Universe 10 - [Anthology] Read online

  There was no mistaking the displeasure in that question. Allegra reached out to touch his hand. “Of course not, but they do have some ideas worth considering. Are you disturbed by that?”

  The muscles in his jaw twitched. “What do you think? I’ve spent four months in hell, working as hard as I could to sell off the cargo so I could redeem you. I was scared to death for you. I didn’t have any idea what that creature might be capable of doing. Now you come back singing his praises and spouting alien philosophy. Exactly how friendly have you been with him?”

  His implied accusation shocked me. “He’s never touched me. You are my beloved, Jonathan. I have been faithful to you.”

  He hugged me fiercely. “Thank God. And now we’re back together again, we can forget this whole incident and continue where we left off.”

  We did not, of course. I had been changed by the months with Hakon. I looked at Jonathan through eyes grown a bit alien. I saw things in him I had never seen before, things that deeply disturbed me. When I realized Jonathan was preparing to cheat Hakon out of part of the profit due him, I had to speak out.

  Jonathan was brusque. “This is none of your concern.”

  “It is. I promised Hakon you were trustworthy. It isn’t right for you to do this.”

  His anger was not the flaming kind. Outwardly, he remained calm. His voice stayed level, his face clear, but the muscles twitched in his jaw as I talked and his voice took the tightness of careful control. He refused to discuss his business and ordered me out of the office.

  I looked at him in great sorrow. I had been afraid it might come to this. “Very well. I’ll go pack.”

  “Pack?” He was on his feet “What do you mean, pack?”

  “I’m leaving you.”

  He came flying around the desk. “No. You can’t.”

  I felt as if I were being torn apart, but I refused to yield to him. I tried to explain how different I felt about things now, how differently I saw. He could not understand.

  “I knew there was something between you and that alien.”

  I shook my head emphatically. “You’re wrong. Perhaps there could have been, but I remained faithful to you and he respected my choice.”

  “Is that so?” His voice was rising. “You think he’s a wonderful man. You bargain in his behalf in business matters that are none of your concern—bargain against me, the man you claim to love. Now you want to leave me. And you expect me to believe it isn’t to go back to him?”

  “I expect you to believe that, yes.”

  “You’re lying.” He said it through clenched teeth. His hands flexed.

  Panic went through me in an icy wash. He was going to hit me! I backed away, feeling helpless and eight years old.

  One of his hands drew back, open, poised for a slap. “You’re lying to me. Don’t you dare do that. Admit there was something between you and the alien. Admit it!”

  “No, Jonathan.” I tried to back farther, but the desk, that huge, solid desk, blocked my retreat. ‘There was nothing! I swear it!”

  In the back of my head, Noir was screaming, too. Jonathan wore the face of my mother’s boyfriend. The hand swung forward. Allegra groped behind her. I needed something to fend him off. My hand closed on the base of the Kain sculpture.

  Noir protested, struggling against the angel mist inside me. The play was not supposed to go this way. Allegra should drop the sculpture, should let him hit her once if necessary, and reason lovingly with him. Once I might have, but now Jonathan’s hand was headed toward my face and the terrifying memory of another hand and another man paralyzed me. Noir Delacour should have resumed control, but that same image held me snarled in the angel mist. I swung the sculpture at him.

  It slashed across his face. The vanes were like dozens of knives, cutting and tearing through cheeks and nose and eyes. Somewhere beyond the walls of the office, there was a shriek, and the sharp stench of sweat and fear. Jonathan screamed and clawed for me. I swung the sculpture again. This time it crossed his throat.

  As he went down I realized what I was doing. I dropped the sculpture and fell on my knees beside him. I tried to stop the bleeding with my hands.

  “Jonathan, Jonathan, why did you do this to me? I never wanted to hurt you. I loved you.”

  Through the angel mist, Noir watched with dull horror and realized it was supposed to happen this way. It had been orchestrated. Brian had chosen me for Allegra because of my mother’s boyfriend. It was to keep me from stopping Allegra’s panic reaction to Jonathan’s anger. I was not the only one chosen, though. Brian had asked Tommy to be Jonathan . . . poor foolish, irresponsible Tommy. Brian had commissioned the Kain sculpture, so appropriately named after those Grecian instruments of revenge.

  Allegra cried, “What are we? I found humanity and compassion in an alien, and monstrosity in my beloved. Even I, for all my pride of being gentle and civilized, become a clawing animal at the first threat of attack.”

  Beyond the projection wall the crowd murmured in excitement. The sound came through the angel mist. My head cleared. I looked down at Tommy. He lay slack and still.

  The blood delighted the crowd. Suddenly I understood them as I never had before. This was why they loved théâtre vérité, what they really came hoping to see . . . modem Romans at a modern circus.

  I looked at my hands, red with Tommy’s blood. “Who are the men, Jonathan, and who the beasts and aliens?”

