A, B, C: Three Short Novels

  “I see,” I said. “I’ll call you back and tell you what I find.”

  I switched off and turned to the scintillator. It said that I had been dead since I arrived on the ship. I was going to phone Parks when I was interrupted by a beep. Judge Cartrite’s face came together on the screen.

  “Captain, I’m sorry to bother you, but I thought this was something I’d better see to in person.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to place you under arrest.”

  “Arrest? For what?”

  “Leela RT-857 vs. The Norm.”

  “And aside from the trivia, how do I differ from the run of the mill?”

  “It’s not trivial, Captain. You were pregnant. And in this City that’s unforgivable as well as illegal.”

  “Who told you?” I wanted to know. I couldn’t imagine Parks giving out something like that.

  But the answer when it came was all too believable. “Parks’s new assistant overheard.”

  chapter ten

  After a few more lines, the entries stopped.

  Joneny closed the book. The boy, still in Joneny’s gell, was holding another book, a similar diary. “This one is Hodge’s,” he said. “Hodge, the executioner.”

  Joneny took it, frowning, and as he turned through the laconic mentions of death after death, verses of the ballad threaded through his mind once more:

  “She walked through the gate and the voices cried,

  She walked through the Market and the children died,

  She walked past the courthouse and the judge so still,

  She walked to the bottom of Death’s Head hill.”

  And the one-eyed woman who held her green-eyed child? The last few pages were in more detail. Hodge had written:

  The trial is over now. It went very quickly. There was no defense. I was not there, but I heard.

  I see her in the death cell every few hours when she walks slowly in front of the long thin window. Death is heavy on her shoulders. I do not think she is afraid. Once she stopped and called to me. I came over, opened the little door in the top so I could hear better, and she said: “Hodge, what’s happening in the rest of the City?”

  “It’s in chaos,” I told her. “The rituals have gotten out of hand, and people have raided the web and are killing the One-Eyes. They go out in hunting parties now, with gas and spears. Ralf is dead, I know. I don’t go there anymore.”

  She had looked calm before, but her face seemed struck now. “Can you get Parks here to see me?” she said softly.

  “I’m not supposed to,” I said. “But I will, Captain.”

  Parks, from the Market, hurried up there so fast he was panting. He looked at me like he wanted me to go away, but I couldn’t do that. So finally the Captain told him to go ahead anyway, that I could be trusted. When she said that, he glanced at me with hate and said, “Trusted to kill you?”

  “That too,” said the Captain. “Go on, Parks, what about the child. Is it safe?”

  He nodded. “They tried to break in, and a lot of the tubes were smashed. But after the first attack…well, I got an idea. You see, Captain, someone’s with us now.”

  She frowned.

  “After one of the raids on the web, when Ralf was killed, Merril came to us in the Market. She knows I’m friendly, anyway. And, well, the same way we took it out of you, we put it into her. She’ll hold it up until a week or so before normal labor would occur, and then we’ll remove it by Cesarean. At least it will be in a mobile container, and the stupid tube-smashing parties won’t get it.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “Just what does that child mean, Captain?” Parks asked. “There’s something special about it, isn’t there? It has to do with what happened on the Sigma-9?”

  “That’s right.” And then she told him. It didn’t make too much sense to me. But she said a lot of scientific-sounding things, and at the end Parks said, “Then we will make it to the stars,” very slowly, very softly. Then, “They won’t get at it. The One-Eyes who’re left will raise it. Merril thought it was something like that. But I didn’t realize—” He stopped. “Merril cried for you, Captain. When we were in the Market, there, talking about your execution, she—we cried.”

  She just held on to the edge of the window, hard, and a muscle in her jaw jumped a few times. All she said was, “Make sure it lives.”

  The last two entries in Hodge’s journal:

  “The riots are growing, they are threatening to come even here.”

  And:

  “Executed today, four o’clock in the afternoon, Captain Leela RT-857.”

  Joneny turned to the Destroyer’s child. “It lived,” he said.

  The boy nodded. “After I was grown, I could make as many duplicates as we wanted, without going through the whole process.”

  Joneny suddenly frowned. “And that explains all your antics then. You, like your father, exist a little outside time, and that’s why the shimmering and the movement during time stop.” Suddenly Joneny frowned. “But the promise, he made her a promise, that you would someday reach the stars and be able to make contact!”

  “He didn’t say when. Aren’t you going to take me back to the University for study?”

  “Well, of course, but…” Suddenly Joneny began to laugh. “With your mind reading, you can make contact with any race. And that coupled with the extra-time facility, why, this might be the biggest discovery in galactic anthropology since…since I don’t even know!”

  The boy nodded. “That’s what we were made for. We can take all the information back to my father, and he will digest it for you, and then we’ll give it to you. You’ll take us to the places where you want to make contact, and that’s what we’ll do.”

  Joneny was about to burst. “And that’s living up to the promise more than ever, because you’ll be making contact for not only half humans, but for them all, the great-grandchildren of completely genetic humans as well. And you’ll be sort of a go-between for you and your father. Are you in contact with him all the time, no matter where he is and no matter where you are?”

