Year's Best Science Fiction 01 # 1984 Page 13

  “Oh, Dan.” And Jason groaned. Patriachlike, he raised his staff and brought it crashing down on Daniel’s skull.

  He had imagined that he mightn’t really notice the blood amidst Daniel’s bright red hair. But he did.

  The boy’s body slumped in the doorway. With an effort Jason dragged it inside, then with an even greater effort up the oak stairs to the attic where Martha Prestidge hardly ever went. The corpse might begin to smell after a while, but it could be wrapped up in old blankets and such.

  However, the return of his housekeeper down below distracted Jason. Leaving the body on the floor he hastened out, turning the key in the lock and pocketing it.

  It had become the custom to invite selected guests back to the Babbidge house following the Mayday festivities; so Martha Prestidge would be busy all the rest of the day cleaning and cooking and setting the house to rights. As was the way of housekeepers she hinted that Jason would get under her feet; so off he walked down to the glass and out onto its perfect flatness to stand and meditate. Villagers and visitors spying the lone figure out there nodded gladly. Their prophet was at peace, presiding over their lives. And over their deaths.

  The skate-sailing masque, the passion play, was enacted as brightly and gracefully as ever the next day.

  It was May the third before Jason could bring himself to go up to the attic again, carrying sacking and cord. He unlocked the door.

  But apart from a dark stain of dried blood the floorboards were bare. There was only the usual jumble stacked around the walls. The room was empty of any corpse. And the window was open.

  So he hadn’t killed Daniel after all. The boy had recovered from the blow. Wild emotions stirred in Jason, disturbing his usual composure. He stared out of the window as though he might discover the boy lying below on the cobbles. But of Daniel there was no sign. He searched around Atherton, like a haunted man, asking no questions but looking everywhere piercingly. Finding no clue, he ordered a horse and cart to take him to Edgewood. From there he traveled all around the glass, through Buckby and Hopperton; and now he asked wherever he went, “Have you seen a boy with red hair?” The villagers told each other that Jason Babbidge had had another vision.

  As well he might have, for within the year from far away news began to spread of a new teacher, with a new message. This new teacher was only a youth, but he had also ridden a slow bird—much farther than the Silent Prophet had ever ridden one.

  However, it seemed that this young teacher was somewhat flawed, since he couldn’t remember all the details of his message, of what he had been told to say. Sometimes he would beat his head with his fists in frustration, until it seemed that blood would flow. Yet perversely this touch of theatre appealed to some restless, troublesome streak in his audiences. They believed him because they saw his anguish, and it mirrored their own suppressed anxieties.

  Jason Babbidge spoke zealously to oppose the rebellious new ideas, exhausting himself. All the philosophical beauty he had brought into the dying world seemed to hang in the balance; and reluctantly he called for a “crusade” against the new teacher, to defend his own dream of Submission.

  Two years later, he might well have wished to call his words back, for their consequence was that people were tramping across the countryside in between the zones of annihilation armed with pitchforks and billhooks, cleavers and sickles. Villages were burnt; many hundreds were massacred; and there were rapes—all of which seemed to recall an earlier nightmare of Jason’s from before the time of his revelation.

  In the third year of this seemingly endless skirmish between the Pacificists and the Survivalists Jason died, feeling bitter beneath his cloak of serenity; and by way of burial his body was roped to a slow bird. Loyal mourners accompanied the bird in silent procession until it vanished hours later. A short while after that, quite suddenly at the Battle of Ashton Glass, it was all over, with victory for the Survivalists led by their young red-haired champion, who it was noted bore a striking resemblance to old Jason Babbidge, so that it almost seemed as if two basic principles of existence had been at contest in the world: two aspects of the selfsame being, two faces of one man.

  Fifty years after that, by which time a full third of the land was glass and the climate was worsening, the Survival College in Ashton at last invented the promised machine; and from then on slow birds continued to appear and fly and disappear as before, but now none of them exploded.

  And a hundred years after that all the slow birds vanished from the Earth. Somewhere, a war was over, logically and finally.