  I huddled over him. I did not look up when the projection wall was shut off. I would not stand to take a bow. Someone picked me up. It was Miles. He kept an arm around me, holding me against his leathery chest while the crowd screamed its pleasure and the stage carried us down out of their sight.

  Miles helped me off the stage in the substage area.

  Brian pushed through the crowd of gaffers and stagehands to us. “Noir, how terrible, but don’t worry. I’m sure the inquest will find it was an accident, death by misadventure.”

  I looked around at him, not letting go of Miles. “What a pity,” I said bitterly. “Then you can’t take proper credit for the most brilliant directing of your career.”

  He stared at me one flicker of time, then patted my shoulder. “Poor Noir. You’re upset.”

  “What does that matter? Pia is avenged, and that’s what it’s all been about, isn’t it?”

  “You’d better take her to her dressing room to lie down, Miles. I’ll call a doctor.”

  I let Miles lead me away, but in the doorway I stopped and looked back. Brian had picked up The Fury from where I’d dropped it and stood holding the sculpture. The light slanting down from the auditorium reflected off the vanes onto his face. It caught his eyes, and as he lifted his head to look back at me, the cinnamon eyes glowed red, like an animal’s by firelight.

  On gray days, when the clouds hang in heavy pewter folds and the wind comes down cold and sharp as a blade, I think of Brian Eleazar. We face each other in the sand garden, and between us lies a trail of footprints, scarlet in the fine white sand, as though they were stepped in blood.

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  * * * *

  Science fiction is an unpredictable literature, and you can trust Howard Waldrop to be more unpredictable than most anyone. Remember the stories about lost valleys in the Amazon or islands in the South Pacific where adventurous scientists discovered living dinosaurs, mastodons, or saber-toothed tigers? Those were only a few of the strange creatures from Earth’s past that have long been extinct. ..

  For instance, there was the dodo.

  * * * *

  THE UGLY CHICKENS

  Howard Waldrop

  My car was broken, and I had a class to teach at eleven. So I took the city bus, something I rarely do.

  I spent last summer crawling through The Big Thicket with cameras and tape recorder, photographing and taping two of the last ivory-billed woodpeckers on the earth. You can see the films at your local Audubon Society showroom.

  This year I wanted something just as flashy but a litt
le less taxing. Perhaps a population study on the Bermuda cahow, or the New Zealand takahe. A month or so in the warm (not hot) sun would do me a world of good. To say nothing of the advance of science.

  I was idly leafing through Greenway’s Extinct and Vanishing Birds of the World. The city bus was winding its way through the ritzy neighborhoods of Austin, stopping to let off the chicanas, black women, and Vietnamese who tended the kitchens and gardens of the rich.

  “I haven’t seen any of those ugly chickens in a long time,” said a voice close by.

  A grey-haired lady was leaning across the aisle toward me.

  I looked at her, then around. Maybe she was a shopping-bag lady. Maybe she was just talking. I looked straight at her. No doubt about it, she was talking to me. She was waiting for an answer.

  “I used to live near some folks who raised them when I was a girl,” she said. She pointed.

  I looked down at the page my book was open to.

  What I should have said was: “That is quite impossible, madam. This is a drawing of an extinct bird of the island of Mauritius. It is perhaps the most famous dead bird in the world. Maybe you are mistaking this drawing for that of some rare Asiatic turkey, peafowl, or pheasant. I am sorry, but you are mistaken.”

  I should have said all that.

  What she said was, “Oops, this is my stop,” and got up to go.

  · · · · ·

  My name is Paul Linberl. I am twenty-six years old, a graduate student in ornithology at the University of Texas, a teaching assistant. My name is not unknown in the field. I have several vices and follies, but I don’t think foolishness is one of them.

  The stupid thing for me to do would have been to follow her.

  She stepped off the bus.

  I followed her.

  · · · · ·

  I came into the departmental office, trailing scattered papers in the whirlwind behind me. “Martha! Martha!” I yelled.

  She was doing something in the supply cabinet.

  “Jesus, Paul! What do you want?”

  “Where’s Courtney?”

  “At the conference in Houston. You know that. You missed your class. What’s the matter?”

  “Petty cash. Let me at it!”

  “Payday was only a week ago. If you can’t …”

  “It’s business! It’s fame and adventure and the chance of a lifetime! It’s a long sea voyage that leaves … a plane ticket. To either Jackson, Mississippi or Memphis. Make it Jackson, it’s closer. I’ll get receipts! I’ll be famous. Courtney will be famous. You’ll even be famous! This university will make even more money! I’ll pay you back. Give me some paper. I gotta write Courtney a note. When’s the next plane out? Could you get Marie and Chuck to take over my classes Tuesday and Wednesday? I’ll try to be back Thursday unless something happens. Courtney’ll be back tomorrow, right? I’ll call him from, well, wherever. Do you have some coffee?…”

  And so on and so forth. Martha looked at me like I was crazy. But she filled out the requisition anyway.