  The boy tilted his head and nodded. “My father and I are one,” he said.

  —

  Back in his cruiser, Joneny once more reviewed the whole of “The Ballad of Beta-2” and marveled at how clear it seemed now. The story of Leela’s attempt to save her people was as immediate to him through those compressed verses as many incidents he had lived through. Who had written the ballad? he wondered. Some last One-Eye? Or perhaps someone from the official sector in whom impotent compassion turned potently to words? He was already planning how to make use of the Destroyer’s Children in his research into Creton III, yet through his planning, still the closing verse of the hymn—it was a hymn, in a way—came back:

  Fire and blood, meat, dung, and bone—

  Down on your knees, steel, stone, and wood

  Today are dust, and the City’s gone,

  But she came back like she said she would.

  New York

  August 1964

  they fly at çiron

  * * *

  proem

  Among the tribes and villages and hamlets and townships

  that ornament the world with their variety, many have existed

  in mutual support, exchange, and friendship. Many others

  have stayed to themselves, regarding their neighbors

  with unease, hostility, and suspicion. Some have gone

  from one state to the other. Some have even gone back.

  But when the memory of a village is no older than the four

  or five generations it takes a grave-scroll record to rot,

  there is no history—only myth and song. And the truth is,

  while a minuscule number of these may echo down the ages,

  only a handful endure more than a season; and the vast majority

  from such handfuls linger (listen to the songs and myths about you!) less than a lifetime.
>
  For

  Dennis Rickett

  and with thanks to

  Sam Debenedetto,

  Leonard Gibbs,

  & Don Eric Levine

  note

  In my second-floor flat at the dead end of East Fifth Street in summer of 1962, I first wrote They Fly at Çiron as the longest (forty-five pages) of five short stories I’d hoped to cobble together into a novel. From my spiral notebooks I typed the first version on a mechanical typewriter in late spring ’62. My editor, Don Wollhiem, did not buy it, however; nor was I really satisfied with the tale. Some time toward 1969 I gave the manuscript of what I felt was the most salvageable section to my friend James Sallis. Jim reworked the opening half-dozen pages. That version appeared as a collaboration under our paired bylines in the June ’71 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Twenty years later, though, it struck me that the story could still use a pass through the word processor. When I was done, I had a manuscript of 150 pages. For all I’ve added, two clauses excepted, I’ve kept none of Jim’s inventive amendments. Nevertheless, they formed an invaluable critique, defining lacks I’ve now addressed otherwise. As none of Jim’s language remains, I can no longer reprint They Fly at Çiron as a proper collaboration. But neither can I publish it—far truer for this than for the ’71 version—without acknowledging that critique as responsible for anything now in it worth the reading. In 1992, equally detailed critiques of the new version came from Randy Byers and Ron Drummond—as did an astute half page of notes from my Amherst collegue and friend Don Eric Levine. In my sunny Amherst study, I responded here and there to all of them as best I could—and the manuscript is now fifty pages longer. In one sense, this is my second novel—but it has taken me thirty years to write.

  —S.R.D.

  chapter one

  “They are dogs.”

  “My prince—”

  “They are less than dogs. Look: they inch on their stomachs, like maggots.”

  “Prince Nactor, they are men—men who fought bravely against us—”

  “—and whom we vanquished, Lieutenant Kire.” The prince slipped long fingers through the fence’s diamond-crossed wires and grasped. “That gives me the right to do anything I want to them.” With his free hand, still in its leather gauntlet, he lifted his powergun from its sling. “Anything.”

  “My prince, yours is also the right to be merciful—!”

  “Even this, Kire.” Nactor put the barrel end through the wire. “Now watch.” The first time he fired, the two who could still scream started in again. Another who could move dragged himself over the dirt, took hold of the fence wire, and tried to pull himself up. His fingers caught. Silently, he opened his mouth, and closed it, and opened it. Nactor glanced back, grinning through his beard. “Smells like barbecue, doesn’t it?” Turning again, he thrust the barrel between the wires into the prisoner’s eye.

  The gun and the fence both jumped at the report.

  Charred neck and bloody hands slid to the ground.

  He took out the noisiest two last, some forty seconds apart. During those seconds, while the smoke above the fence settled back down, Nactor began to smile. The one huddling into himself opened his eyes, then squeezed them tight—he was making a sound more between a wheeze and a whine than a scream. Nactor’s beard changed shape a little as, behind it, his face seemed to grow compassionate. He leaned toward the wire as though at last he saw something human, something alive, something he could recognize.

  Without stopping the sound, again the prisoner began to blink.

  Nactor lowered the gun.

  The man finally let an expression besides terror twitch through the scabs and the mud; he took a breath…

  Nactor thrust the gun through—and shot.

  The fence jumped.

  A hand, charred now, slid through the muck. Something no longer a face splatted down.

