The World Turned Upside Down Part 70

He took two steps forward. The tapestry was almost at his fingertips.

He stepped forward and swiftly jerked the tapestry down from the wall.

And behind was Chun the Unavoidable.

Liane screamed. He turned on paralyzed legs and they were leaden, like legs in a dream which refused to run.

Chun dropped out of the wall and advanced. Over his s.h.i.+ny black back he wore a robe of eyeb.a.l.l.s threaded on silk.

Liane was running, fleetly now. He sprang, he soared. The tips of his toes scarcely touched the ground.

Out the hall, across the square, into the wilderness of broken statues and fallen columns. And behind came Chun, running like a dog.

Liane sped along the crest of a wall and sprang a great gap to a shattered fountain. Behind came Chun.

Liane darted up a narrow alley, climbed over a pile of refuse, over a roof, down into a court. Behind came Chun.

Liane sped down a wide avenue lined with a few stunted old cypress trees, and he heard Chun close at his heels. He turned into an archway, pulled his bronze ring over his head, down to his feet. He stepped through, brought the ring up inside the darkness. Sanctuary. He was alone in a dark magic s.p.a.ce,vanished from earthly gaze and knowledge. Brooding silence, dead s.p.a.ce . . .

He felt a stir behind him, a breath of air. At his elbow a voice said, "I am Chun the Unavoidable."

Lith sat on her couch near the candles, weaving a cap from frogskins. The door to her hut was barred, the windows shuttered. Outside, Thamber Meadow dwelled in darkness.

A sc.r.a.pe at her door, a creak as the lock was tested. Lith became rigid and stared at the door.

A voice said, "Tonight, O Lith, tonight it is two long bright threads for you. Two because the eyes were so great, so large, so golden . . ."

Lith sat quiet. She waited an hour; then, creeping to the door, she listened. The sense of presence was absent. A frog croaked nearby.

She eased the door ajar, found the threads and closed the door. She ran to her golden tapestry and fitted the threads into the raveled warp.

And she stared at the golden valley, sick with longing for Ariventa, and tears blurred out the peaceful river, the quiet golden forest. "The cloth slowly grows wider . . . One day it will be done, and I will come home . . ."

Afterword by Dave Drake Eric and I were both sure that there had to be a Jack Vance story in this anthology, but I'm the one whom Vance had most affected. I even wrote a paper on Vance in my 11thgrade American Lit cla.s.s.

(He is, after all, an American who writes literature.) The slight glitch was thatThe Dragon Masters , the piece that made me a fierce and lifelong Vance fan, was a short novel and too long for this use. We'd run into this before. Both Eric and Jim would've liked to use the novelHave s.p.a.cesuit-Will Travel for Heinlein; in its place we put a novelette of similar tone, written at about the same time as the novel.

For Vance I picked "Liane the Wayfarer" without a second thought. It contains all the traits that attract me to Vance, and it also tells a satisfying story in a brief compa.s.s.

Vance's prose is remarkably colorful and inventive. His plots are complex, he creates neologisms which must be understood from context, and he better than any other writer I'm familiar with makes figments of his imagination concrete on the page.

Also-and this is a big one for me-he writes with a flat affect. Neither the narrator nor the internaldialogue of characters in a Jack Vance story explains how the reader should feel about what's being described. Liane, the viewpoint character in this story, is a sociopath, but Vance to a greater or lesser extent uses the same technique in all his fiction.

I was drawn to that tendency in the first Vance story I read ("The Moon Moth"). I didn't copy Vance when I began to write: Inaturally wrote in a similar fas.h.i.+on. And because of that, I know that some people believe that because a writer doesn't tell readers how to feel, the writer himself feels nothing about the horrors he describes. That's not true of me; I very much doubt it's true of Vance.

So "Liane the Wayfarer" was in many ways the perfect choice for this volume. It's one of the first half dozen stories of Vance's long and productive career; it appeared in his first book,The Dying Earth .

And to a great degree, it's a paradigm for all his work.

The Dying Earthwas published in a very small edition in 1950. "Liane the Wayfarer" itself had appeared in an even smaller magazine at about the same time and wasn't seen again till the 1962 republication of The Dying Earth . That's where I first read it, a few months after I'd readThe Dragon Masters . Not evenRevolt in 2100 had the impact on me thatThe Dragon Masters paired withThe Dying Earth did.

Sp.a.w.n

by P. Schuyler Miller

Preface by Eric Flint I'd never read this story until Dave told me he wanted it for the anthology. After I did, I understood why.

He'll explain his view of it in an afterword, but what I'll say about it for the moment is . . .

This story really, really, really shouldn't work. If there's any "rule of writing" that P. Schuyler Miller doesn't violate somewhere in the course of it, I don't know what it is. The plot is . . .

Absurd. The characters are . . .

Preposterous. The prose is . . .

"Purple" doesn't begin to capture the color.

So much for the rules of writing. In its own completely over-the-top style, this story is a masterpiece.