  “What do I tell Kemejian when I ask him to sign these?”

  “Martha, babe, sweetheart. Tell him I’ll get his picture in Scientific American.”

  “He doesn’t read it.”

  “Nature, then!”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

  · · · · ·

  The lady I had followed off the bus was named Jolyn (Smith) Jimson. The story she told me was so weird that it had to be true. She knew things only an expert, or someone with firsthand experience, could know. I got names from her, and addresses, and directions, and tidbits of information. Plus a year: 1927.

  And a place: northern Mississippi.

  I gave her my copy of the Greenway book. I told her I’d call her as soon as I got back into town. I left her standing on the corner near the house of the lady she cleaned for twice a week. Jolyn Jimson was in her sixties.

  · · · · ·

  Think of the dodo as a baby harp seal with feathers. I know that’s not even close, but it saves time.

  In 1507, the Portuguese, on their way to India, found the (then unnamed) Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean—three of them a few hundred miles apart, all east and north of Madagascar.

  It wasn’t until 1598, when that old Dutch sea captain Cornelius van Neck bumped into them, that the islands received their names—names which changed several times through the centuries as the Dutch, French, and English changed them every war or so. They are now know as Rodriguez, Réunion, and Mauritius.

  The major feature of these islands were large flightless birds, stupid, ugly, bad-tasting birds. Van Neck and his men named them dod-aarsen, stupid ass, or dodars, silly birds, or solitaires.

  There were three species—the dodo of Mauritius, the real grey-brown, hooked-beak clumsy thing that weighed twenty kilos or more; the white, somewhat slimmer dodo of Réunion; and the solitaires of Rodriguez and Réunion, which looked like very fat, very dumb light-colored geese.

  The dodos all had thick legs, big squat bodies twice as large as a turkey’s, naked faces, and big long downcurved beaks ending in a hook like a hollow linoleum knife. They were flightless. Long ago they had lost the ability to fly, and their wings had degenerated to flaps the size of a human hand with only three or four feathers in them. Their tails were curly and fluffy, like a child’s afterthought at decoration. They had absolutely no natural enemies. They nested on open ground. They probably hatched their eggs wherever they happened to lay them.

  No natural enemies until van Neck and his kind showed up. The Dutch, French, and Portuguese sailors who stopped at the Mascarenes to replenish stores found that besides looking stupid, dodos were stupid. They walked right up to them and hit them on the head with clubs. Better yet, dodos could be herded around like sheep. Ship’s logs are full of things like: “Party of ten men ashore. Drove half-a-hundred of the big turkey-like birds into the boat. Brought to ship where they are given the run of the decks. Three will feed a crew of 150.”

  Even so, most of the dodo, except for the breast, tasted bad. One of the Dutch words for them was walghvogel, disgusting bird. But on a ship three months out on a return from Goa to Lisbon, well, food was where you found it. It was said, even so, that prolonged boiling did not improve the flavor.

  That being said, the dodos might have lasted, except that the Dutch, and later the French, Colónized the Mascarenes. These islands became plantations and dumping-places for religious refugees. Sugar cane and other exotic crops were raised there.

  With the Colónists came cats, dogs, hogs, and the cunning Rattus norvegicus and the Rhesus monkey from Ceylon. What dodos the hungry sailors left were chased down (they were dumb and stupid, but they could run when they felt like it) by dogs in the open. They were killed by cats as they sat on their nests. Their eggs were stolen and eaten by monkeys, rats, and hogs. And they competed with the pigs for all the low-growing goodies of the islands.

  The last Mauritius dodo was seen in 1681, less than a hundred years after man first saw them. The last white dodo walked off the history books around 1720. The solitaires of Rodriguez and Réunion, last of the genus as well as the species, may have lasted until 1790. Nobody knows.

  Scientists suddenly looked around and found no more of the Didine birds alive, anywhere.

  · · · · ·

  This part of the country was degenerate before the first Snopes ever saw it. This road hadn’t been paved until the late fifties, and it was a main road between two county seats. That didn’t mean it went through civilized country. I’d traveled for miles and seen nothing but dirt banks red as Billy Carter’s neck and an occasional church. I expected to see Burma Shave signs, but realized this road had probably never had them.

  I almost missed the turn-off onto the dirt and gravel road the man back at the service station had marked. It led onto the highway from nowhere, a lane out of a field. I turned down it and a rock the size of a golf ball flew up over the hood and put a crack three inches long in
the windshield of the rent-a-car I’d gotten in Grenada.

  It was a hot muggy day for this early. The view was obscured in a cloud of dust every time the gravel thinned. About a mile down the road, the gravel gave out completely. The roadway turned into a rutted dirt pathway, just wider than the car, hemmed in on both sides by a sagging three-strand barbed-wire fence.

  In some places the fenceposts were missing for a few meters. The wire lay on the ground and in some places disappeared under it for long stretches.