Universe 6 - [Anthology] Read online

  When we returned, we told Sitting Bull of our victory. He said it was good, but that a bigger victory was to come. He said he had had a vision during the Sun Dance. He saw many soldiers and enemy Indians fall out of the sky on their heads into the village. He said ours was not the victory he had seen.

  It was some days later we heard that a Yellowlegs Thunderbird had been shot down. We went to the place where it lay. There was a strange device above its wing. Crazy Horse studied it many moments. Then he said, “I have seen such a thing before. It carries Thunderbirds beneath one of the Big Fish. We must get our Thunderbirds. It will be a good day to die.”

  We hurried to our Thunderbirds. We had twelve of them fixed now, and we had on them, besides the quick rifles [Henry machine rifles of calibers .41-40 or .30-30—MT], the roaring spears [Hale spin-stabilized rockets, of 2½ inch diameter—MT]. We took off before noonday.

  We arrived at the Greasy Grass and climbed into the clouds, where we scouted. Soon, to the south, we saw the dust of many men moving. But Crazy Horse held us back. Soon we saw why; four Big Fish were coming. We came at them out of the sun. They did not see us till we were on them. We fired our roaring sticks, and the Big Fish caught fire and burned. All except one, which drifted away, though it lost all its fat. Wild Horse, in his Thunderbird, was shot but still fought on with us that morning. We began to kill the men on the Big Fish when a new thing happened. Men began to float down on blankets. We began to kill them as they fell with our quick rifles. Then we attacked those who reached the ground, until we saw Spotted Pony and his men were on them. We turned south and killed many horse soldiers there. Then we flew back to the Greasy Grass and hid the Thunderbirds. At camp, we learned that many pony soldiers had been killed. Word came that more soldiers were coming.

  I saw, as the sun went down, the women moving among the dead Men-Who-Float-Down, taking their clothes and supplies. They covered the ground like leaves in the autumn. It had been a good fight.

  * * * *

  So much has been written about that hot June day in 1876, so much guesswork applied where knowledge was missing. Was Custer dead in his harness before he reached the ground? Or did he stand and fire at the aircraft strafing his men? How many reached the ground alive? Did any escape the battle itself, only to be killed by Indian patrols later that afternoon, or the next day? No one really knows, and all the Indians are gone now, so history stands a blank.

  Only one thing is certain: for the men of the 7th Cavalry there was only the reality of the exploding dirigibles, the snap of their chutes deploying, the roar of the aircraft among them, the bullets, and those terrible last moments on the bluff. Whatever the verdict of their peers, whatever the future may reveal, it can be said they did not die in vain.

  —The Seventh Cavalry:A History

  E. R. BURROUGHS

  Colonel, U.S.A., Retired

  * * * *

  SUGGESTED READING

  ANONYMOUS. Remember Ft. Sumter! Washington: War Department Recruiting Pamphlet, 1862.

  ——. Leviathans of the Skies. Goodyear Publications, 1923.

  ——. The Dirigible in War and Peace. Goodyear Publications, 1911.

  ——. Sitting Bull, Killer of Custer. G. E. Putnam’s, 1903.

  ——. Comanche of the Seventh. Chicago: Military Press, 1879.

  ——. Thomas Edison and the Indian Wars. Menlo Park, N.J.: Edison Press, 1921.

  ——. “Fearful Slaughter at Big Horn.” New York: Herald-Times, July 8, 1876, et passim.

  ——. Custer’s Gold Hoax. Boston: Barnum Press, 1892.

  ——. “Reno’s Treachery: New Light on the Massacre at The Little Big Horn.” Chicago: Daily News-Mirror, June 12-19,1878.

  ——. “Grant Scandals and the Plains Indian Wars.” Life May 3,1921.

  ——. The Hunkpapa Chief Sitting Bull, Famous Indians Series #3. New York: 1937.

  ARNOLD, HENRY H. The Air War in the East, Smithsonian Annals of Flight, Vol. 38. Four books, 1932-37.

  1. Sumter To Bull Run

  2. Williamsburg to Second Manassas

  3. Gettysburg to the Wilderness

  5. The Bombing of Atlanta to Haldeman

  BALLOWS, EDWARD. The Indian Ace: Crazy Horse. G. E. Putnam’s, 1903.