Okay, a madman's masterpiece, maybe, and certainly one of a kind. It still qualifies for the term because it fulfills the ultimate criterion for a great story-and, ultimately, the only criterion worth talking about.

It works. It really, really, really works.

Pedants spout glibly of probability, quibble and hedge, gulp at imagined gnats. Nothing is impossible to mathematics. Only improbable. Onlyvery improbable.

Only impossibly improbable.

Earth, for example, is improbable. Planets should not logically exist, nor on existing planets life. Balances of forces are too impossibly delicate; origins too complexly coincidental. But Earth does exist-and on Earth life.

We see Earth and we see life, or we see something, however improbable, and call it Earth and life. We forget probabilities and mathematics and live by our senses, by our common sense. Our common sense sees Earth and it sees life, and in a kind of darkened mirror it sees men-but men are utterly improbable!

Ooze to worms and worms to fishes. Fishes to frogs and frogs to lizards. Lizards to rats and rats to men, and men at last to bloated, futuristic Brains. Brains are improbable: brains and senses, and above all, common sense. Not impossible-because nothing is impossible-but so improbable that nowhere in all the improbable stars, nowhere in all the improbably empty s.p.a.ce between the stars, is there room for other Earths and other rats and men.

Nowhere-life.

An improbable man is tight. A man with improbably carrot-colored hair, with an improbably enormous nose. With a cold in that nose. With a quart of potato rot-gut to encourage the utter improbability of that cold and that nose, and of the world in general. With a plane's rudder bar under his feet and a plane's stick between his knees, and the Chilean Andes improbably gigantic underneath.

A man is tight. And coincident with that tightness he is witness to the Improbable: Friday, the 25th of July:James Arthur Donegan, thirty-odd, red-haired, American, has witnessed the Improbable.

A cliff, hard and quartz-white, softening-puddling-pulping away in a vast heaped monstrousness fat with thick ropes of gold. Raw gold-yellow in the Andean sunlight. Mother-gold-knotted in wadded worm-nests in the s.h.i.+ning rock. Medusae of golden fascination. Gold burning in hemp-dream arabesques in the naked cliff-face, in the white quartz that is pulping, dripping, sloughing into monstrosity.

Jim Donegan tipped his bottle high and lifted his plane out of insanity. Jim Donegan's brain reeled with the raw white fire of potato whiskey and the raw yellow l.u.s.tre of fat gold. And with the gold a quartz cliff melting, puddling-stone into pudding-sense into nonsense.

Jim Donegan tipped his bottle again and remembered to forget. Landed in Santiago. Disappeared.

An improbable man is sober. A thousand improbable men and a thousand even less credible women, and of them all only a hundred drunk. Only another hundred tight, or boiled, or mildly blotto. And half athousand improbable men and women, drunk and sober, see and hear and photograph the Improbable eating whales: Wednesday, the 20th of August:Richard Chisholm, fifty, grizzled, British, has entered the Improbable in his log. Has stirred one wrinkled cerebrum, accustomed to the investigation of probabilities, in unaccustomed ways.

Zoologist Heinrich Wilhelm Sturm leaned with polished elbows on a polished rail and stared at a burnished sea. Daughter Marie Elsa Sturm leaned and stared beside him. Secretary Rudolf Walter Weltmann leaned and stared, but not at waves.

Waves lifted lazily along a great s.h.i.+p's flank. Waves swelled and fell unbroken with the listless, oily languor of old dreams. And caught in the warm web of the sun and the malachitic waxenness of the waves a score of whales basked, rolling and blowing, under the weary eyes of Zoologist Heinrich Sturm.

The molten, lucent fluid of the sea clotted and cooled. Color went swiftly out of it: greenstone to apple jade, jade into chrysoprase, prase into beryl spume. It folded in uneven glistening hillocks of illogical solidity, and Zoologist Heinrich Sturm choked on his German oaths as a score of drowsing whales fought suddenly with death!

Acres of empty sea became quivering pulp. Grey puffs of it pushed out of the waves and sank again.

Horrible, avid ripples shuddered and smoothed across its sleekness. And twenty whales were caught: gigantic, blunted minnows wallowing in a pudding mould; t.i.tanic ebon microbes studding an agar bowl.

Drowned by the grey-green stuff that oozed into their gullets and choked their valved blow-holes!

Strangled and stifled by it.

Swallowed and eaten by it!

The sound of it was unreal-the whoosh of blown breath splattering jellied ooze-the soft, glutting gurgle of flowing pulp-the single soughing sob as giant flukes pulled loose to fling aloft and smash into the rippled greenness that was darkening with the shadow of the s.h.i.+p.

One last sucking sigh-the fling of one mighty glisteningupsilon against the sky-the babble of half a thousand human beings gulping breath. And Zoologist Heinrich Sturm, staring through thick, dark lenses at the blob of grey-green jelly on his wrist, at the spatter of jelly on the deck at his feet, and swearing happily his guttural German oaths . . .

A dead man lay in state.

And I was there: Friday, the 22nd of August:Nicholas Svadin lies for the third day in solemn state before the peoples of the world.

