Universe 11 - [Anthology] Read online

  “I forgot something; I returned for a moment,” said Selly. “I’m sorry if I startled you.”

  “That’s quite all right. I respect your attention to detail, you know that.”

  Selly replaced the mouse in the vivarium, where it had been trying to build a bridge from the little island upon which it had been placed, to a happy land at the edge of the world where nuts and other choice scraps tempted. Together they watched the mouse in its occupation without comment. Selly nodded in benevolent approval, absentmindedly scratching his ear and shaking his head. Janos was very offended at this utterly disgusting behavior until he realized with a thrill that Selly was behaving like a cat. Of course, the nasty man sometimes scratched himself anyway. He looked for the control which Marvene had been constructing and it had gone. Had she finished it; had she gone ahead without him? How long had she been secretly experimenting with Selly without his knowledge? Janos looked at Selly looking at the mouse. The fellow was drooling.

  Shaking with fury, he took his leave and went to find Marvene. She was there, outside the lab, and had been observing both of them through the glass door. She told him that she had been looking for him; she had a surprise for him. Confused, he told her he thought he knew what it was.

  “But watch this,” she said, waving the tiny box between a thumb and finger. She indicated Selly. They were fascinated to observe Selly slowly take off all his clothes and prowl round slowly; and then, fat though he was, crouch down on his haunches and with much puffing and heaving somehow manage to get his leg up around the back of his neck where it stuck up pointing at the ceiling, his foot extended like that of a dancer. He slowly reached forward with tongue extended and made a bold attempt to wash his own genitals, pausing to nibble at something bothering him on his thigh. Janos thought: I shall remember this moment all my life. It is one of the great moments of science that we are privileged to witness.

  ~ * ~

  They were all invited to another party, and this was very exciting, the host being the renowned Roald, who had made breakthroughs in bringing back seels to land and breeding them as household pets. Miniature seals were a favorite in many homes, lolling around on sofas and balancing things on their noses. To have reversed evolution in this way was a considerable feat and might lead to a further breed of useful seal. Selly wobbled with anticipation.

  “It is to be a swimming party. What a sense of humor the man has!” Janos laughed aloud, a thing he seldom did, usually expressing amusement with breathy exhalations. He was delighted because he swam very well indeed and would be able to exhibit this talent. Marvene was less happy because she had never swum well and had no confidence in water. The pool contained dolphins and she disliked them, fearing that they might bite and imagining that they would read her mind. She knew that they did not bite but still the fear was there, secreted behind her immaculate eyes.

  “I may go in aquatic costume,” Janos said, “if costume is allowed.” Marvene dreaded that there might only be seafood, which she could not bear.

  “I hope they have seafood,” said Selly. “If there’s one thing I like, it is a nice bit of fish.” But the main thing to be glad about was that they were privileged to be visiting Roald, for he had a very high position and, following so soon on their own party, they could make a continued good impression. Each would have preferred to have a reputation alone, but together was better than nothing.

  Work continued without further discussion, and Janos locked away all his notes when he was done, and hid the key.

  The party was going well when they arrived and they were well received and introduced to important people. They were feeling confident of themselves, and Marvene had resigned herself to not making much of a showing in the water; she draped herself at the edge of the pool, bravely throwing her supper to the dolphin, which did seem to be reading her mind because it always leapt a split second before she threw a morsel. Janos was posing nearby eating prawns and clams with evident enjoyment. He planned to dive into the pool, when there were not many swimming, and execute a graceful water dance. If he had not been a scientist, he could have been a great water athlete. Selly was chatting easily with Roald himself, and several important people stood near them waiting to have a word with the great man. Suddenly Marvene saw her chance: if Selly misbehaved here, he would be forever out of countenance. She activated his new behavior.

  Selly abruptly crouched on the floor on his haunches and got himself into a complicated position whereby he could lick the backs of his own thighs. The effect was immediate then— good! Had he done that at their animal mime party he would have received applause, but one never repeated a performance or did anything out of tune with the prescribed atmosphere. Roald stared unbelieving at this awful display, seeming at a loss, and other important people tried to ignore Selly, everyone suffering from acute embarrassment.

  Janos was horrified. Why had she done this here? Did she not realize that it would bring bad attention to all three of them? What lack of tact! He decided to try to divert attention from the scene and ran up the steps to the diving board, sparing a look of hatred for Marvene, who was actually displaying her glee at Selly’s display. He prepared to dive, calming himself for an especially elegant performance.

  Selly, while engaged in cat behavior which did not seem at all unusual to him, noticed his wrist monitor because his tortured position brought it right in front of his eyes. His brainwave readings and noradrenalin were abnormal. They would be normal for a cat, though, and of course all manner of other realizations came with this knowledge—these made him snarl and begin a howling growl which made the blood run chill. He could take his revenge immediately without a show of power, without explanation. He would bring them both down—if he was to be ruined, then it would not happen in solitude. It must be Janos who had done this thing to him, he believed, for he had read Janos’ notes fairly extensively in his spying. But his discoveries had enabled him to do something very similar. He had not believed that they would dare attempt this on him, but he had been waiting his chance to experiment with Janos.

