Nova 2 Read online

  Robinson said, “Yes, I think—well, I think I can handle it.” He crossed his legs, then uncrossed them.

  Beverly nodded, pursing his lips. He reached for a magazine on the desk, pushed it an inch closer. “You’re familiar with this publication?”

  The cover had a picture of a woman in a tramp’s costume smoking a cigar, and a headline, “SMOKES TEN STOGIES A DAY.”

  “Yes, I’ve seen it,” Robinson answered. He tried to think of something else to say. “It’s, uh, the kind of thing you read in barbershops, isn’t it?” Beverly nodded again, slowly. His expression did not change. Robinson crossed his legs. “Your job,” Beverly said, “would involve choosing pictures for the magazine from photos like these.” He pointed to the next desk; it was covered with disorderly heaps of photographs. “Do you think you could do that?”

  Robinson stared at the topmost picture, which showed a young woman in what appeared to be a circus costume. He could see the powder caked on her dimpled face, and the beads of mascara on her eyelashes. “Yes, sure. I mean, I think I could handle it.”

  “Uh-huh. Okay Robinson, thanks for coming in. We’ll let you know. Go out that way, if you don’t mind.” He gave Robinson another handshake and turned away.

  Robinson walked to the elevator. He knew he was not going to get the job, and even if he did get it, he would hate it. In the street, he turned west and walked against a tide of blank-eyed, gum-chewing faces. A taxi went over a manhole cover, clink-clank. Steam was rising from an excavation at the comer. The world was like a puzzle with half the pieces missing. What was the point of all these drab buildings, this dirty sky?

  In his room, he made some hash and eggs and ate it, reading the Daily News and listening to the radio. Then he poured a cup of instant coffee and took it to the easy chair in the corner. On the table beside him lay a paperback book. The cover showed a half-naked redskinned young man whose smooth muscles bulged as he struck with a scimitar at a monstrous flying boar. A maiden in metal breastplates cowered behind him, and there was ship’s rigging in the background. Robinson found his place, bent the book’s spine to flatten it, and began to read.

  Sometime during the night (he read), the young crewman awoke with a start. He had fallen asleep in his chair, and his legs were cramped, his neck stiff. He got up and walked back and forth the few steps the cubby allowed, but it was not enough, and he went out into the passage. The ship was silent and dark. On an impulse, he climbed the companionway and emerged under a spectral sky. The deck was awash with moonlight. Up in the foretop, there was a wink of red as the lookout lighted his pipe. That would be Rilloj, his second cousin, a heavy, black-browed man who had the same ox-like face as his father, and his uncle Zanid, and all the rest. On the whole ship there was not one of them he could talk to, not one who understood his yearnings.

  Hugging himself for warmth, he walked over to the lee rail. A few stars shone above the dim horizon. Up there, somewhere, unreachable and unknown, there must be worlds of mystery, worlds where a man could live. Gigantic cities thronged with people, exotic machines, ancient wisdom. . .

  And he was Akim, seventeen years old, a crewman on the Vlakengros. As he turned, he felt a queer loss of balance for an instant; the world seemed to split, and he had a glimpse of a ragged crack with grayness showing through it. Then it was gone, but it had frightened him. What could cause such a thing?

  Back in his cubby, he sat down heavily in front of the screen. He would be sorry for it in a few hours, when the watch turned him out, but after all, what else was there? He turned on the machine. There was Robinson, reading in his chair. A cigarette beside him in the ashtray had burned to a long gray ash. The alarm clock read two-thirty. It was the gray turning point of the night, when the eyes are dry and the blood flows thin. Robinson yawned, read another line without interest, then shut the book and tossed it aside. He began to realize how tired he really was. He shut off the viewer, pulled his bunk down out of the wall, stripped off his robe. He got up and headed for the bathroom, unbuttoning his shirt as he went. He brushed his teeth, wound the alarm clock (but did not set it), undressed and got in between the rumpled sheets. He went to the head, made sure his door was secure, then rolled into the bunk. As he lay there between sleep and waking, the events of the day got all mixed up somehow with the story he had been viewing. Tomorrow they would be at their next port of call, and he would pick up his unemployment check. Maybe he would get a job. The ship was rolling gently. Under the edge of the blind, the neons winked red-blue, red-green, red-blue. Good night, good night. Sleep tight, don’t let the seapigs bite.

