The Second IF Reader of Science Fiction Page 8

  Adelie was very pale. Vigil was trying to speak.

  And that from the old man was enough to bring back the first scarlet edge of the fury he had turned on the gun.

  “Close your mouth!” Greaves commanded him. “I have to go fight Mayron tomorrow, and I don’t want another word out of you. Go find something useless to do. Adelie, I want a bath, some food and drink. Right now!”

  IV

  During the night, he asked Adelie: “I’m supposed to fight him with my hands, is that it? Or with simple weapons of some kind? And this will prove to the worshippers all over the Universe or to the Shadows that either my or Mayron’s way of life is right?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And you are very strong. I’m sure you will win. I was sure when I suggested it to Mayron. He’s so completely confident—I knew I could trick him into it.”

  Later, he asked her: “Tell me—was there a famous weapon poet in First City?” And he took her hand, not letting go of it. When she asked him, once, hesitantly, why he had broken the gun, he answered honestly: “Because it seemed hateful.” And other than that, they said very little to each other during the night, and whatever they did say had about as much truth in it as all the things they had said or he had been told from the first moment of his awakening. He did not sleep. For one thing, he felt no need for it. For another, he was frightened. He did not want to be a Shadow . . .

  In the morning he had forgotten fear. Steps led from the temple to a pathway that wound down toward the city. He stood for a moment at their head, with the altar burning behind him. and then stepped out into the morning, with Adelie and Vigil following.

  There were people waiting out there. They lined the path, murmuring among themselves. As he strode along they fell in behind him, leaving behind the temporary shelters they had put up when they fled from the city and took refuge here.

  “Sheep,” Vigil snorted as he padded through the dust beside Greaves. “All right, let them see you brought down. I’ll make another gun—if your stupidity hasn’t robbed me of the time I need—and then they’ll see . . .”

  “I’m sure that if I lose today, Mayron will give you all the time you need. Maybe he’ll even send that same Shadow poet back to you with whatever story you’ll believe this time.”

  “What—?” Vigil stammered.

  “What did he tell you? That he could create the gun for you because he hated the Shadows, even though he was a Shadow? Did he tell you how he remembered how fine it was to be a man? Is that the story you believed? You simple, credulous murderer! And you repaid him by testing it on him. As he well suspected you might. It’s not only humans who can be brave. Or Sacrifice themselves for the ferocity of their race. Or were you too busy taking Humanity’s name in vain to ever consider that? You never dreamed that gun. Not you—you may be foolish, but you don’t hate this Universe.”

  Vigil was blinking at him. “What—?”

  Adelie laughed. “Last night, father. He asked me about weapon posts. There’s no use trying to lie out of it.” Greaves smiled at her. “That’s right. I asked you, and from that moment on you knew I was cleverer than Mayron thinks. But you never got away to tell him that, did you? You know,” he said thoughtfully, “you’d better hope I win today. Mayron won’t be too fond of you if I give him any more shocks.”

  Adelie grinned. “I thought of that. But if you win, he dies. And if you die . . .?”

  “You will have had your glory anyway? You will have engineered the battle of the gods, and dabbled in other pleasures, too?” Greaves was still smiling, but Adelie’s eyes grew wider. “Maybe it’ll be that simple, Adelie. But who can tell the minds of gods, hmm?”

  And so David Greaves strode into the city of Shadows, followed by a fearful multitude and two badly shaken people. He walked down a broad avenue at whose end something black bulked and glimmered, while things with black-filled eyes stood watching thin-lipped. And as he walked he showed none of his fear.

  He stopped at the end of the avenue, with the tall towers looming over him, and stood facing the Temple of Shadows. There was no sign of life in the square black opening that served as a door for the featureless stone block, dark but not as dark as a Shadow.

  He threw back his head and called: “Mayron!”

  The worshippers huddled around him. Vigil, like them, was throwing anxious looks over his shoulders as the city’s Shadows crowded closer.

