“Look. It isn’t even rusted.” The sculpture was beautiful, wrought from scrap steel and copper, and sealed in a block of lucite. It was one of the few things in the room that hadn’t been ruined.
The building had been an art gallery, and from the look of things, a fine one. Now, paintings peeled from their frames and fluttered weakly in the current. Carved wood had swollen and rotted. A pair of simple kinetic sculptures were clotted with mud and sand.
The narrator continued. “Fully half of the multiple-story structures in California collapsed, including many of the ‘earthquake-proof’ buildings. The shoreline moved inland an average of three miles, and water damage added hundreds of millions to the total score.”
The green path was taking them out of the art gallery, looping back into the street.
Acacia shook her head soberly. “What must it have been like on that day?” she murmured. “I can’t even imagine.” Tony held her hand, and was silent. His eyes were as sad as hers.
As the green path carried them through countless tons of wreckage, Gwen heard someone behind her choke back a sob.
It was understandable. Once people had walked these streets. Once there had been life, and noise, and flowers growing, and the raucous blare of cars vying for road space. Once, California had been a political leader, a trend-setter, with a tremendous influx of tourists and prospective residents. But that was before the Great Quake, the catastrophe that broke California’s back, sent her industry and citizenry scampering for cover.
Sixty-six years afterward, California was still pulling itself out of the greatest disaster in American history. The tranquil Pacific covered the worst of the old scars…but now they were peeking under the bandage. The reality of death was near, and stark.
Beneath a crumbled block of stone there sprawled a shattered skeleton, long since picked clean. The eyes in the skull seemed to flick toward them. Gwen’s hand clamped hard on Ollie’s arm, and she felt him jump, before she saw that a crab’s claws were waving within the skull’s eye sockets.
“There is so much death here,” she whispered. It wasn’t cold, but she shivered. Now bones were everywhere.
Impassively, the recorded voice went on. “Despite extensive salvage operations, the mass of lost equipment and personal possessions remains buried beneath the waves…”
The Oriental woman whispered fearfully, “Richard, something is happening.”
“She’s right, you know,” said Ollie. “We’re seeing more bones than before. A lot more. And something else…there isn’t as much encrustation on these old cars.”
Gwen almost stepped off the green path, trying to get close enough to check for herself. “I don’t know, Ollie…”
Now he was getting excited. “Look, there are more scavengers, too.” This was readily apparent. Fish darted into heaps of rubble more frequently now. A pair of small sharks cruised through the area.
They passed another skeleton, but, disturbingly, not all of the clothing had been torn away, and there were strands of meat on the bones. Tiny fish fought over them, clustering like carrion crows.
A pleasure launch had smashed through the window of a jewelry store, and it was surrounded by a mass of wriggling fish. There were no barnacles on it at all.
“Despite, or perhaps due to, the grotesqueries found in these waters, they are a favorite location for scuba divers and single-subs…” The narrator blathered on, but nobody was listening. An undercurrent of startled wonder ran through the group, as stones began to shift apparently of their own accord.
“Look!” someone screamed, the scream followed by other fearful, delighted outbursts. A skeletal hand probed out from under a stone, pushed it off with a swirl of suddenly muddied waters. The skeleton stood up, teeth grinning from a skull half-covered with peeling skin, and bent over, dusting the silt off its bones.
“And over there!”
Two waterlogged corpses floundered from within a shattered bank, looked around as if orienting themselves, and began lumbering toward the green strip. They passed a flooded dance hall where death had come in mid-Hustle, and there were additional laughing shrieks as the disco dead boogied to life.
The water swarmed with scavengers of all sizes, and now full-sized sharks were making their appearance. One of them attacked one of the walking dead. The green-faced zombie still had meat on its bones. It flailed away ineffectually as the carnivore ripped off an arm.
Now, all around them, the water was clouded dark with blood where fish and animated corpse battled. Here, a dozen “dead” struggled with a shark, finally tore it apart and devoured it. There, half a dozen sharks made a thrashing sphere around one of the zombies, divvying her up with an aquatic egalitarianism that was admirably efficient.