  BENTEEN, CAPT. FREDERICK. Major Benteen’s Letters to his Wife. University of Oklahoma Press, 1921.

  BRININSTOOL, A. E. A Paratrooper with Custer. n.p.g., 1891.

  BURROUGHS, COL. E. R. retired. The Seventh Cavalry: A History. Chicago: 1931.

  CLAIR-BRITNER, EDOARD. Haldeman: Where the War Ended. Frankfort University Press, 1911.

  CROOK, GENERAL GEORGE C. Yellowhair: Custer as the Indians Knew Him. Cincinnati Press, 1882.

  CUSTER, GEORGE A. My Life on the Plains and in the Clouds. Chicago: 1874

  ——and CUSTER, ELIZABETH. ‘Chutes and Saddles. Chicago: 1876. Custer’s Luck, n.a, n.p.g., [1891]

  DE CAMP, L. SPRAGUE and PRATT, FLETCHER. Franklin’s Engine: Mover of the World. Hanover House, 1939.

  DE VOTO, BERNARD. The Road From Sumter. Scribners, 1931.

  ELSEE, D. V. The Last Raid of Crazy Horse. Random House, 1921.

  The 505th: History From the Skies. DA Pamphlet 870-10-3 GPO Pittsburgh, May 12, 1903.

  FM 23-13-2 Machine Rifle M3121A1 and M3121A1E1 Cal. .41-40 Operator’s Manual, DA FM, July 12, 1873.

  GODDARD, ROBERT H. Rocketry: From 400 B.C. To 1933. Smithsonian Annals of Flight, Vol. 31, GPO Pittsburgh, 1934.

  Guide to the Custer Battlefield National Monument. U.S. Parks Services, GPO Pittsburgh, 1937.

  The Indian Wars. 3 vols, GPO Pittsburgh, 1898.

  KALIN, DAVID. Hook Up! The Story of the Balloon Infantry. New York: 1932.

  KELLOGG, MARK W. The Drop at Washita. Chicago: Times Press, 1872.

  LOCKRIDGE, SGT. ROBERT. History of the Airborne: From Shiloh to Ft. Bragg. Chicago: Military Press, 1936.

  LOWE, THADDEUS C. Aircraft of the Civil War. 4 vols. 1891-96.

  MCCOY, COL. TIM. The Vanished American. Phoenix Press, 1934.

  MCGOVERN, MAJ. WILLIAM. Death in the Dakotas. Sioux Press, 1889.

  MORISON, SAMUEL ELIOT. France in the New World 1627-1864. 1931.

  MYREN, GUNDAL. The Sun Dance Ritual and the Last Indian Wars. 1901.

  PATTON, GEN. GEORGE C. Custer’s Last Campaigns. Military House, 1937.

  PAUL, WINSTON. We Were There at the Bombing of Ft. Sumter. Landmark Books, 1929.

  PAYLEY, DAVID. Where Custer Fell. New York Press, 1931.

  POWELL, MAJ. JOHN WESLEY. Report on the Arid Lands. GPO, 1881.

  Proceedings, Reno Court of Inquiry. GPO Pittsburgh, 1881.

  Report on the U.S.-Canadian Offensive against Sitting Bull, 1879. GPO Pittsburgh, War Department, 1880.

  SANDBURG, CARL. Mr. Lincoln’s Airmen. Chicago: Drift-wind Press, 1921.

  SETTLE, SGT. MAJ. WiNSLOW. Under the Crossed Sabers. Military Press, 1898.

  SHERIDAN, GEN. PHILLIP. The Only Good Indian . . . Military House, 1889.

  SINGLETON, WILLIAM WARREN. J. E. B. Stuart, Attila of the Skies. Boston, 1871.

  SMITH, GREGORY. The Grey White Man: Moseby’s Expedition to the Northwest 1863-1866. University of Oklahoma Press, 1921.

  SMITH, NELDOO. He Gave Them Wings: Captain Smith’s Journal 1861-1864. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1927.

  STEEN, NELSON. Opening of the West. Jim Bridger Press, 1902.

