Universe 11 - [Anthology] Read online

  Meanwhile, in a well-curtained, black-glassed limousine, our sponsor arrived and was whisked down to the Transformation Room.

  He was a wiry—or weedy—specimen of a man, depending upon one’s point of view, and I couldn’t help thinking of those advertisements for Charles Atlas body-building courses, where the runt has sand kicked in his face by the tough guy. Obviously our sponsor had developed his financial muscles to the bursting point, but when it came to making his body superhuman only science was going to help, not workouts.

  He was injected, and later sedated to lie on Geneva’s waterbed while his two bodyguards stood watch with us, turn by turn, in the observation room.

  Presently, while Geneva thrashed around the estate, enjoying herself, the changes began.

  ~ * ~

  He went through what I now thought of as the stage of banal caricature—just as Geneva had looked for a while: merely fat, stupid, and sly.

  However, during this period he actually shrank, becoming more like an Egyptian mummy, shriveled and dried up, as though not only were the catheters draining fluid from his body but so were the feeding tubes. It was as though he were regressing to some wizened monkey thing. We watched this with considerable concern—especially the bodyguards, who were seeing the body they were paid to guard evaporate before their very eyes.

  But then he stabilized. He did not build back, though. Instead—weighing by now less than fifteen kilos, and just over a meter long from head to foot—he became ineffably beautiful: a sprite, something elfin, fairylike, angelic. We were consumed with wonder and anxiety.

  “I don’t think we got it right,” murmured Axel Norman to me, out of hearing of the bodyguards. “This can’t be the future of the human race: giant ladies and tiny males. It wouldn’t work with our species. We aren’t spiders! What’s happening, Frank, I do believe, is a strange psychobiological change: it’s what the subject really wants to become, deep down in his soul. It’s how he really feels he is: the idealization of himself. Himself as metaphor, rather than meat. A dream person.”

  “There’s plenty of meat on Geneva,” I pointed out.

  “So that was her secret dream. To be an Amazon—it was her soul’s dream, unknown even to her.”

  “And his dream was to be a fairy?”

  “His soul’s dream was that. He wanted to be utterly beautiful—and damn it, he is, but it isn’t any ordinary human standard of good looks. It’s the beauty of a hummingbird or a butterfly. I bet that if you took the drug, you wouldn’t turn out anything like either of them. You might be a werewolf or . . . oh, I don’t know what. Breathe water, maybe.”

  “The rats and monkeys all ended up looking physically similar, by and large.”

  “Monkeys have dexterity, rats have cunning—that’s their dream. They haven’t as much imagination. But with us, it’s . . . it’s everyone’s form of perfect satisfaction—as though the world is newly made, and you can create yourself according to your heart’s desire. Without prejudice. Only you can’t consciously command what it’ll produce. You can’t foreguess it either. Because none of us knows what we really want. But the body cells do. Or something does—the unconscious? This is mythological, Frank; it’s the real dream of mythology. It’s the way back to a crazy, magical race of Sirens and Harpies and Manticoras and Mermaids. Everyone his or her own race. This thing’s a soul teratogen. It produces monsters. but perfectly viable ones. Beautiful ones, all in their own terms. Wow.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “It’ll be his way of looking at it. I know it will.”

  “He’ll be satisfied? Lord, let’s hope so. The way I see it, this whole project has just gone up the spout.”

  “Oh no, Frank, no.”

  “How are they going to mate?”

  “Don’t you see, other people will join this . . . this Wonderland by invitation? With his consent, that is. Brave spirits, bold spirits—they’ll beg to. Naturally, we’ll have to be very discreet about it. . . . And if they don’t beg, well, he’ll still want unusual company, won’t he?”

  “For Christ’s sake!”

  “Plenty of room here. Big estate. Geneva seems pretty delighted with her transformation, unexpected as it was. I haven’t heard her going on about her Swiss bank account lately.”

  “This isn’t what the experiment was about!”

  “It could just be this is what it’s about now.”

  “Axel!”