There was much good-natured shivering in the line, but it was infused with laughter—until the red-haired woman stepped off the strip. There was a shiny metallic object half-buried in the sand, and she was stretching out to reach it. Somehow she overbalanced and took that one step.
Immediately, a flashing dark shape swooped, and a shark’s jaws snapped closed on her shoulder. Her face distorted horribly with the force of her scream. The shark tried to carry her away, but now a zombie had her by the leg. It pulled, its face lit by a hungry grin. There was a short tug-of-war, and the redhead lost.
“I’m gonna be sick,” Ollie moaned. He looked at Gwen’s smile and was alarmed. “My God, you really are sick!” She nodded happily.
No one else stepped off the strip, but zombies and sharks swarmed around the edges, darting toward the group. They were getting in each other’s way, fighting each other, but how long could it last?
Another scream from the rear. A teenaged boy had thrown himself flat. A great shark skimmed just over him. The boy huddled, afraid to get up. The walking dead were converging on the green strip…and when Ollie looked down, the green glow was fading to the color of the mud.
He chose not to mention it to Gwen. The others saw nothing but sharks and zombies converging, reaching for them.
There was a sudden rumbling, and the ground began to shake.
“Earthquake!” Tony yelled. Then his long jaw hung slack with amazement.
Because the buildings were tumbling back together. As they watched, sand and rock retreated from the streets, and tumbled masonry rose in the water to reform their structure.
A golden double-arch rose tall again, and a fistful of noughts sprinkled themselves across a sign enumerating customers, or sales, or the number of hamburgers that could be extracted from an adult steer.
Zombies were sucked backward through the water, into office buildings and stores and cars and buses. Bubbles rose from beneath the hoods of cars waiting patiently for a traffic light to change. Fully clothed pedestrians stood ready to enter crosswalks.
The water receded. For a moment they saw Los Angeles of the ’eighties, suddenly alive and thriving, filled with noise and movement. They were shadow figures in a world momentarily more real than their own.
The narrator’s forgotten voice was still droning on, “Now we come to the end of our journey to a lost world. We at Dream Park hope that it has been as entertaining for you as it has been for us.” The lost world began to fade, and the green path flared bright as it flowed into a dark corridor. Lights came up, and when the narrator finished speaking it was in the neutral voice of the computer. “We hope you enjoy the rest of your stay. Oh…is anybody missing?”
“The redhead,” Acacia murmured. “Was anybody with the, ah, the lady who got eaten by the shark?” She sounded only half serious, but there was an answering murmur of inquiry. Gwen tugged at her sleeve.
“Nobody came with her, Acacia. She was a hologram.”
Tony elbowed Acacia in the ribs as they walked back out into sunlight. “Faked out again, huh?”
“Just wait till tonight, Tony, my love,” Acacia said sweetly. “It’s all set up with the Park. You’ll swear I’m there in the room with you…”
Tony seemed to consider
that. “Do holograms snore?”
Steven Barnes stands about five eight or nine. He’s black. He’s in perfect physical condition. He’s smiling. He’s probably talking [though he listens good too] and as he talks, he bounces around like he really ought to be tied to a railing, just in case.
Tony Barnes is a bit shorter, caucasian brunette, with long, lean muscles. She may be with Lauren Nicole, who is maybe three feet tall by now; she has a great smile, and the muscles aren’t showing yet, though she exercises with her parents.
Steve isn’t exactly your typical fan. Then again, he is.
Kids picked on him in high school for being an intellectual bookworm. They wouldn’t let him be nice. He took up martial arts. He teaches several varieties. Now they let him be nice whenever he wants to.
But…he’s a science fiction fan. We’re different. He didn’t stop with learning how to survive Conan the Cimmerian.