  His hands felt very clumsy because his thumb did not want to oppose itself and his claws wanted to retract in a most uncomfortable way, because he did not have claws. With a triumph of control, considering that everyone was staring at him as if he had gone mad, he activated a control directed at Janos.

  Janos was poised for action. He looked down to judge the height and was overcome with waves of prickling terror at the sight of the water. Water! He had come the wrong way. He turned to retreat, wobbling wildly between diving skills which he knew he had and the total unfamiliarity with water that belongs to mice. He clutched himself with his little front paws, balancing on his hind legs by an act of will, and people turned to see a man hesitating to dive because of lack of nerve. He was creating a totally unfavorable diversion, but his rodent instincts made him tremble and stay. There was derisive laughter from one or two impolite guests and Roald glared at them, then at Janos. This spurred him to action and he fell into the water with a disgraceful splash, squeaking with fear he could not master. He floundered around trying to swim but a lab mouse had no inkling of such motion. He panicked.

  Marvene collected herself and without thinking slid into the water to rescue him. She swam well. Janos had activated her snake instincts, thus ensuring her increased confidence in water, although it was certainly still not her favorite element. The onlookers were impressed with Marvene in spite of themselves, and she was obscurely aware that she had done something amazing and unaccustomed. While the disgraced Janos was being taken away to dress and the impossible Selly escorted to another room to hide himself, she enjoyed a certain amount of qualified glory. It was while she was experiencing a strange desire to slither away underneath a piece of furniture that she guessed what was happening to her. Her jaws drew open with reptilian fury. There was something so obviously wrong with her now that people left her alone. The three of them were in disgrace; it was demonstrated that they were no longer desir
able. Marvene knew then that all the work would come to an end. It would be impossible to find another good place in upper-class society. She burned with hatred of her two colleagues. They had stolen the work and used it against her! The very thought filled her with the will to kill them both. She felt that she could strangle them slowly while telling them why she was doing so, and then swallow them whole to eliminate them from her ruined world.

  It was discreetly suggested to her in a message from Roald that she leave the party with Selly and Janos. They were ruining his party. She acquiesced with graceful dignity and as she glided away she looked her host in the eye in such a way that he felt threatened. Everything was over now; what did it matter? Then the three of them were out in the night. None of them spoke; there was too much suppressed anger beneath the tough veneer of politeness for any to dare. Janos’ upper lip twitched dangerously and Selly’s mouth was ajar in a silent snarl as he regarded Janos with malice. He had hunger in his face and Janos felt threatened; a paralysis seemed to have overcome him. Marvene slid away from them, which broke the gaze and the two men followed.

  Selly loped along silently on the balls of his feet, going ahead and returning, quickly but without fuss, circling them and then trotting off like a shadow. Marvene glided quickly then, head held erect, fixing Janos with a gaze, and he trotted agitatedly, head down in his shoulders. Around them the fantasy of the city glowed, the illuminated towers and balconies and flights of stairs and terraces were beautiful, everywhere glass, every aspect designed to astonish and amuse. Marvene spoke first.

  “Janos, I am going to kill you. I am going to punish you for spoiling my life. There is nothing you can do; you are going to die.’’ He kept his nervous eyes upon her and tripped over the bottom step of a winding flight that led to a broad esplanade, a favorite nightwalk because of its elevation over an abyss and the astounding view. The banisters of the stairway were hollow and filled with small alien lifeforms from other planets. Janos had always loved this walk; he always stopped to take a look at the lizard people or the gloriously beautiful butterfly people in their simulated environment. Now, he would have given a lot to be a prisoner in a bottle like these highly intelligent specimens; anything would have been better than to have only space between Marvene and himself.

  Suddenly she reached out to grab him and he jumped; he ran up the stairway at speed but saw Selly ahead, crouched on all fours. The grotesque image of fat Selly crouching to spring almost made him squeak with hysterical laughter, out of control. In a blind panic he whimpered and ran down again. Marvene reached him and almost had hold of him by the neck when Selly leapt with a screech. The stairway beneath them all disappeared instantly and all Marvene could hear was her own ghastly hissing shriek as she clung to a balustrade, winding herself around it clinging, watching the little butterfly people escape as their prison dissolved. They would not live long. And Janos had lost the night game; he fell to his death among a cloud of exquisite wings.

  Selly had changed direction in midleap and somersaulted out into space in a wonderful arc to land with ease upon his feet on an impossible balcony two flights below. He crouched there moaning with the physical shock, looking down to see Janos land on solid glass. And then he looked up at Marvene, her hair coiling wildly.

  “We shall all die. I shall kill you myself. None of us has a life now.”

  “And we have come such a long way together.”

  “Not together.”

  “I’ll switch off the control if you will. Do we want to be like this?” It was self and not-self, this snake that she felt to be. ’

  “No. You are a snake. It suits your nature. And it must have been Janos who did that to you.”

