The café was crowded and dark. Juanito caught sight of her somewhere near the back, near the rest rooms. Go on, he thought. Go into the ladies’ room. I’ll follow you right in there. I don’t give a damn about that.
But she went past the rest rooms and ducked into an alcove near the kitchen instead. Two waiters laden with trays came by, scowling at Juanito to get out of the way. It took him a moment to pass around them, and by then he could no longer see the red-haired woman. He knew he was going to have big trouble with Farkas if he lost her in here. Farkas was going to have a fit. Farkas would try to stiff him on this week’s pay, most likely. Two thousand callies down the drain, not even counting the extra charges.
Then a hand reached out of the shadows and seized his wrist with surprising ferocity. He was dragged a little way into a claustrophobic games room dense with crackling green haze coming from some bizarre machine on the far wall. The red-haired woman glared at him, wild-eyed. “He wants to kill me, doesn’t he? That’s all bullshit about having me do retrofit operations, right?”
“I think he means it,” Juanito said.
“Nobody would volunteer to have his eyes replaced with blindsight.”
“How would I know? People do all sorts of crazy things. But if he wanted to kill you I think he’d have operated differently when we tracked you down.”
“He’ll get me off Valparaiso and kill me somewhere else.”
“I don’t know,” Juanito said. “I was just doing a job.”
“How much did he pay you to do the trace?” Savagely. “How much? I know you’ve got a spike in your pocket. Just leave it there and answer me. How much?”
“Three thousand callies a week,” Juanito muttered, padding things a little.
“I’ll give you five to help me get rid of him.”
Juanito hesitated. Sell Farkas out? He didn’t know if he could turn himself around that fast. Was it the professional thing to do, to take a higher bid?
“Eight,” he said, after a moment.
Why the hell not? He didn’t owe Farkas loyalty. This was a sanctuary world; the compassion of El Supremo entitled Wu to protection here. It was every citizen’s duty. And 8000 callies was a big bundle.
“Six five,” Wu said.
“Eight. Handshake right now. You have your glove?”
The woman who was Wu made a muttering sound and pulled out her flex terminal. “Account eleven thirty-three,” Juanito said, and they made the transfer of funds. “How do you want to do this?” Juanito asked.
“There is a passageway into the outer shell just behind this café. You will catch sight of me slipping in there and the two of you will follow me. When we are all inside and he is coming toward me, you get behind him and take him down with your spike. And we leave him buried in there.” There was a frightening gleam in Wu’s eyes. It was almost as if the cunning retrofit body was melting away and the real Wu beneath was emerging, moment by moment. “You understand?” Wu said. A fierce, blazing look. “I have bought you, boy. I expect you to stay bought when we are in the shell. Do you understand me? Do you? Good.”
It was like a huge crawl space surrounding the globe that was El Mirador. Around the periphery of the double shell was a deep layer of lunar slag held in place by centrifugal forces, the tailings left over after the extraction of the gases and minerals that the satellite world had needed in its construction. On top of that was a low open area for the use of maintenance workers, lit by a trickle of light from a faint line of incandescent bulbs; and overhead was the inner skin of El Mirador itself, shielded by the slag pile from any surprises that might come ricocheting in from the void. Juanito was able to move almost upright within the shell, but Farkas, following along behind, had to bend double, scuttling like a crab.
“Can you see him yet?” Farkas asked.
“Somewhere up ahead, I think. It’s pretty dark in here.”
“Is it?”
Juanito saw Wu edging sideways, moving slowly around behind Farkas now. In the dimness, Wu was barely visible, the shadow of a shadow. He had scooped up two handfuls of tailings. Evidently he was going to fling them at Farkas to attract his attention, and when Farkas turned toward Wu, it would be Juanito’s moment to nail him with the spike.
Juanito stepped back to a position near Farkas’ left elbow. He slipped his hand into his pocket and touched the cool sleek little weapon. The intensity stud was down at the lower end, shock level; and without taking the spike from his pocket he moved the setting up to lethal. Wu nodded. Juanito began to draw the spike.
