Universe 9 - [Anthology] Read online

  Tondius Will reached into the half of the urn in his left hand and extracted something that had lain there for ten thousand millennia. A tiny skeleton to which a thin shroud of skin clung; a miniature mummy. “It’s an infant who died at birth,” Will muttered. “The urn was his sarcophagus. A shame to disturb it. So . . .” He bent, retrieved the fallen half, replaced it over the mummy. Clamping the two halves snug with his left hand, with the thumb of his right he pressed the seams of the urn, all the way around, fusing it shut. Moving slowly and easily, he replaced the urn in the hole he had made in the wall. Then he returned his gaze to the eyes of the assassin. “Now: can you match what I have just done?”

  The assassin slowly shook his head.

  “Then, you know that I could kill you,” said Will lightly, taking a cautious step forward so that he was within striking distance. “I could kill you even before you pressed the fire stud of your charge gun.” Will smiled. “Yes?”

  Looking stooped and weary, the assassin nodded.

  “Therefore, your mission is useless. Depart now, in peace.”

  The assassin shook his head...The tenets of the assassin’s guild.

  Will saw the man’s eyes narrow. Will knew, a split-second realization, that the assassin was depressing the stud of his charge gun.

  Will struck, doubly. One hand struck aside the charge gun, the other dipped into the assassin’s chest. Just as that hand had penetrated the wall.

  Will took something from the man’s chest and held it up for him to see.

  Spurting blood from the gaping crater in his chest, the assassin took two seconds to collapse, two more to die.

  But before he fell he had a glimpse of his heart, his own heart torn still pumping from his chest, wet-red and steaming in Will the Chill’s outthrust hand.

  * * * *

  In a.d. 1976 the physicist-philosopher Denis Postle said: “Mass-energy tells space-time how to curve and curved space-time tells mass-energy how to move.”

  Imagine that you are involved in a competition which requires that, with your right hand, you throw a discus with Olympic skill, while your legs are performing an elaborate ballet choreography and with your left hand you are playing the world tennis champion (and winning), and in between racquet strokes you must move a piece to attack a champion chessmaster effectively on a three-dimensional chessboard. If you can imagine doing all that in near simultaneity, then you know something of what it is to be a waverider.

  * * * *

  Externally. In hookup, Will’s eyes were closed, his hands were clamped rigidly on armrests, his legs flexed and poised; except for his heaving chest, he seemed inert—about to fly to activity like a drawn bowstring.

  Internally. He saw himself, in his mind’s eye, floating naked in space; outside him were luminous matrices, the energy fields, flickering in and out of ken as he looked up and down the spectrum. He approached a pulsing sphere—to innersight, the sphere seemed only ten meters across. It traveled in preordained paths through the matrix. Paths he had ordained. He had set his globe on the road it was taking by manipulating pushcoils situated about the vast surface of its genuine counterpart, Roche Five.

  He felt the presence of Opponent, though he could not yet see her. He sensed her position as a man with closed eyes knows the whereabouts of the sun by the feel of its glare on his eyelids. She had not yet moved Roche Three from tertiary-stage orbit. But she was there, satelliting Three elliptically, just within pushcoil-control range. She was waiting for Will to serve.

  Will served. He reached out, mentally, for the imaged sphere. He didn’t touch Roche Five directly, just as Great Senses kept out of range of the planet’s gravdrag so that orbitshift wouldn’t wrench the ship. He placed his hand near the Eastcenter South Polar pushcoil, poised over the pushcoil column (externally he remained in his seat—but his muscles flexed accordingly) in a hand posture that told Great Senses exactly how much push should be exerted by the coil, and for how long, and at what intervals. Through hookup, Great Senses drank Will’s muscular expressions, translated them into mathematical formulas. Great Senses knew Will’s flesh, though Will denied that flesh to humanity.

  Except for autonomic functions, breathing and blood moving, Will’s every movement (as visualized on the noumenon plane, hookup) represented, to Great Senses, a signal to be transmitted to the pushcoil control units on Five.

  Externally. He was rippling like an eel, rippling purposefully, sending three dozen signals in one dozen seconds. Sometimes several pushcoils were activated simultaneously, sometimes one at a time; on each occasion the activation signal carried a precisely quantified regulation of the thrust applied.

  Roche Five moved out of orbit.

  A man about 1.8 meters high and weighing 170 pounds moved a mass of about 6 billion trillion tons, some 11,000 kilometers in diameter. And he did this (apparently) by rotating his hips and flexing shoulder muscles.

  He did this very swiftly—but very warily. Because the wrong nudge could conflict impetus with the planet’s rotational force, sundering the masspiece.

  Internally. Swimming through space after the sphere, waving his hands about it in intricate patterns like a wizard invoking visions from a crystal ball, he swept it easily (but not effortlessly) in a wide arc, ninety degrees from the solar system’s orbital plane, right angles from its former path.

  This was stage three-fifty in Contest. Six months since stage one.