  Adelie murmured: “There he is.”

  And he was, trotting lightly down the steps, smiling. He wore his human skin as naturally as if it were no more than a cloak, and Greaves had to look hard to see that when he smiled his lips stretched but no teeth showed.

  “Well, Man in all your pride. Are you ready?”

  “Ready as any man. How do you propose to go about this?”

  “Adelie didn’t tell you?”

  “She told me as much as I asked. I didn’t ask much. Could you suggest any way I could have refused the conditions, no matter what they are? That loses the fight right there. Wasn’t I supposed to understand that? Do you think politics is a recent invention?”

  “Fierce, fierce,” Mayron murmured. “Well spoken.”

  He chuckled. “When I was a man, I would have liked you.”

  “Get to the business, Mayron.”

  The Shadow held up his hand. “Not so fast. Perhaps we can arrive at some—”

  “Arrive at nothing. Put up or shut up. Vigil no longer has that monstrous gun and there’s no point in this for you today. But there is for me, and you don’t have much time to realize that.” He glowered at the Shadow, feeling the rage, feeling the onrush of the bright white exaltation when the body moves too fast for the brain to speak, when what directs the body is the reflex founded on the silent knowledge of the brain’s deep layers, where the learning has no words.

  Mayron frowned. His head was cocked to one side. If he had had eyes, he would have been peering at Greaves’ face. But he said nothing; he had lost the moment, and now Greaves used it.

  “You scum,” Greaves said, his voice booming through the Temple square for all the Shadows to hear. “A weapon that drains the power of this continuum! You leech—you would have had that doddering old man put all my stars out!”

  And now the moment was at its peak, and Greaves screamed with rage, so that the faces of the towers were turned into sounding boards and the shout crackled in the air like thunder. He jumped forward, one sweeping arm tossing Mayron out of his way and flailing for balance, while Greaves sprang into the Temple and charged the Chamber of Shadows.

  And now the fear—the great devouring fear that came like fangs in his belly but did not stop him. Now the fear as he burst through the acolytes and into the black, light-shot sphere that quivered at the focus of Mayron’s machine. And he stood there, feeling the suck not of one voracious universe but many—all the universes that had eaten the over-curious Mayron and sent back a Judas goat in his skin to conquer what belonged to Man. Feeling the icy cold, and the energy-hunger that could suck Man’s Universe dry and still leave a hunger immeasurable.

  But the rage—the rage that came to him, that came to the god uncounted generations of men had made while David Greaves lay sleeping but his deepest mind lay awake, feeling, feeling the faith, knowing the splendor of what Man had done—The rage that could make a god, that could give a creature like David Greaves the power to create, to dream a man—to make a David Greaves who would lie waiting, ready to become a god . . .

  That rage went forth.

  And in parallel continuums of life unimaginable, the dawn of Apocalypse burst upon suns unnameable and worlds unheard-of—upon all the universes which were the true Shadows. The god who was David Greaves again, when the rage had passed—the image which Man himself had made stood blazing his fury in the Chamber of Shadows, and the Universe of Man was free and safe. But in the place of the Shadows there was no hope, no joy, no place of refuge. Mankind was come forth, and galaxies were dying.

  One last snap of the fangs—
one moment when the death-spurred Shadows almost had their greatest prize of all—and then it was over. Greaves turned and strode out of the blasted Chamber, and the acolytes cowered, covering their eyes, not yet realizing that once more they had eyes.

  David Greaves appeared on the temple steps, and began walking slowly down, his legs shaking with exhaustion. Adelie watched him coming toward her. Around her, Shadows that had once been men were men again, but at her feet Mayron lay without his skin, and though her father had fled, she did not dare go without learning what the look on David Greaves’ face meant for her.

  THE FOUNDLING STARS

  by Hal Clement

  “All right—perfect. You’re the most nearly motionless thing in the universe.”