  Nactor reslung his weapon and turned from the corral, releasing the wire. “I find killing these”—the fence vibrated—“easier than those creatures from their cave holdings that we exterminated three attacks ago. These at least were human. But those, with their shaggy pelts and their thickened nails like beast claws—I suppose they reminded me of my dogs at home. There, your requests for clemency, your sour looks and your sulkings, really got on my nerves, Kire. This was worth doing just to keep you quiet.” He glanced where Kire’s hand jerked, now toward, now away from, the sling at his own hip. “That is, if it doesn’t actually cheer you up. Lieutenant?” (Three more jerks, and Kire’s arm, in its black sleeve, straightened.) “Is it really necessary to remind you that the purpose of this expedition is conquest—that Myetra must expand His boundaries or He will perish? When the time comes for our final encounter with Calvicon, you will…I trust you will distinguish yourself in war, in service to Myetra, bringing honor to your superiors, who watch you, and to your men, who trust you.” The prince palmed the powergun’s handle, moving gauntleted fingers on the sling’s silver embossing, worked into Kirke, Myetra’s totemic crow. (The silver came from the Lehryard mines; the guns were smithed in the Tradk Mountains. For both guns and silver, Myetra traded wheat taken by force from the veldt villages of Zeneya. Even Kirke, Kire reflected, had come from a distant county he could no longer name, but which Myetra had long ago laid waste to.) “What is our mission now, Kire? Just so I know you haven’t forgotten: To march our troops across this land in a line as straight as…as what?”

  “ ‘As straight as a blood drop down a new-plastered wall.’ ” The lieutenant’s voice was low, measured, but with some roughness in it that might have been a social accent, an emotional timbre, or a simple failure in the machinery of tongue, throat, and larynx. “Shoen, Horvarth, Nutting, and fourteen other hamlets lie devastated behind us. Çiron, Hi-Vator, Requior, and seven more villages lie ahead to be crushed, before we reach Calvicon for our final encounter.”

  The prince raised his gloved hand and with his naked forefinger began to tick off one, two, three…“Yes, it is seven. I thought it was eight there, for a moment. You might almost think I wanted to prolong the pleasures of this very pleasant journey we’ve been on almost a year and a half now. But you’re right. It’s only seven. The best way to spill blood in war, Kire, is to spill it where all can see. You spill it slowly, Kire—slowly, so that the enemy has time to realize our power and our greatness, the greatness of Myetra. Some locales have a genius for work, for labor, for toiling and suffering. And some have a genius for ruling. Myetra!” The prince flung up his gauntleted fist in salute. As he lowered it, however, a smile moved behind his heavy beard that put all seriousness into question. “There really is no other way.” With his ungloved knuckles, the prince pushed his rough beard hair to shape, now forward from his ears, now back at his chin. “Those who disagree, those who think there is another way, are Myetra’s enemies. You’ve seen how merciful Myetra is to its enemies, eh, Kire?” Abruptly, Prince Nactor turned and walked toward his tent.

  In his black undergarments, black jerkin with black leggings over them, black harness webbing hips and chest, black hood tight around his face (a scimitar of bronze hair had slipped from under the edge), and wearing an officer’s night-colored cape that did not rise anywhere as high as you might expect in the steady eastern breeze, the tall lieutenant turned too—after a breath—and walked from the corral.

  The troops sat at fires paled to near invisibility by the silvery sun. Some men cleaned their weapons. Others talked of the coming march. One or two still ate. A stack of armor flung a moment’s glare in Kire’s eyes, brighter than the flames.

  In only his brown undershorts, cross-legged and hunched over a roasted rabbit haunch, the little soldier, Mrowky, glanced up to call: “Lieutenant Kire, come eat.”

  His belly pushing down the waist of his undershorts, the hem of his singlet up, standing by the fire big Uk said: “Hey, lieutenant?”

  On the ground, Mrowky lifted freckled shoulders. “Sir, we saved some hare…”

  But
Kire strode on to the horse enclosure, where two guards quickly uncrossed their spears and flung up their fists. (Kire thought: how little these men know what goes on in their own camp.) He stepped between them and inside, reached to pull down a bridle, bent to heft up a saddle. He cut out his mare, threw the leather over her head, put the saddle over her back, and bent beneath her belly for the cinch. A black boot in the iron stirrup, and moments later he galloped out, calling: “I shall be back before we decamp for Çiron.”

  Passing loudly, wind slapped at his face, but could not fill his cape to even the gentlest curve. Hooves hit up dirt and small stones, crackled in furze. Low foliage snapped by. The land spun back beneath.

  —

  Dim and distant, the Çironian mountains lapped the horizon. Kire turned the horse into a leafy copse. A branch raked at him from the right. Twigs with small leaves brushed his left cheek as he pulled—in passing—away. The mare stepped about; behind them brush and branches rushed back into place. At a stream, Kire jabbed his heels into the mare’s flanks, shook the reins—

  —an instant later, with four near-simultaneous clops, hooves hit the rockier shore. Pebbles spattered back into the water. Kire rode forward, to mount a rise and halt there, bending to run a black glove over the flat neck. He was about to canter down among the trees when a long and inhuman Screeeeee made the horse rear. Kire reined hard and tightened his black leggings against her flanks.

  Raucous and cutting, the Screee came again. The mare danced sideways.

  Dismounting, Kire dropped the reins to the ground. Snorting twice, the mare stilled.