  But by then, from an Earth four-fifths of whose land surface was desert or swamp—in between necklaces of barren shining glass—the first starship would arise into orbit.

  It would be called Slow Bird. For it would fly to the stars, slowly. Slowly in human terms; two generations it would take. But that was comparatively fast.

  A second starship would follow it; called Daniel.

  Though after that massive and exhausting effort, there would be no more starships. The remaining human race would settle down to cultivate what remained of their garden in amongst the dunes and floods and acres of glass. Whether either starship would find a new home as habitable even as the partly glassed Earth, would be merely an article of faith.

  On his deathbed in Ashton College lay Daniel, eighty years of age, who had never admitted to a family name.

  The room was almost indecently overcrowded, though well if warmly ventilated by a wind whipping over Ashton Glass, and bright-lit by the silvery blaze reflecting from that vitrified expanse.

  The dying old man on the bed beneath a single silken sheet was like a bird himself now: shriveled with thin bones, a beak of a nose, beady eyes and a rooster’s comb of red hair on his head.

  He raised a frail hand as if to summon those closest, even closer. Actually it was to touch the old wound in his skull which had begun to ache fiercely of late as if it were about to burst open or cave in, unlocking the door of memory—notwithstanding that no one now needed the key hidden there, since his collegians had discovered it independently, given the knowledge that it existed.

  Faces leaned over him: confident, dedicated faces.

  “They’ve stopped exploding, then?” he asked, forgetfully.

  “Yes, yes, years ago!” they assured him.

  “And the stars—?”

  “We’ll build the ships. We’ll discover how.”

  His hand sank back on to the sheet. “Call one of them—”

  “Yes?”

  “Daniel. Will you?”

  They promised him this.

  “That way … my spirit …”

  “Yes?”

  “ … will fly …”

  “Yes?”

  “ … into the silence of space.”

  This slightly puzzled the witnesses of his death; for they could not know that Daniel’s last thought was that, when the day of the launching came, he and his brother might at last be reconciled.

  POUL ANDERSON

  Vulcan’s Forge

  One of the best-known and most prolific writers in SF, Poul Anderson made his first sale in 1947, and in the course of his subsequent 37-year career has published more than 80 books, sold hundreds of short pieces to every conceivable market, and won seven Hugo Awards, three Nebula Awards, and the Tolkien Memorial Award for lifetime achievement in fantasy. His books include (among many others) The High Crusade, The Enemy Stars, Three Hearts and Three Lions, The Broken Sword, Tau Zero, The Night Face, Guardians of Time, and The Man Who Counts, and the collections The Queen of Air and Darkness and Other Stories, The Earth Book of Stormgate, and The Best of Poul Anderson. His most recent books are Time Patrolman, a collection of novellas, and the massive novel Orion Shall Rise. Anderson lives in Orinda, California, with his wife (and fellow writer) Karen.

  Here he takes us to one of the most dangerous and exotic regions of the solar system for a bittersweet look at a strange and intimate kind of partnership that even death can not put asunder
…

  AWAKE

  INPUT: RV (SOL) 57932100 + 150, RA 3.33, DEC 7.05, DR/DT 5.42, D2R/DT2 3.51 -2.86, 7.90 …

  “Hello, there, Kitty. Everything okay?”

  “Okay, boss. Blasting in about two minutes. You?”

  “Going down soon. I’ll resume contact in an hour or so. Good faring to you.”

  “Good faring to us both, boss.”

  INPUT: BB TEMP 522, EM SPEC DIST … .