He wants to know everything that the human body can be made to do. He wants his friends to be healthy and safe. He teaches self-defense classes at the LASFS. He tries out exercise modes, and when he knows something works, he passes it on to his friends.
The latest, for Marilyn and me, is a Versa Climber, a device for climbing mountains in your bedroom. Marilyn’s up to thirty minutes. I do somewhat less.
Writing? Oh, writing! Jerry Pournelle and I think we’re pretty good. We could have made THE LEGACY OF HEOROT a fine tale of interstellar colonization; but we don’t have the right mind-set for a horror novel. What it took was the guy who wants me to see The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for its artistic merit.
His first solo novel [Streetlethal] was based on a working love potion, for God’s sake! A monogamy treatment. I wouldn’t have had the nerve.
The television industry loves him too. Remember a show called The Wizard? They were about to drop it. Then they saw Steven’s script. It involved a robot suspected of murder.
Suddenly they were talking about this one saving the show! They swapped scripts around to put his in the right place; they found enough money somehow; and when the producer made script changes, the director changed it back and swore it was already perfect. They think he’s pretty good.
There’s money in scripts, too.
You be nice to him, or he’ll spend all his time writing scripts.
• • •
• • •
THE DRACO TAVERN STORIES
What I was looking for was a way to deal with the universal questions, the thorniest and murkiest and most painful questions, at vignette length.
It would help if I could also offer the right answers, but this I do not consider necessary. The key to building a playground for the mind is to ask the right questions.
Life after death. Mortality. The nature of reality. Intelligence. Man’s place in the universe. Territorial and dominance matters. The soul.
What I got was the chirpsithra.
They’ve been around for billions of years. They own the galaxy, or at least the part they’re interested in. If your question is general enough, the chirpsithra have known the answer before we had trees to climb. Or else they’re very great liars…and it would be hard to catch them at it, because they really do have a lock on the interstellar trade.
THE GREEN MARAUDER
I was tending bar alone that night. The chirpsithra interstellar liner had left Earth four days earlier, taking most of my customers. The Draco Tavern was nearly empty.
The man at the bar was drinking gin and tonic. Two glig—gray and compact beings, wearing furs in three tones of green—were at a table with a chirpsithra guide. They drank vodka and consommé, no ice, no flavorings. Four farsilshree had their bulky, heavy environment tanks crowded around a bigger table. They smoked smoldering yellow paste through tubes. Every so often I got them another jar of paste.
The man was talkative. I got the idea he was trying to interview the bartender and owner of Earth’s foremost multi-species tavern.
“Hey, not me,” he protested. “I’m not a reporter. I’m Greg Noyes, with the Scientific American television show.”
“Didn’t I see you trying to interview the glig, earlier tonight?”
“Guilty. We’re doing a show on the formation of life on Earth. I thought maybe I could check a few things. The gligstith(click)optok—” He said that slowly, but got it right. “—have their own little empire out there, don’t they? Earthlike worlds, a couple of hundred. They must know quite a lot about how a world forms an oxygenating atmosphere.” He was careful with those polysyllabic words. Not quite sober, then.
“That doesn’t mean they want to waste an evening lecturing the natives.”
He nodded. “They didn’t know anyway. Architects on vacation. They got me talking about my home life. I don’t know how they managed that.” He pushed his drink away. “I’d better switch to espresso. Why would a thing that shape be interested in my sex life? And they kept asking me about territorial imperatives—” He stopped, then turned to see what I was staring at.
Three chirpsithra were just coming in. One was in a floating couch with life support equipment attached.
“I thought they all looked alike,” he said.
I said, “I’ve had chirpsithra in here for close to thirty years, but I can’t tell them apart. They’re all perfect physical specimens, after all, by their own standards. I never saw one like that.”
I gave him his espresso, then put three sparkers on a tray and went to the chirpsithra table.