  Probably true; it didn’t matter now. She ran then, bitter and wild, not home but making for the lab in the underground, down to it through the glittering arcades aware that Selly followed. Kill herself? Where was the courage for that? How did snakes kill themselves? She was drawn to her most familiar surroundings and stood among the cages, uncertain. She reached in and picked up a mouse by its tail. It kicked as she dangled it over her open mouth. Selly got there, howling eerily with laughter and reached out a paw to get the mouse for himself. The little creature was dashed away and ran to trembling safety in a heap of mouse bedding, heaps of paper shredded but still showing that it was covered with Janos’ handwriting. Then she laughed too, for he had been careless; now there would be nothing left to show what the research had been. The two humans engaged in a clumsy struggle— Marvene lacked weight and Selly was too fat to get her arms around to squeeze and he was hitting her with the flat of his hand.

  Behind him on the bench were the dissecting knives, and she reached out and grasped one. She pushed the instrument into the side of his throat and cut, and cut. He was thick and tough and she could hardly believe that he was dead when his weight went slack and slid to the floor in a great pool of his blood. She found the control in his belt pack and deactivated it, examining it with a detached curiosity to see if it was a good copy. She felt different now, active and tense but more like herself. She felt disgusted that she had almost eaten a mouse. What a powerful discovery they had made. She turned over in her mind ways in which she could use this to make a new life for herself. It was a powerful control weapon. Perhaps she could still be famous if she completed the research alone. She had nobody holding her back now, crippling her sense of style. She turned from the mess and wandered into the snake house.

  “Marvene, I have waited for you,” said Lupus the Loop, smiling with pleasure. The hallucination of his actually speaking to her was very strong. All the disturbances she had endured had upset her mental balance. “Chomsky was right, Marvene. That ancient debate is at an end. Language is innate, you know.” She stared at him, knowing perfectly well that the vocal cords of snakes were so. . . .

  “Selly very kindly gave me his powers of verbal communication when he gave me his own instincts. You didn’t know he was trying that, did you?”

  “You cannot speak,” she said, obviously expecting it to interpret.

  “Did you hear a voice, my dear? I am transmitting to you telepathically, my usual method of communication with other snakes, of course.”

  Marvene laughed thinly. “What an imagination I have sometimes. Dear Lupus, come to me then, tell me more. Give me answers out of my own brain.” But she had not read Chomsky. He glided to her and swiftly wound himself around her, head down and gripping tightly.

  “Marvene, I want us to mate. I have needed a female for some time, but my cruel imprisonment here did not allow that. Snakes are more passionate than humans realize, and Selly too had his passions. Secretly, he much desired you, my dear.” She screamed again and again, begging him to let her go. He was embracing her desperately, frustrated and in anguish. He gripped her tighter and her bones slowly snapped and the breath went out of her so that she could not scream any more. Finally, possessing her in the only way he could, he swallowed her whole, taking his time, covering her broken body over with his own beautiful elastic skin.

  ~ * ~

  The little mouse who had escaped was busy. It was releasing its fellow prisoners, who were not only grateful to be released, but said so.

  <>

  * * * *

  The advance of technology affects everything in our culture . . . yes, even art. For decades, science fiction writers have warned us that fallible human authors may one day be replaced by robots or computers programmed to produce stories that will be without flaws (and usually without surprises). But Nancy Kress suggests, in this very human story, that perfection in writing may be developed sooner using human authors aided by precise physiological monitoring. This would certainly be an improvement; still, “perfection” always raises questions, some very basic.

  “Shadows on the Cave Wall” is the fifth short story Nancy Kress has sold; her earlier ones were published in Omni, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and Galaxy. Her first novel, Prince of Morning Bells, appeared recently
from Pocket Books. A teacher of English at the college level, she lives in Brockport, New York, with her husband and two sons.

  ~ * ~

  SHADOWS ON THE CAVE WALL

  Nancy Kress

  “Our music, our poetry, our language itself, are not satisfactions, but suggestions.”

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  ~ * ~

  On Tuesday it was preadolescent girls for Matthew McGratty, a free-lancer we’d just put under contract. McGratty always chooses the obvious, so naturally it was a horse story. Garber said he wasn’t crazy about having his studio used for a horse story, the same studio where two months ago Garber’s great undiscovered protégé Johannsen had final-auded Greta. But McGratty had a decent if uninspired composing record, we had him under contract, and Garber had no real choice except to grumble a little about the perversion of art and the debasement of public taste and so forth, and then give the go-ahead. Garber has fits like that, delusions that G-M Press is more than just a third-rate c-aud shop for free-lancers; we on the staff humor him. And every so often we do come up with a Greta, although we’re no Harper and Simon, and for us it’s a windfall, a lucky lightning, a comet’s tail we don’t even try to grab but just sparkle in the light of before it whizzes past. Last week Johannsen signed a contract with Harper and Simon.