  “Okay, just elaborating. Fantasizing. Joking off the top of my head, really. It’s pretty crazy, this.” But Dr. Axel Norman did not sound like he was joking.

  ~ * ~

  Our sponsor became slightly smaller, and even more beautiful, before he awoke. A kind of filmy ballooning membrane—angel wings, fixed like the membrane of some gliding animal—grew between his arms and sides, extending from wrist and waist. We got a sort of electric shock when we touched his comatose body now—a fierce protective shock.

  We discontinued the sedation, and the next morning he sat up and saw himself.

  He stared in amazement, and unrecognition, with great dewy eyes. Then he warbled . . . joyously, and hopped about the room, the membrane inflating as he danced, holding him momentarily free of the ground like twin-arm parachutes. He was a fairy kite, something that children might fly high on the end of a string on a blowy, sunny day. Except, he was the child and the kite, together in one. It was his apotheosis, from long ago, before the paper of the kite became one color: green, printed with bank serial numbers.

  “Sir,” I said hesitantly, fearing his electric eel defenses— electricity conducting down that string out of the heavens. “How do you feel, sir?”

  I thought perhaps he couldn’t talk, but only warble like that bird character in The Magic Flute. Or so I remembered The Magic Flute, no doubt inaccurately—an opera needs a verbal libretto, after all.

  He could speak, singingly, lyrically.

  “Geneva doesn’t need a million dollars!” he trilled. “She already has what she needs! She must know that by now. Let me out; let me out onto the grounds!”

  Naturally we complied. He was still the sponsor; and there was no binding someone who could shock you dead—any more than mighty Geneva could be restrained by anything less than a cannon.

  Half an hour later, I watched through field glasses as our sponsor—who had decided on the spur of the moment to rename himself Ariel—came gliding in from some trees to land on Geneva’s great shoulder. No shock encounter there! So it was under voluntary control now. She laughed merrily as he whispered in her ear. Then she picked him from her shoulder and tossed him high into the air, and he glided around her head and around, to land again, and bend as though to sip at her breast. The ill-matched pair, the great troll woman and the sprite, seemed to be getting on famously. I’d have said they were in love—much more so than if there had been a rambunctious thrashing about of randy Titans. They were in love with what they were, because of what they were.

  They did not return to the farm buildings that night; but what they were up to, I’ve no idea. Geneva checked in, in the morning, ravenous for steaks—with Ariel perched on her shoulder, wanting a bowl of milk and honey.

  ~ * ~

  Which would have been a fine, if interim, ending to the saga of Jean Sandwich and our sponsor, except that a few days later during one of their mighty and minute banquets, Geneva pointed a great finger at me while Ariel twittered excitedly in her ear. Later I saw Dr. Axel Norman conferring with the sponsor, with a wry smile upon his lips.

  I tried to escape from the farm that night, but one of the guards brought me down with a hypodermic dart in my buttocks. When I awoke, I was in the Transformation Room, with a giantess and a fairy and various of my ex-colleagues peering in.

  I wonder: did Geneva point her finger at me in revenge—or was it out of gratitude?

  When I wake up as a hobgoblin or an ogre or a centaur, to join them in their play, will I feel grateful too?

  <>


  * * * *

  Stories of alien invasions of Earth have been a standard form of science fiction since at least the time of H. G. Wells—in fact, this subgenre was so thoroughly explored and exploited in sf’s early years that writers soon had to turn to variations on the theme. (Perhaps the classic novel of this latter type was Fredric Brown’s Martians, Go Home, published more than a quarter century ago.) Still, sf writers are known for their ingenuity, so they’re still able to come up with new approaches. . . Carol Emshwiller has long been one of our most original writers, and her version of the alien invasion is characteristically offbeat, intriguing . . . and satirical.

  Carol Emshwiller’s stories have been appearing in the genre sf publications since 1955; many have also turned up in nongenre magazines such as Cavalier, New Directions in Prose and Poetry, Transatlantic Review, and TriQuarterly. A collection of her short stories, Joy in Our Cause, was published in 1974.