Suddenly, Farkas roared like a wild creature. Juanito grunted in shock, stupefied by that terrible sound. This is all going to go wrong, he realized. A moment later, Farkas whirled and seized him around the waist and swung him as if he was a throwing hammer, hurling him through the air and sending him crashing with tremendous impact into Wu’s midsection. Wu crumpled, gagging and puking, with Juanito sprawled, stunned, on top of him. Then the lights went out—Farkas must have reached up and yanked the conduit loose—and then Juanito found himself lying with his face jammed down into the rough floor of tailings. Farkas was holding him down with a hand clamped around the back of his neck and a knee pressing hard against his spine. Wu lay alongside him, pinned the same way.
“Did you think I couldn’t see him sneaking up on me?” Farkas asked. “Or you, going for your spike? It’s three hundred and sixty degrees, the blindsight—something Dr. Wu must have forgotten. All these years on the run, I guess you start to forget things.”
Jesus, Juanito thought. Couldn’t even get the drop on a blind man from behind him. And now he’s going to kill me. What a stupid way to die this is.
He imagined what Kluge might say about this if he knew. Or Delilah. Nattathaniel. Decked by a blind man.
But he isn’t blind. He isn’t blind. He isn’t blind at all.
Farkas said, “How much did you sell me to him for, Juanito?”
The only sound Juanito could make was a muffled moan. His mouth was choked with sharp bits of slag.
“How much? Five thousand? Six?”
“It was eight,” said Wu quietly.
“At least I didn’t go cheaply,” Farkas murmured. He reached into Juanito’s pocket and withdrew the spike. “Get up,” he said. “Both of you. Stay close together. If either of you makes a funny move, I’ll kill you both. Remember that I can see you very clearly. I can also see the door through which we entered the shell. That starfish-looking thing over there, with streamers of purple light pulsing from it. We’re going back into El Mirador now, and there won’t be any surprises, will there? Will there?”
Juanito spit out a mouthful of slag. He didn’t say anything.
“Dr. Wu? The offer still stands,” Farkas continued. “You come with me, you do the job we need you for. That isn’t so bad, considering what I could do to you for what you did to me. But all I want from you is your skills, and that’s the truth. You are going to need that refresher course, aren’t you, though?”
Wu muttered something indistinct.
Farkas said, “You can practice on this boy, if you like. Try retrofitting him for blindsight first, and if it works, you can do our crew people, all right? He won’t mind. He’s terribly curious about the way I see things, anyway. Aren’t you, Juanito? Eh? Eh?” Farkas laughed. To Juanito he said, “If everything works out the right way, maybe we’ll let you go on the voyage with us, boy.” Juanito felt the cold nudge of the spike in his back. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? The first trip to the stars? What do you say to that, Juanito?”
Juanito didn’t answer. His tongue was still rough with slag. With Farkas prodding him from behind, he shambled slowly along next to Wu toward the door that Farkas said looked like a starfish. It didn’t look at all like a fish to him, or a star, or like a fish that looked like a star. It looked like a door to him, as far as he could tell by the feeble light of the distant bulbs. That was all it looked like, a door that looked like a door. Not a star. Not a fish. But there was
no use thinking about it, or anything else, not now, not with Farkas nudging him between the shoulder blades with his own spike. He let his mind go blank and kept on walking.
GILGAMESH IN THE OUTBACK
Back in the mid-1980’s, during the heyday of the shared-world science-fiction anthologies, in which a group of writers produced stories set in a common background defined by someone else, I was drawn into a project called Heroes in Hell. Its general premise (at least as I understood it) was that everybody who had ever lived, and a good many mythical beings besides, had been resurrected in a quasi-afterlife in a place that was called, for the sake of convenience, Hell. The concept was never clearly explained to me—one of the problems with these shared-world deals—and so I never fully grasped what I was supposed to be doing. But the basic idea struck me as reminiscent of the great Riverworld concept of Philip Jose Farmer, humanity’s total resurrection in some strange place, and I had long admired the Farmer books, so here was my chance to run my own variant on what Farmer had done a couple of decades earlier.
