appearances the computer sees isn’t purely coincidental, in which case we’ll find nothing but desert.”

  “What’s so special about this particular site?” Kelvin asked, echoing the question which had crossed Surgenor’s mind.

  “If the Paladorians can move freely in time—as we think they can—then the quasi-materialization of buildings might be just a byproduct of the natives themselves visiting the present. It’s analagous, I’m told, to when you walk out of a heated building—you take some of the warm air with you into another environment. At each appearance of this city our scanners detected what seems to be a woman.

  “And she was solid.”

  Listening to the major’s words, Surgenor felt the familiar cockpit of Module Five, in which he had spent so many hours of his life, become alien and hostile. He had been unwilling to admit his own fears that Man, perfector of a type of thinking which had given him mastery of the three spatial dimensions, had finally encountered a cooler, more judicious culture which had established its dominions in the long gray estuaries of time. But it appeared that other men were thinking along the same lines.

  “Something up ahead, sir,” Kelvin said.

  Giyani turned to the front again and they all stared in silence at the forward viewscreen upon which the ghostly outlines of a cityscape were etching themselves across the horizon. Regular patterns of lights glowed where a few seconds earlier there had been nothing but sand and stars. The city’s transparent rectangles were surprisingly Earth-like in design, except for one incongruity—the vertical rows of lights, which looked like windows, were not always superimposed on the silhouettes of buildings. It was as if, Surgenor thought, the city was being seen not as it had existed at a single point in time, but with a temporal depth of focus extending over thousands of years during which the slow drift of continents had moved it several meters, producing a double “image.”

  In spite of Giyani’s facile explanation for what they were seeing, or perhaps because of it, Surgenor began to feel chilled as he appreciated fully what the little expedition hoped to achieve.

  “Reduce speed and go the rest of the way on the ground,” Giyani said. “We want to travel quietly from here on in. Douse lights, too.”

  Surgenor eased off the lift and cut the ground speed to fifty. At that rate, and with the absence of spatial referents, the survey module seemed to be at rest. The only sounds in the cabin were Kelvin’s hoarse breathing and a series of faint clicks from McErlain’s rifle as the sergeant adjusted slides and verniers.

  Giyani glanced over his shoulder at McErlain. “How long is it since you served with the Georgetown, sergeant?”

  “Eight years, sir.”

  “Quite a long time.”

  “Yes, sir.” McErlain sat quietly for a moment. “I’m not going to shoot anybody unless ordered to, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “Sergeant!” Kelvin’s voice was scandalized. “You’re going on report for . . .”

  “It’s all right,” Giyani said easily. “The sergeant and I understand each other.”

  Surgenor was briefly distracted from the incredible view which lay ahead. He now knew why McErlain had been under discussion in the Sarafand’s mess. Ten or eleven years earlier theGeorgetown had made first contact with an intelligent air-breathing species in the Third Quadrant and in a ghastly debacle, the details of which had never been officially released, had annihilated all the functional males in a single military action. The planet had since been sealed off to allow the final generation of females and non-functional males to make their own way into extinction in peace, and the Georgetown’s commander had been court-martialed, but the “incident” had passed into the catalog of self-indictments which humanity preserved in place of a racial conscience.

  “Keep going at this speed till we reach the south side of the city,” Giyani ordered.

  “We’ll need lights.”

  “We won’t. Those buildings don’t exist, except in a very attenuated form. Drive straight on.”

  Surgenor allowed the module to continue on its original course and the insubstantial cityscape faded before him like fine mist. When he judged they were in the heart of it, all that could be seen was an occasional suggestion of a streetlamp of curious trapezoid design and so faint that it might have been a reflection on clear glass.

  “The buildings haven’t dematerialized,” Kelvin said. “Nobody ever got this close before.”

  “Nobody had sufficiently processed the data before,” Giyani replied abstractedly. “I have a feeling that the computer prognostication is going to check out right down to the last detail.”

  “You mean . . . ?”

  “If I were a gambler, I’d stake a year’s salary that our Paladorian is a pregnant female.”

  * * * *

  The grid references Surgenor had been given were so precise that he could have put the module on the designated spot with cross-hair accuracy, but Giyani told him to halt two hundred meters short. He opened the door and waited until the three soldiers had got out onto the dark sand. The desert air was cold, the nightly temperature drop on Palador being accentuated by the fact that the surface turned white during its exposure to sunlight and thus reflected away much of the day’s heat.

  “This should take only a few minutes,” Giyani said to Surgenor. “We’ll want to move off immediately when we get back, so I want y
ou to stay here. Keep your motor turning and be ready to head north as soon as I give you the word.”

  “Your wish . . .”

  Giyani put on goggle-like nightviewers, and handed a set to Surgenor. “Put those on and keep watching us. If you see anything going seriously wrong, radio the ship and get out of here.”

  Surgenor put the viewers on and blinked as he saw Giyani’s face etched with unnatural reddish light. “Are you expecting trouble?”

  “No—just preparing for it.”

  “Major, is it not true that there’s a full-scale diplomatic mission on its way to this planet?”

  “What of it, Surgenor?” Giyani’s voice had lost its friendliness.

  “You and the colonel may not look good with feathers in your caps.”

  “The colonel isn’t exceeding his authority, driver—but you are.”