  ~ * ~

  THE START OF THE END OF THE WORLD

  Carol Emshwiller

  First the distant sound of laughter. I thought it was laughter. Kind of chuckling . . . choking maybe ... or spasms of some sort. Can’t explain it. Scary laughter coming closer. Then they came in in a scary way, pale, with shiny raincoats and fogged glasses, sat down, and waited out the storm here. Asked only for warm water to sip. Crossed their legs with refined grace and watched late-night TV. They spoke of not wanting to end up in a museum . . . neither them nor their talismans nor their flags, their dripping flags. They looked so vulnerable and sad . . . chuckling, choking sad that I lost all fear of them. They left in the morning, most of them. All but three left. Klimp, their regional director, and two others stayed.

  “It is important and salutary to speak of incomprehensible things,” they said, and so we did till dawn. They also said that their love for this planet, “this splendid planet,” knows no bounds, and that they could take over with just a tiny smidgen of violence, especially since we had been softening up the people ourselves as though in preparation for them. I believed them. I saw their love for this place in their eyes.

  “But am I”—and I asked them this directly—”am I, a woman, and a woman of, should I say, a certain age, am I really to be included in the master plan?” They implied, yes, chuckling (choking), but then everyone has always tried to give me that impression (former husband especially) and it never was true before. It’s nice, though, that they said they couldn’t do it without me and others like me.

  What they also say is, “As sun to earth, so kitchen is to house and so house is to the rest of the world. Politics,” they say, “begins at home, and most especially in the kitchen, place of warmth, chemistry, and changes, means toward ends. Grandiose plans cooked up here. A house,” they say, “hardly need be more than kitchen and a few good chairs.” Where they come from that’s the way it is. And I agree that if somebody wanted to take over the Earth, it’s true: they could do worse than to do it from the kitchen.

  They also say that it will be necessary to let the world lie fallow and recoup for fifteen years. That’s about step number three of their plan.

  “But first,” they say (step number one), “it will be necessary to get rid of the cats.”

  ~ * ~

  Klimp! His kind did not, absolutely not descend from apelike creatures, but from higher beings. Sky folk. We can’t understand that, he said. Their sex organs are, he told me, pure and unconnected to excretory organs in any way. Body hair in different patterns. None, and this is significant, under the arms, and, actually, what’s on their head really isn’t hair either. Just looks like it. They’re a manifestation in living form of a kind of purity not to be achieved by any of us except by artificial means. They also say that, because of what they are, they will do a lot better with this world than we do. Klimp promises me that and I believe him. They’re simply crazy about this world. “It’s a treasure,” Klimp keeps saying.

  I ask, “How much time is there, actually, till doomsday, or whatever you call it?”

  No special name, though Restoration Day or (even better) Resurrection Day might serve. No special time either. (“Might take a lifetime. Might not.”) They live like that but without confusion.

  ~ * ~

  But first, as they say, it is necessary to get rid of the cats, though I am trying to see both sides: (a) Klimp’s and his friends’ and (b) trying to come to terms with three hyperactive cats that I’ve had since the divorce. The white one is throwing up on the rug. Turns out to be a rubber band and a long piece of string.

  ~ * ~

  Of the three, Klimp is clearly mine. He likes to pass his cool hands . . . his always-cold hands through my hair, but if I try to sit on his lap to confirm our relationship, he can’t bear that. We’ve known each other almost two weeks now, shuffled along in the park (I name the trees), the shady side of streets, examined the different kinds of grasses. (I never noticed how many kinds there were.) He looks all right from every angle but one, and he always wears his raincoat so we don’t have any trouble.

  “I accept,” I say, when he asks me a few days later, anthropomorphising as usual, and tired of falling in love with TV stars and newsmen or the equivalent. I put on my old wedding ring and start, then, to keep a record of the takeover, kitchen by kitchen by kitchen. . . .

  Klimp says, “Let’s get in bed and see what happens.”