  Miss Omega Raven

  by Naomi Mitchison

  Mrs. Mitchison mailed this story from Africa, from Botswana, where she had gone to take care of some business for her tribe. She had to hurry back to Scotland for some more business, this time with the Highland Council. One can only admire her energy—as well as her talent that gave us “Mary and Joe” in Nova 1, and now this deeply understanding story of a completely different type of mutation.

  The others were always quick, always first. Was it because of what they did to us when we were young, when they took us out of our nests before our feathers were more than quills and fed us this other food and made us sleep and put the little wires on to our heads so that we could look back and forward? We became different. And yet I think I became the most different of all. We knew what was ahead and how to get it. We knew, not deep inside where there is no choice like knowing in our necks and wings the moves of the mating flight when all is Now. No, not that. We knew with the parts of ourselves that choose. Thinking, they called it, remembering, looking ahead. I was the latest hatched, damp and flabby, my beak making squeals, the pieces of shell still stuck to me. I had not seen my mother. I opened eyes and saw him, the God-man with the special food. He became her. I had to follow him to do what he did, to become him. How else? Yet because of that I was more changed. But they took us a long way in the dark in a box and made us fly. By then our wings were grown. We felt a need but did not know what it was.

  When we flew we were in a different place with open stretches of rocks and trees, but no built walls. But inside we knew it. We knew the ways in which we were going to live. The food. And there were the mates. Oh beautiful, with the deep part which has no choice, I knew this was my need. I must get one. I must get the most beautiful, the best, shining dark of feathers, bright of eye. We must dance together in the air. That was what wings were for. We forgot the humans who had reared us; we forgot to look forward and back. But perhaps I did not quite forget. Perhaps that was what went wrong.

  I did not at once leap into the air, crooning and bubbling, to chase the top bird, the raven of ravens, Alpha Corax. My feathered tufts were slow to come to the erect and welcoming sign which should draw him, yes, to lay his neck over mine. Others did it, my hated sisters, jumping with touched beaks, ruffing, courting, crooning. And the mates responded, answering with the same love notes, the same stiffening and relaxing, so that feathers ruffled and beaks snapped. It was clear already who was top, who could peck whom, though it had scarcely yet become clear to us female fledglings. [Even during the courting dance when air became buoyant and welcoming, inviting to enormous heights of glory from which one could dive flashingly, the wind booming one’s feathers or even when the mate, turning on his back, invited with his beating spread wings but warned with beak and claws.] One after another the couples began to take flight. But I—I? Surely I could not be the one left out! But I was. For me and for one other, no mate. There had been two more of us than of them. Or perhaps two of them had died in the rearing. She, the other unmated, was even more hateful than the wives. Each of them had taken the rank of her husband and would keep it for life. We ravens settle each with her own mate for always.

  This way each took orders and gave orders, each pecked in punishment and was herself pecked; it was the same with the husbands. Only the most beautiful, the bravest, the top raven Alpha Corax, gave orders. Nobody pecked hi
m. He led the flock to roost or to hunt. He watched and warned for enemies and sometimes attacked. His beak was sharpest.

  But I was lowest of the low. She—the other unmated—pecked me and I had to accept this, jumping away from food, not pecking back. All that was in the deep part of me. I could not escape being how I was. There was no choice. But also I was angry and that anger was in the other part of me driving me to plan. That part of me thought of a future in which I would not be pecked. I knew I was becoming ugly. My feathers were draggled. I was thin, for I always got the worst share, either of flesh or eggs or the rarer grain and nuts. No wonder I was a pecked on with nobody to peck. Had God-man made me this? If he had not made me something other I could not have questioned what I was.