  Mercury is small, hard, a mass drawn inward on itself (iron, nickel, silicate … .), day ablaze, night afreeze as I swing in my winging around. My shield glows radio-hot, for its sunward side is white light-hot. Solar wind whistles and hails. Here is no seething of it in a changeable magnetic cauldron nor interplay of gravities as at Jupiter, no swirl of moonlets about Saturn. But silence the memory bank, now in this new mission. Do not raise Wanda’s ghost, not yet. COMPUTE BLAST VECTORS READY ALL SYSTEMS TO GO

  Caloris Base was forever undermanned. No matter the pay, technicians were few who would serve there; it was a dismal and sometimes dangerous outpost, where equipment kept breaking down under conditions that were still scantily understood. Six months off after six months on were not always enough for nerves to recuperate. Turnover became high, which meant a chronic dearth of experienced personnel, which compounded the problem. The scientists for whom the place existed were in better case, with an endlessness of discoveries to make, so that some returned more than once and a cadre had made Mercury their careers. However, they too were overworked while on the planet.

  Thus it happened that even when a living legend arrived, only one person took the time to greet him. That was Ellen Lyndale. The man at ground control didn’t count, nor the driver who would fetch the newcomer.

  Alone in the common room, she switched fluoros off and let the view leap at her eyes. Upward the simulacrum went, from floor to zenith, as if she stood on the surface a hundred meters above her. Night neared an end. The stars remained ice-brilliant in their myriads, Earth glowed sapphire not far from the Milky Way, she thought she saw Luna as an atom of gold beside it. But zodiacal light hovered ghostly above the eastern horizon, and solar corona was climbing after it. The mother-of-pearl gleam fell on a landscape that curved away, beneath this mountaintop, in crags, craters, boulders, ridges, dark dustiness of the basin rock, until all at once it dropped out of sight under that sky. A warmth and a breath of flower-scented air only made the scene colder. Some hours hence, they would only make it more of a furnace.

  Regulus lifted above a cliff and crossed the constellations. In low orbit, the supply ship moved fast. Its shield being aimed toward the sun, Lyndale saw just a half-disc, whose brightness would have blinded her if the scanners had not stopped it down. Her attention went to the pair of smaller cabochons accompanying it. One drifted sideways as the shuttlecraft to which it belonged left the mother vessel, bearing Jeremy Ashe down to her. The other trailed yet. Her pulse quickened. Behind yonder shield was Kittiwake.

  The scout also broke free, accelerating on ion jets that formed a lacy smoke, soon dissipated, well aft of it, and departed her vision, Vulcan bound. She looked back at the shuttle. Entering Mercury’s shadow, the shield grew dim. Presently she made out the boat itself, and then the countermass and the metal spiderwebbing that held everything together. Meanwhile Regulus passed upper culmination and began to set, until she could see its hull too, larger by far than the boat’s but distance-dwindled to a splinter, trailing a foreshortened dull circle that was the convex side of its own shield.

  The shuttle descended to a landing court fused into the regolith below the mountain. In her view, it became a parasol, or a mushroom cap … . For an instant she was a child again, barefoot in a Kentucky greenwood, where soil squooshed cool and damp between her toes, mushrooms clustered on a sun-flecked mossy log, and a mockingbird sang … . The car that scuttled forth went under it like a beetle seeking cover. She visualized airlock extensors osculating and Ashe climbing through. The car reappeared and returned to the vehicle chamber. She visualized Ashe getting out, walking across the floor, taking the elevator that would bring him to this level.

  The hall door opened. He entered.

  “Oh!” Startled despite herself, she switched the lights on again. Stars receded. Furniture changed from shadows to chairs and tables, 3V screen and music speakers, all a bit shabby and very outmoded. “Welcome, Captain Ashe,” she said. “I’m Ellen Lyndale. It’s an honor meeting you.”

  She wasn’t surprised when he approached with a smooth low-gravity glide. It generally took a while to adapt to any given weight, and he had been more than a year on Earth, then under boost aboard Regulus. In three decades, though, from end to end of the Solar System, he must have undergone every acceleration the human body could endure. She was taken aback at how much older he looked than the pictures she had seen—tall, craggy, hair a gray bristle above a deeply trenched face.

  His handshake was brief, his glance impersonal. “How d’you do, Doctor Lyndale.” A trace of British accent lingered to clip his tones. “I’ve studied your work, of course. Still, you’ll have quite a lot to explain to me in a short time.” He paused. “And doubtless I to you.”