  Hoey’s words were figurative, of course; whether they were accurate or not depended entirely on point of view. Rocco Luisi and his Ymyrgar were indeed at rest with respect to Hoey and the Anfforddus, after more than four hours of maddening effort, but neither machine was motionless with respect to much else. Both were travelling at about four kilometers a second, roughly galactic northward, with respect to their home port on Rhyddid, seventy-five parsecs away. They were moving at a much greater velocity with respect to the far more distant Solar System. With respect to each other, however, velocity had been whittled down to somewhat less than five centimeters a year.

  How long this would last was problematical. An automatic tracker was now on duty in Hoey’s ship, trying to hold steady the fringe pattern produced by combining two ultraviolet laser beams, one originating in his own vessel and the other in Luisi’s, in one of the most precise interferometers ever made. Since the crafts were about a light-hour apart, however, corrections tended to be late in time and, in spite of a computer’s best efforts, erratic in amount and direction.

  “Nineteen decimals” had been a proverbial standard of accuracy for well over a century; but achieving it on any but the atomic size and time scale was not yet standard art.

  “That seems to be it,” Hoey repeated. “That means that you and I stay strapped in our seats, with no more motion than we can help, for the next four hours or so. If either of the instrument platforms on our ships moves more than half a micron with respect to the other, a lot of time and money go down the drain.”

  “I know—I’ve had it hammered into me as often and as hard as you have.” Luisi’s voice was undistorted, and the responses instant, on the medium communicator.

  “Sure you have,” retorted Hoey, “only a lot of people wonder whether you really believe it.”

  “Well, it depends on what you mean by believe. I can figure as well as anyone where the center of mass of my ship would go if I stood up; I—”

  “I know you can. Your trouble is that you can’t believe it would make as much trouble as they say. Just remember that they were even concerned about tidal forces from Cinder over there”—he gestured, rather uselessly, at the grossly misnamed one star glaring at them from half a parsec away—“and even went to the trouble of finding a part of this neighborhood where the wind was steady—”

  “Right there I break connection. Space is space. You only worry about wind when you’re close to a sun, and then it’s only a hard-radiation problem.”

  “True enough, as a rule. The trouble is that the usual run of stellar winds involves a mass density of around ten atoms to the cubic centimeter; here it’s a couple of thousand. It tamed out that even that much mass wouldn’t accelerate the ships seriously unless the relative velocity were very high indeed, but it was something the planners had to check on. You see what I mean; so stay put. Let’s cut the chatter. The sooner the folks in Big Boy can get to work, the sooner we can breathe comfortably. I’ll call ’em.”

  Hoey’s finger tensed on a button, replacing the microscopic crystal in the activity field of his communicator with another, whose twin was aboard. “Big Boy”—more formally, the Holiad. He spoke without preamble, knowing that someone would be listening.

  “We’re in position, and my tracker says we’re holding. Get the job going while the going’s good.”

  “Right.” The answer was terse, but not casual. The speaker, a heavy-set middle-aged man with an almost fanatically intense stare in his blue eyes, leaned forward over the console in front of him and began punching buttons in an intricate sequence. He paused every second or two to interpret the patterns of light which winked at him from the board. After half a minute or so the pattern became fixed, and he leaned back, more relaxed.

  “Program A is running.” A younger man, seated at a similar console a few yards away, nodded at the words. At first he did not answer aloud; then he decided to speak, though for several seconds he was obviously trying to make up his mind what to say. It was easy to make the wrong remark to Elvin Toner.

  “D’you think we’ll get full time out of it?” he ventured at last. “Those pilots are good, but I still wish it had been possible to use robotships for the key stations. A man can’t hold still forever.”