  The greater the scope entailed in implementing an activity, the greater the need for strict attention to small details.

  Each split-second decision taking into account all that Will read of gravitational fields, electromagnetic and heat-energy factors, gravdrag on nearby asteroids, influence of solar wind—the consequences of interaction with these factors.

  Will struggled with ecstasy. Each aspect of the celestial field had its own musics, in Will’s mind, and its own fireworks, exquisite and hypnotic: a threat of distraction.

  . . . Opponent drew Roche Three in ever-widening spirals, never quite breaking free of the gravitational field of the sun. She used the pull of the sun, increasing her speed as she neared it, profiting in impetus accumulated with one pass after another. She expended weeks in each strategic repositioning, always moving with strict reference to the ploys of Will the Chill...

  Concentration opaqued time; Will’s fixation on Contest never faltered. The weeks collapsed upon themselves; Three and Five spun nearer, and nearer.

  Hookup fed and cleansed him. In place of sleep it washed his unconcious and hung it to dry in the winds of dreaming. Weeks melted into minutes. Sports-eyes recorded all. Sports-eyes staring from a thousand angles, a thousand droneships with camera snouts preparing the composite time-lapse film reducing Contest to the relative simplicity of a bullfight.

  * * * *

  They entered the specified ninety thousand cubic kilometers of space agreed upon as Impact Zone.

  Like macrocosmic Sumo wrestlers, the planets closed, bulk upon bulk. Sadly, as with Sumo wrestlers, the naked eye made them seem mindlessly charging brutes, naked force versus naked force; but Sumo artists know their wrestle as a kind of dance, a finely pivotal judo, intricate in calculation and performance.

  The masspieces were ten thousand kilometers apart.

  She was closing fast, impulsively, driving straight as a billiard ball, utilizing the equatorial bulge as impending impact point. She was overconfident, perhaps, because Will had not been performing as well as in the past; his mind was troubled, divided. He had to struggle to keep from thinking of the ruins, the sunharp, the voices, and Mina.

  This was his final Contest, and his heart pleaded with him to play it to denouement.

  But as the two planets engaged for impact—each making minute split-second adjustments in trajectory, rate of spin, and lean of axis—Will rose up from hookup, thinking: Sports-eyes, this time you’re cheated. Crack your own eggshells.

  Great Senses was not capable of surprise. But it was capable of alarm. Alarmed by Wil
l’s withdrawal from hookup, the computer spoke to him through ship’s intercom. “What’s wrong? Impact is in—”

  “I know. Less than two hours. So it is scheduled, and so Opponent expects. But there will be no impact. We are stalemating; no one wins. I’ll back out of the approach pattern as if I’m preparing another. But Five will never collide with Three.”

  Will was capable of surprise. “You aren’t supposed to read my mind.”

  “Because of the voices in the ruins?”

  “I read only what hookup leaks to me. I know you want to preserve the planet for the voices. The dead one hundred thousand. Why? They’re already dead. Do you want to preserve Five intact as a monument to them?”

  “In a way, it will be a monument. But—do you know what they require of me?”

  “They want you to guide them upspectrum. Beyond the shortest known wavelengths, the highest frequencies. Into the fuller spheres.”

  “I want to go. I want to see upspectrum. And I want Mina. ... It is a condition of their advancement that there must be a solid point of departure. We have to depart from an intact planet; it’s like a door into the Farther Place. If the game were consummated, most of Five would be destroyed. . . . The only reason—beyond my love of Contest—that I’ve played this far was to be near Five. I had to Contest to stay near, since this is sponsor’s ship.”

  “Within an hour the quakes on Five will begin. If you want to preserve the ruins—”

  “I’ve programmed the backup navigator. You won’t have to do a thing. In forty-five minutes the pushcoil will veer Five. Opponent’s momentum will prevent her from coming about to strike. As soon as we’re out of impact zone, on that instant, transmit a message to her, tell her, as is my right at this point, I declare stalemate, by right of points accrued. That will infuriate her.”

  “And you’ll go to the surface of Five.”

  “Yes ... and you’ll go to serve another waverider.”

  “And on Five you’ll die and go with them.”

  “Yes.”

  “How? Will you crash the lander?”

  “No. I’ve got to be in sunharp rapport with them when I die.”

  “Then—you’ll remove your respirator? An ugly death.”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary. She’s proved herself to be vindictive. When she discovers the stalemate she’ll come after me. She’ll find me in rapport.”

  That was where she found him.

  The sudden change in orbital trajectory had riven the surface of Five. The sky was mordant with volcanic smog. Some of the ruins crumbled. The sunharp survived.

  Roche Five was moving into a wide, cold, permanent orbit. The pushcoil column, in the waning light like a colossal mailed fist and forearm, flared for the last time.

  He stood before the sunharp, tranced by its distant hum. The voices whispered, sang louder, a cry touched by exultation.

  “Hello,” he said.