  So things went on. The beautiful one watched and led us to food; so did his wife. She saw with his eyes. She too led the flight in which I was last. And I knew two opposite things: in the deep part of me—that this was how it was but, in the outside, the changed and choosing part—that this was not for always and one day there would be a choice and a plan. But the choice did not come. The mates made their nests, beautiful, enviable, with heathers and grasses and earth and small sticks, lined deliciously with worked, soft grasses and feathers, ready for eggs. Once I tried to sit on a nest but how I was driven out, with what pain and anger! I tried to join in flights, I tried to croon and preen to each of the males but I aroused nothing in any of them, since they had only one image in their constant minds. They also had been in the hands of the God-men but now they had forgotten. I being alone, could not forget.

  Then came the chipping of the eggs, the young, the tremendous drive and bustle of feeding. I was looked on, knowing what it was I missed; it was I driven from the dead lamb that was feasting us. It was I who saw the God-men circling us, with what intent I did not know, yet believed it was not evil. It was not they who had left me hungry. They spoke to one another or so I supposed. I also saw that they took some of the nestlings while they fed others with their own kind of food. The mothers were disturbed briefly but none of us could feel that the God-men were enemies. They were only high beyond us, beyond the top of the Alphas; they could give orders. They could peck us to the bone and any of us must submit, but because they had also fed us they did not do that; they did not need to. The one on whom my nestling eyes had first opened was there. He looked at my thin and draggled body; he had brought pieces of food, not their own kind, but good raw meat. He gave me some and I tried to gulp it quickly before the other unmated could see and drive me off. Yet she came, and her black beak drove at me; feathers flew. The deep, inside part of me was making me cower and accept. But the one I had not forgotten, the God-man had shown himself; it was meat he had given. He sent the knowledge of choice back into me. In a moment she was the pecked on. I made her feathers fly! It was impossible and it had happened.

  Once pecked, she accepted. That was the first lesson. For both of us. I hated her. I could not stop pecking. Even when the God-man picked me up so that she could run and then flap away. Through the wriggle of my held wings and the straining of my body I felt his hands thinking about me. My beak wanted to peck, my claws to scratch; the beak pointed yet unable to peck him. He was my mother; the one I had opened eyes on. He held me but it came to me that I also held him.

  Then there was a feast again. A cow had given birth. She moved away with the calf, leaving what else had come out of her red and wet in the grass. That was for us. But now I had one to peck and drive off if she came near me and the one who before had pecked her could not at once change to pecking me. The old pattern had been made. Yet because she too had been with the God-men and had been partly changed by them, so that she had choice, she began to know that I had taken the place of the other and also she was afraid in case I did not accept it. Sometimes her pecking was not hard. But I did not attack at once, not when she was with her nest and her mate.

  The leaves of the great nest trees had spread and become green to live the leaves’ life. Then they browned and drooped and loosened and the leaf flocks swirled briefly in air and then dropped and were still and useless. The young birds began to fly. But from every nest the God-men climbing quietly had taken one. I was watching, the mothers not always. They and their mates swirled and clattered and called uselessly, and yet they all knew, in the parts of their minds that looked forward and back, that the God-men had the right and this way was best for all.

  And now cold days began and we all scattered again, though the pairs kept partly together. There was less food in winter and less light—time to find it. And I began to peck back at the next above me. Her mate looked on uncertainly but it was not he I wanted. I did not want any mate; it was the wrong season. I wanted only to be top. By the next season I could take this one’s place, but it was not enough. What then?

  The God-man came. My own. Was he top God-man or was it possible that all were top? They did not seem to hurt one another. But perhaps they did in some way hidden from ravens; who could tell? No use asking even if one knew what or how to ask. What is asking? So it went. But one day the God-man was gone and with him in a box went the wife of Alpha Corax, the top raven. Where had she gone? We did not know what to think, only that all were perturbed. She, with him, had led the foraging parties of the ravens. He was used to her being with him. He called; she was not there. He made the croonings and the mating cries; she did not answer. But all of us felt something in the deep part that wanted to answer, even before the season of mating. There was movement and small noises. Feathers rose and a posturing walk began. And then my own God-man looked at me and he too made a mating cry and he lifted his arms flapping. He was me. He had taken me from the egg and changed me so that I could hatch out of the old patterns. And then suddenly it was I who was answering Alpha Corax; it was I who was with him, who had taken top place. I was the same as my God-man, my top God.