  “So do I.” Toner answered without obvious irritation, and his eyes remained fixed on his console, to the younger man’s relief. “I also wish,” the director went on, “that it were possible to use the medium communicator system directly for automatic control of such things as distance, so as to get away from light-lag. But until some genius in your generation works out a way to measure the frequency, wavelength, and propagation velocity of medium waves—or at least, furnishes some evidence that a wave phenomenon is involved—we’ll have to stick with electromagnetic radiation and, at times, with human beings. You may not like it, but by the time you reach my age you’ll have learned to put up with it.”

  “I hope not,” Ledermann couldn’t help replying.

  “Eh? Why not?” Toner’s eyes almost flicked away from his instruments for a moment, but didn’t quite.

  “I mean that if I learn to put up with inconveniences, it’ll be because I haven’t been able to figure out anything else to do about them. Who wants to admit that?” Toner grinned. “Nobody wants to, I suppose, but the honest people do anyway. Hold up; here comes the end of the first minute; any irregularities on your board?”

  “Not so far. I don’t know what that proves, though; all we are measuring is what’s going into the generators. We can’t touch what’s coming out without changing it—”

  “Of course.” The older man made a gesture of impatience. “It’s some relief, though, to know that things are going in right. I don’t know about you, Dick, but Program A is going to be the second longest couple of hours in my life.”

  “I know,” replied Ledermann. It was the first time Toner had ever been so frank about his feelings—even though they were usually quite obvious from other evidence—and certainly the first time the assistant had felt much real sympathy for the director. Since the younger man was not a fast thinker, the remark left him once more unsure of what to say.

  As a matter of fact, there was probably nothing to say which would have been just right. Toner, like most middle-aged men, had developed a pretty firm personal philosophy and a rather rigid set of fundamental beliefs. The present experiment involved very heavily one of those beliefs—one which Ledermann did not share.

  Although, the assistant thought as he glanced through one of the Holiad’s great view ports, this was a place where it was hard to feel sure and right about anything fundamental.

  Space was not dark, though the nebular material which abounds in the Orion spur of the Milky Way system is never very bright even when no planetary atmosphere dims it. Getting closer to an extended light source, of course, doesn’t make each square degree look any brighter; it merely increases the number of square degrees. From the Holiad’s position, most of the sky is nebula-bright; and to a spaceman, anything resembling a cloud looks wrong in space. In some directions the stars blaze steadily, as they do from Earth’s moon; other directions are blacked out by light-years of dust. Some of the dust itself is bright, for Orionis, named “Cinder” by some humorist who had explored
the region earlier, is only half a parsec away. Not only does its fierce ultraviolet radiation keep the nebular gases fluorescing, but its visible is quite enough to light up the dust for immense distances. Not counting its emission envelope, Cinder is only about five times the diameter of Sol, which means that it looks like a point from half a parsec away; but that point illuminated the Holiad almost as effectively as the full moon illuminates the earth. Several other O and B stars flame in the neighborhood; some look brighter than Venus as seen from Earth, some reveal themselves only by illuminating the surrounding dust clouds, some are invisible in the nebuIosity. The Orion Spur is one of the cradles of the galaxy.

  Unfortunately, the occupants of the cradle are foundlings. The general circumstances surrounding a star’s birth are now fairly clear; ships prowling the cloudier regions of the spiral arms have found them in all stages of gestation, from gas and dust clouds half a light-year across and little denser than the interstellar background, through T Tauri variables hot enough to radiate visibly, to the vast population of main-sequence suns whose hydrogen fires are safely alight. Like foundlings, while an entire birth has never been observed in any one case, we know enough to picture the circumstances with some confidence.

  Also like foundlings, however, the precise details of a star’s conception are somewhat obscure. It has been widely supposed for several decades that random variations in the density of the interstellar medium are the key factor—that the law of chance is the father. Dick Ledermann, young and conservative, had no trouble accepting this view. To him, it was obvious that the random “winds” of space must at times produce a gas concentration so dense that its gravity would override the disruptive tidal force of the rest of the galaxy—override it enough to produce a local potential well able to trap at least the lower energy particles of the cloud.