  Again you have not come alone (said the voices). A she comes in a small, armed ship. Just out of sight, in the clouds. She approaches.

  “I know. She will be the instrument of our union.”

  Tondius...

  “Mina!” shouted Will the Chill warmly.

  I’m here.

  The planet was rotating into darkness. Light diminished, night engulfed Five. But Tondius Will had no lack of light: “Mina!” he breathed.

  She touched him before the others, a chill breath, a kiss of ether. Then the others came and he was borne up, the surfer deliquesced; a sea of one hundred thousand and two waves. His body, still standing, remained alive and for a few moments it tethered him to that plane.

  Something metallic broke from the clouds. A chip of light glittered low in the black sky, growing. It was a contestship, diving like a vulture. It spat a beam of harsh red light; the laser passed through Will’s chest and through his heart—but before his body crumpled his ears resounded with a joyous cry, the song of the sunharp: struck by the laser blade passed through his flesh.

  One wavelength, infinitely divisible.

  Freed of his body Will had no need of hookup. He showed them the way. In a moment, the one hundred thousand and two had gone.

  . . . Far over the surface of Five, Will’s Great Senses surveyed the planet. Its face of honeycombed crystal was a mixture of three colors; red for regret, blue for considering, green for triumph...

  Great Senses veered from Five and departed the system.

  Opponent’s ship departed as well.

  Now, Roche Five, icing over, a frigid forever monument to a transcended race, was utterly empty. Except for the lonely ghost of a forgotten assassin.

  <>

  * * * *

  Here’s another “first” story, in the sense that it’s Juleen Brantingham’s first sale in the science fiction field; she is, however, an experienced writer of children’s stories and confessions. (“I confess I’ve been a seventy-year-old man who held up a grocery store, a sixteen-year-old-girl who posed for pornographic pictures, and a fourteen-year-old hit-and-run driver.”)

  “Chicken of the Tree” is a departure for her, and delightfully different as a science fiction story, too: a witty and odd tale of people escaping from the automated pollution of tomorrow’s cities.

  Juleen Brantingham was born in Ohio but spent most of her life in Florida; currently she lives with her husband and three children in New York State, “where it’s cold and dark but that’s all right because it gives me lots of time to write.” Let’s hope she continues to give us science fiction stories as original and entertaining as this.

  * * * *

  CHICKEN OF THE TREE

  Juleen Brantingham

  Chicken Little didn’t do enough. She should have hired Foxy Loxy as a lobbyist, sent petitions to the President, and recruited Henny Penny and the other members of her commune to picket everyone who ever raised a hand to take an oath of office. The sky is falling. And our cluck was too dumb to get out of the way.

  I’m just your ordinary nut back-to-the-lander. I was converted the day I walked into a supermarket, mistaking it for a grocery store. This was one of the modern ones that comes from the manufacturer complete with prepackaged food, prepackaged music, and prepackaged smiles. I wanted one tomato for my supper salad. That was another mistake. I should have given up salads and fresh vegetables and embraced the delights of the canning industry. It would have been safer.

  A stock boy, rushing to fill shelves with the five o’clock special, knocked me against the produce case. A pile of ethylene-ripened tomatoes cascaded down the side of the case and bombarded my sneaker-clad feet.

  The produce manager raced toward me waving a waiver of responsibility. Groggy with pain I signed it and hobbled out of the store, home to a tomatoless salad.

  Gly and Spike were properly sympathetic. Pickles just giggled. She did that a lot and we tried to ignore it. She was arrested for felonious joking the last time she visited the airport to see her mother and she hasn’t been the same since. Gly—that’s GLY for God Loves You—she says Pickles is still in shock from discovering that someone as powerful as her uncle has no sense of humor. Spike says she has always been antisocial and giggles just to annoy us.

  The truth is, Pickles was a flake before that visit and she’s a flake now and I don’t care what she says they did to her in that interrogation room, I won’t let her get away from me until she tells me where she hid my Euell Gibbons autograph.

  As you can see, we’re a very close family.

  Gly brewed me an herb tea, Pickles made poultices for my feet, and the four of us had a family conference. Twenty-two if you count the ragweed and toadstools as Gly insists on doing.

  Spike wanted to buy all those tomatoes and throw them at the store window but I convinced him that even if we could afford to buy the tomatoes, reducing plate glass to rubble would prove nothing.

  “The time for action is past. Actions are ignored. Our only defense is reaction.”

  I must apologize. A
t one time I could create slogans that stirred the mind and lit a fire in the heart, not to be confused with scrambled eggs and heartburn. That time is gone now. I think words began to fail me the day I found out a multimillion-dollar corporation was being fined one hundred and fifty dollars for turning a healthy stream into an open sewer. I manage as well as I can now, though the spirit has gone out of me. At least I have the consolation of knowing that in the bosom of my own family my failure is forgiven.

  “Dumb. Really dumb, El. Why don’t you just say what you mean and quit trying for immortality?”