  Something does, but I won’t say what.

  I haven’t seen any of them, even Klimp, totally naked, though a couple of times I saw him wearing nothing but a teacup.

  (They read our sex manuals before beginning their takeover.)

  But willing servants (women are) of almost anything that looks or feels like male or has a raspy voice, regardless of the real sex whatever that may be, or if sex at all. And sometimes one had to make do (we older women do, anyway) with the peculiar, the alien or the partly alien, the egocentric, the disgruntled, the dissipated. . . . But also, and especially, willing servants of things that can fly, or things, rather, that may have descended from things that could fly once or things that could almost fly (though lots of things can almost fly). But I heard some woman say that someone told her that one had been seen actually vibrating himself into the sky, arched back, hands in pockets . . . had also, this person said, been seen throwing money off the Ambassador Bridge. The ultimate subversion.

  Also I heard they may have already infiltrated the mayonnaise company. A great deal of harm can be done simply by loosening all the jar lids. Is this without violence! And when one of them comes up behind you on the street, grabs your arm with long, strong thumb and forefinger, quietly asking for money and your watch and promising not to hurt you

  . . especially not to hurt you, then you give them. Afterward I hear they sometimes crumple the bills into their big, white pipes and smoke them on the spot. They flush the watches down toilets. This last I’ve seen myself.

  But is all this without violence! Klimp takes the time to explain it to me. We’re using the same word with two somewhat different meanings, as happens with people from different places. But then there’s never any need to justify the already righteous. Sure of his own kindnesses, as look at him right now, Klimp, kiss to earlobe and one finger drawing tickly circles in the palm of my hand. He sees, he says, the Eastern Seaboard as it could be where it the kind of perfection that it should be. He says it will be splendid and these are means toward that end.

  Random pats, now, in the region of the belly button. (His pats. My belly button.) Asks me if I ever saw a cat fly. It’s important. “Not exactly,” I say, “but I saw one fall six stories once and not get hurt, if that counts.”

  As we sit here, the white cat eats a twenty-dollar bill.

  ~ * ~

  I was divorced, as I mentioned. We were, all of us women who are in this thing with them, all divorced. DIVORCE. A tearing word. I was divorced in the abdomen and in the chest. In those days I sometimes telephoned just to hear “Hello.” I was divorced at and against sunsets, hills, fall leaves,
and, later on in the spring, I was divorced from spring. But now, suddenly, I have not failed everything. None of us has failed. And we want nothing for ourselves. Never have. We want to do what’s best for the planet.

  Sometimes lately, when the afternoon is perfect . . a pale, humid day, the kind they like the most . . . cool . . . white sky . . . and Klimp or one of the others (it’s hard to tell them apart sometimes, though Klimp usually wears the largest cap . . . yellow plastic cap) . . . when the one I think is Klimp is on the lawn chair figuring how to get rid of all the bees by too much spraying of fruit trees or how best to distribute guns to the quick tempered or some such problems, then I think that life has turned perfect already, though they keep telling me that comes later . . . but perfect right now, at least as far as I’m concerned. I like it with the take-over only half begun. Doing the job, it’s been said, is half the fun. To me it’s all the fun. And I especially like the importance of the kitchen for things other than mere food. Yesterday, for instance, I destroyed (at the self-cleaning setting) a bushel of important medical records plus several reference works and dictionaries, also textbooks and a bin of brand-new maps. When I see Klimp, then, on the lawn, or all three sometimes, and all three gauzy, pale blue flags unfurled, and they’re chuckling and whispering and choking together, I feel as though the kitchen itself, by its several motors, will take off into the air . . . hum itself into the sunset riding smoothly on a warm updraft, all its engines turned to low. I want to tell them how I feel. “Perfect,” I say. “Everything’s perfect except for these three things: wet sand tracked into the vestibule, stepping on the tails of cats, and please don’t look at me with such a steady, fishlike gaze, because when you do, I can’t read the recipes you gave me for things that make people feel good, rot the brain, and cost a lot.”