I seized on Gilgamesh as my protagonist, since he has always seemed to me to be the archetype of the fantastic hero. (He had figured in several of my earlier stories, and in 1984 I had used the original Sumerian Gilgamesh legend as the basis for my novel Gilgamesh the King.) Then, wondering whether Robert E. Howard would regard the towering Sumerian monarch as the prototype of his own Conan the Conqueror, I conjured Howard up to wander the wastelands of Hell as my secondary protagonist, and gave him H. P. Lovecraft for company. From there I added to the mix such people as Prester John, Kublai Khan, and Albert Schweitzer.
The story took a couple of months for me to finish—from October, 1985 to the end of the year, because I was busy with other things, as I’ll explain in the next introduction. But it was so much fun to write that I went on to do a second Gilgamesh in Hell novella, featuring the likes of Pablo Picasso and Simon Magus, and then a third. I never read very many of the other Heroes in Hell stories, so I have no idea how well my stories integrated themselves with those of my putative collaborators in the series, but I was enjoying myself and the novellas (which were also being published in Asimov’s Science Fiction) were popular among readers. “Gilgamesh in the Outback,” in fact, from the July, 1986 issue of Asimov’s, won a Hugo for Best Novella in 1987, one of the few shared-world stories ever to achieve that.
By then I realized that what I was doing was writing a novel in serialized form. The book that resulted in 1987, To the Land of the Living, was not primarily an expansion but a compilation: I drew together my three Gilgamesh novellas, making slight revisions here and there in the interest of consistency, and added a brief epilog that gave Gilgamesh’s seemingly random wanderings in Hell some emotional significance and an ultimate epiphany. The only major change in the original three texts involved deleting all material that referred directly, or directly grew from, the work of the other writers in the Heroes in Hell series. This was done to avoid any clashes over copyright issues. Since I had, by and large, gone my own way as a contributor to the series, with only the most tangential links to what others had invented, it seemed wisest to eradicate from my book any aspect that some other writer might lay claim to, and I did.
——————
Faust.
First I will question thee about hell.
Tell me, where is the place that men call hell?
Meph.
Under the heavens.
Faust.
Ay, but whereabouts?
Meph.
Within the bowels of these elements,
Where we are tortur’d and remain for ever:
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib’d
In one self place; for where we are is hell,
And where hell is, there must we ever be:
And, to conclude, when all the world dissolves,
And every creature shall be purified,
All places shall be hell that are not heaven.
Faust.
Come, I think hell’s a fable.
Meph.
Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind.
Marlowe: Dr. Faustus
Jagged green lightning danced on the horizon and the wind came ripping like a blade out of the east, skinning the flat land bare and sending up clouds of gray-brown dust. Gilgamesh grinned broadly. By Enlil, now that was a wind! A lion-killing wind it was, a wind that turned the air dry and crackling. The beasts of the field gave you the greatest joy in their hunting when the wind was like that, hard and sharp and cruel.
He narrowed his eyes and stared into the distance, searching for this day’s prey. His bow of several fine woods, the bow that no man but he was strong enough to draw—no man but he and Enkidu his beloved thrice-lost friend—hung loosely from his hand. His body was poised and ready. Come now, you beasts! Come and be slain! It is Gilgamesh king of Uruk who would make his sport with you this day!