  Now it was I who would have Alpha Corax, the top bird, the most beautiful, the raven of ravens. At mating time we would dance together in the air and then we would build our nest. But today, now, he knew and acknowledged me. I was Alpha today. I could peck the one below me and not one of them could peck me. I would become beautiful and glossy; my feathers would always lie smooth; I would bite and swallow all the bloodiest bits of the food. I would have the best nest, safe, not out in the edges.

  All this happened. It happened to me. Now I am mated forever with Alpha Corax. Yes, at first there were those that rebelled, that had it in the bottom of their minds that I was still the pecked one, Omega Raven. Yes, some of them tried to peck me. But how I pecked them back, scattering feathers and blood! For I remembered the other food and the little wires that made me more than myself. I remembered God-man who made me into top pecker, breaker of custom. My God-man, top God. God-man and I.

  The Poet in the Hologram

  In the Middle of Prime Time

  by Ed Bryant

  The author of this story showed that he had the makings of a writer when he turned his back on the establishment—and a hard-earned M.A.—and went to work in a stirrup buckle factory so he could labor away at his fiction. He also attended the first Clarion Workshop in Fantasy and Science Fiction which certainly bodes well for that course. Now, with a keen modern eye, he looks carefully at the world of commercial entertainment and some of the jollies it may have in store for us.

  COMPUTER LINK:

  MEDIUM SHOT—THE POET SEATED IN HIS CHAIR

  EFFECTS: NORMAL SCALE—H-FIGURES DISTORT +/- 2%

  AIR DISPERSAL: GRAVEYARD EARTH, RAINSOAKED

  INSERT 100 MICROGRAMS ETK-10 IN PROP WINE

  FADE IN:

  Entrapment. Fearing, Ransom downed the last of the wine

  ruby flowing, richer than blood it drains.

  He smiled ruefully. It was a bad line: the choice of words was trite, the metaphor was a cliché. But, he suspected, it was more than typical of his work these days. Ransom flipped the wine bottle over his right shoulder. The empty decanter, unbreakable, bounced ac
ross the carpet

  decry the permanence of plastic;

  outliving even our rock tombs.

  The man in the chair grimaced and belched. Better. He looked at the device on the coffee table and grinned widely.

  The device was genuine. So was the bouquet of blue flowers in the vase beside it. Most of the rest of the room was fake: the table was ersatz walnut, the dark-grained paneling on the walls was imitation.

  Ransom stood and stared out the window, down a hundred levels at the sprawl of Greater Ellay. He wasn’t really looking out a window, of course. His rooms were interred deep within the labyrinthian apartment block. The window was an electronic screen. Once, besides offering a view of the external world, it could pick up more than eighty television channels. Back when TV was the entertainment medium.

  The window, not being a window, could not be opened. If it really were a window, it still would stay permanently shut. On Ransom’s level of the urban stack, no one could breathe the polluted sky; shovel it, maybe, but not inhale. Air was piped into Ransom’s apartment-first filtered, cleansed, sterilized; then oxygenated, ionized, humidified properly, heated, certified carcinogen-free, and consigned to the alveoli of Ransom’s lungs.

  Ransom frowned at the slight undulation of his surroundings.

  Too much wine, he thought. Too much for efficiency and not enough for courage. He crossed to the coffee table, realizing he was weaving. But sufficient for action.

  He looked down at his contraband toy; then his chin raised and he wrinkled his nose. His nostrils enclosed the slightest scent, a smell undefined, yet disturbingly suggestive. Dark. Moist. Cool. Slightly sweet with decay.