  “I’m sorry no one else is here. So’s everybody. But the sun’s doing unusual things, which the solar investigators have to keep track of, and the planet scientists are preparing an expedition to the North Jumbles, and biochem recycle has chosen this exact moment to develop a collywobble—nothing to fear, but it has to be corrected immediately—”

  “No matter. I understand.”

  “Director Sanjo is planning a dinner party this evenwatch. Meanwhile I’ll show you to your quarters and you can rest. And if you’d like some refreshment, or anything else we can provide, please tell me.”

  He shook his head. “No, thanks. Just have my baggage brought to my room. Let’s you and I get cracking.”

  She started. “What?”

  “You heard me,” he snapped. “Kittiwake’s en route to Vulcan. She’ll make rendezvous within a hundred hours, unless we change the thrust, and we can’t decide about that without proper data, can we? Besides, I promised her I’d call as soon as possible. Come along, young lady, lead on.”

  INPUT:—PROTON FLUX 15.8, HELIUM + 0.05, HELIUM + + 0.03—

  “Kitty.”

  “Acknowledging, boss. Everything well so far.”

  The great paraboloid of my shield wards off the fury ahead, brings it to a focus and hurls it back, a lance of radiance. Energy does penetrate, but into multiple layers of solid-state cells behind the reflector surface; electrons leap through their dances of being and not-being, of quantum death and transfiguration; that which emerges on my side is largely of long wavelengths to which I am transparent, and all that emerges is diffused by curvature, with little ever impinging on me. That is enough to heat me somewhat, by those photons in its spectrum which make the crystals of my body ring. I feel the shivering through my sensors, record and transmit it together with the other data torrenting upon me. But my essential self remains cool enough, the delicate balance that maintains it is undisturbed.

  The sun grows and its bearing changes as I drive onward. The shield swings slowly in its framework, to stay between me and destruction. Opposite, the countermass moves too; and therefore my thrust vectors must change, lest the couple throw a torque upon me that will send me spinning out of control. Meanwhile, the gale that blows from the sun casts eddies around the edge of the shield, that lick at the spindle which is my hull.

  The planets and moons in the cold outer reaches were not like this. But we are explorers, my boss and I and our memories of Wanda.

  “Are you sure, Kitty? Caution is the doctrine.”

  “I’ll have to work fast at Vulcan, you know. Less risky than taking any longer than necessary in those parts.”

  “You’re not there yet. Double check your self-monitor.”

  The time lag between us is 215 milliseconds, 216, 217, 218 … .

  SWITCH

 
COMPUTE

  PROCEED

  “Okay,” Ashe grunted. “For the time being, at least.” He set the board to receive-record-standby and leaned back. Against the obscurity in an otherwise deserted communications room, glow from the sweep-survey scope flickered across the harshness of his face like green firelight.

  Lyndale sat forward in her own chair. Shock tingled faintly through her skin. “Were you … talking … to the scout?” she asked. It had not been audible, but she had seen his lips move, and stiffen as he listened to whatever came in through the earphones he had now doffed. And his fingers had been less active on the keys than hers would have been.

  He regarded her for seconds, not as other men did. She was considered handsome, in a rangy, square-jawed fashion, but she had a feeling that he was looking straight at what lay beneath. Briefly she wondered if he could see it, whatever it was. Jeremy Ashe had been a loner since his wife’s death a dozen years ago; and before then they had been a pair of loners, taking the scout on missions that kept them out many months on end, moving only in a narrow social group on Earth. Wanda Ashe died when an oxygen valve failed on a moon of Neptune, Lyndale remembered, and afterward her widower refused to take another partner but somehow, incredibly, single-handed Kittiwake. No, Lyndale thought, Jeremy Ashe knew much about the universe but probably little about humankind.

  He nodded at last. “The program includes several special features,” he said. “Speech is one. It’s often more convenient than a digital code, quicker, yes, actually more accurate in some cases. I couldn’t operate as I do without it.”