  TAPSCOTT, RICHARD D. He Came With the Comet. University of Illinois Press, 1927.

  TWAIN, MARK. Huckleberry Among the Hostiles: A Journal. Hutton Books, 1932.

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  * * * *

  One of the great themes of science fiction is the desperate weariness that would eventually wear down an immortal person: the most resourceful and inventive of us could find enough things to do for hundreds, thousands of years . . . but forever? “Forever is too long,” as one science fiction novel was titled a quarter century ago.

  harlan ellison tells now of a being who had lived far t
oo long, who has done everything there is to do, on a cosmic scale. And of a Final Gathering of many such people, on a world of a far star.

  * * * *

  The Wine Has Been Left Open Too Long and the Memory Has Gone Flat

  BY HARLAN ELLISON

  “Taking advantage of what he had heard with one limited pair of ears, in a single and relatively isolated moment of recorded history, in the course of an infinitesimal fraction of conceivable time (which some say is the only time), he came to believe firmly that there was much that he could not hear, much that was constantly being spoken and indeed sung to teach him things he could never otherwise grasp, which if grasped would complete the fragmentary nature of his consciousness until it was whole at last—one tone both pure and entire floating in the silence of the egg, at the same pitch as the silence.”

  w. s. merwin, “The Chart” *

  * From “The Chart” by W. S. Merwin, in The New Yorker, Oct 22, 1973.

  * * * *

  Ennui was the reason only one hundred and one thousand alien representatives came to the Sonority Gathering. One hundred and one thousand out of six hundred and eleven thousand possible delegates, one each from the inhabited worlds of the stellar community. Even so, counterbalancing the poor turnout was the essential fact that it had been ennui, in the first place, that had caused the Gathering to be organized. Ennui, utter boredom, oppressive worlds-weariness, deep heaving sighs, abstracted vacant stares, familiar thoughts and familiar views.

  The dance of entropy was nearing its end.

  The orchestration of the universe sounded thick and gravelly, a tune slowing down inexorably, being played at the wrong speed.

  Chasm ruts had been worn in the dance floor.

  The oscillating universe was fifty billion years old, and it was tired.

  And the intelligent races of six hundred and eleven thousand worlds sought mere moments of amusement, pale beads strung on a dreary Möbius of dragging time. Mere moments, each one dearer than the last, for there were so few. Everything that could be done, had been done; every effort was ultimately the fuzzed echo of an earlier attempt.

  Even the Sonority Gathering had been foreshadowed by the Vulpeculan Quadrivium in ‘08, the tonal festival hosted by the Saturniidae of Whoung in ‘76, and the abortive, ludicrous Rigellian Sodality “musical get-together” that had turned out to be merely another fraudulent attempt to purvey the artist Merle’s skiagrams to an already-disenchanted audience.

  Nonetheless (in a phrase exhumed and popularized by the Recidivists of Fornax 993-λ), it was “the only game in town.” And so, when the esteemed and shimmering DeilBo devised the Gathering, his reputation as an innovator and the crush of ennui combined to stir excitement of a sluggish sort . . . and one hundred and one thousand delegates came. To Vindemiatrix Σ in what had long ago been called, in the time of the heliocentric arrogance, the “constellation” of Virgo.

  With the reddish-yellow eye of the giant Arcturus forever lighting the azure skies, forever vying with Spica’s first magnitude brilliance, Σ’s deserts and canyons seemed poor enough stage setting for the lesser glow of Vindemiatrix, forever taking third place in prominence to its brawny elders. But Σ, devoid of intelligent life, a patchwork-colored world arid and crumbling, had one thing to recommend it that DeilBo found compelling: the finest acoustics of any world in the universe.

  The Maelstrom Labyrinth. Remnant of volcanic upheavals and the retreat of oceans and the slow dripping of acid waters, Σ boasted a grand canyon of stalagmites that rose one hundred and sixty kilometers; stalactites that narrowed into spear-tip pendants plunging down over ninety kilometers into bottomless crevasses; caverns and arroyos and tunnels that had never been plotted; the arching, golden stone walls had never been seen by the eyes of intelligent creatures; the Ephemeris called it the Maelstrom Labyrinth. No matter where one stood in the sixteen-hundred-kilometer sprawl of the Labyrinth, one could speak with a perfectly normal tone, never even raise one’s voice, and be assured that a listener crouching deep in a cave at the farthest point of the formation could hear what he said as if beside him. DeilBo selected the Maelstrom Labyrinth as the site for the Gathering.