Two were exactly like any other chirpsithra: eleven feet tall, dressed in pouched belts and their own salmon-colored exoskeletons, and very much at their ease. The chirps claim to have settled the entire galaxy long ago—meaning the useful planets, the tidally locked oxygen worlds that happen to circle close around cool red-dwarf suns—and they act like the reigning queens of wherever they happen to be. But the two seemed to defer to the third. She was a foot shorter than they were. Her exoskeleton was as clearly artificial as dentures: alloplastic bone worn on the outside. Tubes ran under the edges from the equipment in her floating couch. Her skin between the plates was more gray than red. Her head turned slowly as I came up. She studied me, bright-eyed with interest.
I asked, “Sparkers?” as if chirpsithra ever ordered anything else.
One of the others said, “Yes. Serve the ethanol mix of your choice to yourself and the other native. Will you join us?”
I waved Noyes over, and he came at the jump. He pulled up one of the high chairs I keep around to put a human face on a level with a chirpsithra’s. I went for another espresso and a Scotch and soda and (catching a soft imperative hoot from the farsilshree) a jar of yellow paste. When I returned they were deep in conversation.
“Rick Schumann,” Noyes cried, “meet Ftaxanthir and Hrofilliss and Chorrikst. Chorrikst tells me she’s nearly two billion years old!”
I heard the doubt beneath his delight. The chirpsithra could be the greatest liars in the universe, and how would we ever know? Earth didn’t even have interstellar probes when the chirps came.
Chorrikst spoke slowly, in a throaty whisper, but her translator box was standard: voice a little flat, pronunciation perfect. “I have circled the galaxy numberless times, and taped the tales of my travels for funds to feed my wanderlust. Much of my life has been spent at the edge of lightspeed, under relativistic time-compression. So you see, I am not nearly so old as all that.”
I pulled up another high chair. “You must have seen wonders beyond counting,” I said. Thinking: My God, a short chirpsithra! Maybe it’s true. She’s a different color, too, and her fingers are shorter. Maybe the species has actually changed since she was born!
She nodded slowly. “Life never bores. Always there is change. In the time I have been gone, Saturn’s ring has been pulled into separate rings, making it even more magnificent. What can have done that? Tides from the moons? And Earth has changed beyond recognition.”
Noyes spilled a little of his coffee. “You were here? When?”
/> “Earth’s air was methane and ammonia and oxides of nitrogen and carbon. The natives had sent messages across interstellar space…directing them toward yellow suns, of course, but one of our ships passed through a beam, and so we established contact. We had to wear life support,” she rattled on, while Noyes and I sat with our jaws hanging, “and the gear was less comfortable then. Our spaceport was a floating platform, because quakes were frequent and violent. But it was worth it. Their cities—”
Noyes said, “Just a minute. Cities? We’ve never dug up any trace of, of nonhuman cities!”
Chorrikst looked at him. “After seven hundred and eighty million years, I should think not. Besides, they lived in the offshore shallows in an ocean that was already mildly salty. If the quakes spared them, their tools and their cities still deteriorated rapidly. Their lives were short too, but their memories were inherited. Death and change were accepted facts for them, more than for most intelligent species. Their works of philosophy gained great currency among my people, and spread to other species too.”
Noyes wrestled with his instinct for tact and good manners, and won. “How? How could anything have evolved that far? The Earth didn’t even have an oxygen atmosphere! Life was just getting started, there weren’t even trilobites!”
“They had evolved for as long as you have,” Chorrikst said with composure. “Life began on Earth one and a half billion years ago. There were organic chemicals in abundance, from passage of lightning through the reducing atmosphere. Intelligence evolved, and presently built an impressive civilization. They lived slowly, of course. Their biochemistry was less energetic. Communication was difficult. They were not stupid, only slow. I visited Earth three times, and each time they had made more progress.”
Almost against his will, Noyes asked, “What did they look like?”
“Small and soft and fragile, much more so than yourselves. I cannot say they were pretty, but I grew to like them. I would toast them according to your customs,” she said. “They wrought beauty in their cities and beauty in their philosophies, and their works are in our libraries still. They will not be forgotten.”