Other men in this land, when they went about their hunting, made use of guns, those foul machines that the New Dead had brought, which hurled death from a great distance along with much noise and fire and smoke; or they employed the even deadlier laser devices from whose ugly snouts came spurts of blue-white flame. Cowardly things, all those killing-machines! Gilgamesh loathed them, as he did most instruments of the New Dead, those slick and bustling Johnny-come-latelies of Hell. He would not touch them if he could help it. In all the thousands of years he had dwelled in this nether world he had never used any weapons but those he had known during his first lifetime: the javelin, the spear, the double-headed axe, the hunting-bow, the good bronze sword. It took some skill, hunting with such weapons as those. And there was physical effort; there was more than a little risk. Hunting was a contest, was it not? Then it must make demands. Why, if the idea was merely to slaughter one’s prey in the fastest and easiest and safest way, then the sensible thing to do would be to ride high above the hunting-grounds in a weapons-platform and drop a little nuke, eh, and lay waste five kingdoms’ worth of beasts at a single stroke!
He knew that there were those who thought him a fool for such ideas. Caesar, for one. Cocksure coldblooded Julius with the gleaming pistols thrust into his belt and the submachine gun slung across his shoulders. “Why don’t you admit it?” Caesar had asked him once, riding up in his jeep as Gilgamesh was making ready to set forth toward Hell’s open wilderness. “It’s a pure affectation, Gilgamesh, all this insistence on arrows and javelins and spears. This isn’t old Sumer you’re living in now.”
Gilgamesh spat. “Hunt with 9-millimeter automatics? Hunt with grenades and cluster bombs and lasers? You call that sport, Caesar?”
“I call it acceptance of reality. Is it technology you hate? What’s the difference between using a bow and arrow and using a gun? They’re both technology, Gilgamesh. It isn’t as though you kill the animals with your bare hands.”
“I have done that too,” said Gilgamesh.
“Bah! I’m on to your game. Big hulking Gilgamesh, the simple innocent oversized Bronze Age hero! That’s just an affectation too, my friend! You pretend to be a stupid stubborn thick-skulled barbarian because it suits you to be left alone to your hunting and your wandering, and that’s all you claim that you really want. But secretly you regard yourself as superior to anybody who lived in an era softer than your own. You mean to restore the bad old filthy ways of the ancient ancients, isn’t that so? If I read you the right way you’re just biding your time, skulking around with your bow and arrow in the dreary Outback until you think it’s the right moment to launch the putsch that carries you to supreme power here. Isn’t that it, Gilgamesh? You’ve got some crazy fantasy of overthrowing Satan himself and lording it over all of us. And then we’ll live in mud cities again and make little chicken-scratches on clay tablets, the way we were meant to do. What do you say?”
“I say this is great nonsense, Caesar.”
“Is it? This place is full of kings and emperors and sultans and pharaohs and shahs and presid
ents and dictators, and every single one of them wants to be Number One again. My guess is that you’re no exception.”
“In this you are very wrong.”
“I doubt that. I suspect you believe you’re the best of us all: you, the sturdy warrior, the great hunter, the maker of bricks, the builder of vast temples and lofty walls, the shining beacon of ancient heroism. You think we’re all decadent rascally degenerates and that you’re the one true virtuous man. But you’re as proud and ambitious as any of us. Isn’t that how it is? You’re a fraud, Gilgamesh, a huge musclebound fraud!”
“At least I am no slippery tricky serpent like you, Caesar, who dons a wig and spies on women at their mysteries if it pleases him.”
Caesar looked untroubled by the thrust. “And so you pass three quarters of your time killing stupid monstrous creatures in the Outback and you make sure everyone knows that you’re too pious to have anything to do with modern weapons while you do it. You don’t fool me. It isn’t virtue that keeps you from doing your killing with a decent double-barreled .470 Rigby. It’s intellectual pride, or maybe simple laziness. The bow just happens to be the weapon you grew up with, who knows how many thousands of years ago. You like it because it’s familiar. But what language are you speaking now, eh? Is it your thick-tongued Euphrates gibberish? No, it seems to be English, doesn’t it? Did you grow up speaking English too, Gilgamesh? Did you grow up riding around in jeeps and choppers? Apparently some of the new ways are acceptable to you.”