  And so they came. One hundred and one thousand alien life-forms. From what the primitives had once called the constellations of Indus and Pavo, from Sad al Bari in Pegasus, from Mizar and Phecda, from all the worlds of the stellar community they came; bearing with them the special sounds they hoped would be judged the most extraordinary, the most stirring, the most memorable: ultimate sounds. They came, because they were bored and there was nowhere else to go; they came, they wanted to hear what they had never heard before. They came; and they heard.

  * * * *

  “. . . he domesticated the elephant, the cat, the bear, the rat, and kept all the remaining whales in dark stalls, trying to hear through their ears the note made by the rocking of the axle of the earth.”

  w. s. merwin, “The Chart”

  If she had one fear in this endless life, it was that she would be forced to be born again. Yes, of course, life was sacred, but how long, how ceaselessly, repetitiously long did it have to go on? Why were such terrible stigmas visited on the relatives and descendants of those who simply, merely, only wished to know the sweet sleep?

  Stileen had tried to remember her exact age just a few solstices ago. Periodically she tried to remember; and only when she recognized that it was becoming obsessive did she put it out of her mind. She was very old, even by the standards of immortality of her race. And all she truly hungered to know, after all those times and stars, was the sweet sleep. A sleep denied her by custom and taboo. She sought to busy herself with diversions. She had devised the system of gravity pulse-manipulation that had kept the dense, tiny worlds of the Neer 322 system from falling into their Primary. She had compiled the exhaustive concordance of extinct emotions of all the dead races that had ever existed in the stellar community. She had assumed control of the Red Line Armies in the perpetual Procyon War for over one hundred solstices, and had amassed more confirmed tallies than any other commander-in-chief in the War’s long history.

  Her insatiable curiosity and her race’s longevity had combined to provide the necessary state of mind that would lead her, inevitably, to the sound. And having found it, and having perceived what it was, and being profoundly ready to enjoy the sweet sleep, she had come to the Gathering to share it with the rest of the stellar community.

  For the first time in millennia, Stileen was not seeking merely to amuse herself; she was engaged on a mission of significance . . . and finality.

  With her sound, she came to the Gathering.

  She was ancient, deep yellow, in her jar with cornsilk hair floating free in the azure solution. DeilBo’s butlers took her to her assigned place in the Labyrinth, set her down on a limestone ledge in a deep cavern where the acoustics were particularly rich and true, tended to her modest needs, and left her.

  Stileen had time, then, to dwell on the diminished enthusiasm she had for continued life.

  * * * *

  DeilBo made the opening remarks, heard precisely and clearly throughout the Maelstrom. He used no known language, in fact used no words. Sounds, mere sounds that keynoted the Gathering by imparting his feelings of warmth and camaraderie to the delegates. In every trench and run and wash and cavern of the Maelstrom, the delegates heard, and in their special ways smiled with pleasure, even those without mouths or the ability to smile.

  It was to be, truly, a Sonority Gathering, in which sounds alone would be judged. Impressed, the delegates murmured their pleasure.

  Then DeilBo offered to present the first sound for their consideration. He took the responsibility of placing himself first, as a gesture of friendship, an icebreaker of a move. Again, the delegates were pleased at the show of hospitality, and urged DeilBo to exhibit his special sound.

  And this is the sound, the ultimate sound, the very special sound he had trapped for them:

  On the eleventh moon of the
world called Chill by its Inhabitants, there is a flower whose roots are sunk deep, deep into the water pools that lie far beneath the black stone surface. This flower, without a name, seems to be an intricate construct of spiderwebs. There are, of course, no spiders on the eleventh moon of Chill.

  Periodically, for no reason anyone has ever been able to discern, the spiderweb flowers burst into flame, and very slowly destroy themselves, charring and shriveling and turning to ashes that lie where they fall. There is no wind on the eleventh moon of Chill.