Nicholas Svadin, Dictator of Mittel-Europa, lay waxen white under the heaped callas, under the August sun of Budapest. Nicholas Svadin, son of a Slavic butcher, grandson of German fuhrers, lay with six soft-nosed bullets in his skull and breast. Nicholas Svadin-whose genius for government had won the loyalty instead of the hatred of nations, whose greedy hand fed on the conflict of languages and races, whose shadow had covered Europe from the Volga to the Rhine. Nicholas Svadin-who had held allEurope under his humane tyranny save for the bickering fringe of Latin states and the frozen, watchful silence of the Anglo-Scandinavian confederacy.

Nicholas Svadin-dead in the August sun, with all Europe trembling in metastable balance under the fast-unfolding wings of Chaos.

And four men were the world. And four men were afraid.

They stood as they had stood when Svadin's great rolling voice burst in a b.l.o.o.d.y cough and his great body, arms upflung in the compa.s.sionate gesture of the Cross, slumped like a greasy rag on the white steps of the Peace Hall. They stood with the world before them, and the world's dead master, and the vision of the morrow brooded in their eyes.

Four men were the world. Rasmussen, bearded, blond, steel-eyed premier of Anglo-Scandia. Nasuki at his elbow, little and cunning with the age-old subtlety of the East. Gonzales, sleek, olive-skinned heir of the Neo-latin dictator. Moorehead the American, lean and white-headed and oldest of the four. Two and two in the August sun with the sickly scent of the death-lilies cloying in their nostrils, and I with my camera marking Time's slow march.

I marked the four where they stood by the open bier. I marked the spilling lines of mourners that flowed in black runnels through the silent streets of Budapest. I marked the priests where they came, slow-treading with the stateliness of an elder civilization.

I marked the resurrection of the dead!

Nicholas Svadin rose on his white-banked bier and stared at the world of men. Nicholas Svadin rose with the white wax softening in his ma.s.sive jowls and the round blue scar of a soft-nosed slug between his corpse's eyes. Nicholas Svadin swung his thick legs with an ugly stiffness from the bier and stood alone, alive, staring at mankind, and spoke four words-once, slowly, then again: "I-am-Nicholas Svadin."

"I am Nicholas Svadin!"

And men had found a G.o.d.

Svadin had been a man, born of woman, father of men and women, the greatest Earth had known. His genius was for mankind, and he enfolded humanity in his kindly arms and was the father of a world.

Svadin was a man, killed as men are killed, but on the third day he rose from his bed of death and cried his name aloud for the world to hear.

Svadin the man became Svadin the G.o.d.

I photographed the world-a.s.sembly at Leningrad when Svadin called together the scientists of the Earth and gave them the world to mould according to their liking. I marked the gathering in America's halls of Congress when the rulers of the world gave their nations into his bloodless hands and received them again, reborn into a new order of democracy. I watched, and my camera watched, as the world poured itself into these new-cut patterns of civilization and found them good. And then, because men are men and even a Golden Age will pall at last, I turned to other things: A bathysphere torn from its cable in mid-deep. Fis.h.i.+ng fleets returning with empty holds after weeks and months at sea.

Eels gone from their ancient haunts, and salmon sp.a.w.ning in dozens where once streams had been choked with their l.u.s.ting bodies.

Cattles.h.i.+ps lost in mid-Atlantic, and then a freighter, and another, gone without a trace.

Two men and a girl whose names were on the rolls of every s.h.i.+p that crossed and recrossed the haunted waters of the North Atlantic.

And from the South vague rumors of a G.o.d: Miami's sun-bathed beaches were black with human insects. Miami's tropic night throbbed with the beat of music and the sway and glide of dancers. Maria Elsa Sturm glided and swayed in the strong, young arms of Rudolf Weltmann and laughed with her night-blue eyes and poppy lips, but Heinrich Sturm stood alone in the star-strewn night and stared broodingly at the sleeping sea. Maria basked in the smoldering noonday sun, a slender golden flame beside the swarthy handsomeness of her companion, but the old masked eyes of Heinrich stared beyond her beauty at the sea.

Long waves swelled sleepily against the far blue of the Gulf Stream and sank and swelled again and creamed in tepid foam along the sands. Gay laughter rippled and prismatic color played with kaleidoscopic lavishness under the golden sun. Wave after wave of the sea, rising and falling and rising against the sky-and a wave that did not fall!

It came as the others had come, slowly, blue-green and glistening in the sunlight. It rose and fell with the ceaseless surge of the Atlantic at its back, and rose again along the white curve of the beach. It was like a wall of water, miles in length, rus.h.i.+ng sh.o.r.eward with the speed of a running man. Men ran from it and were caught. Spots of bright color spun in its sluggish eddies and went down. Tongues of it licked out over the warm sands, leaving them naked and bone-white, and flowed lazily back into the monstrous thing that lay and gorged in the hot sun.

It was a sea-green tumulus, vast as all Ocean. It was a league-long hillock of green ooze, apple-jade-green, chrysoprase-green, grey-green of frosted flint. It was a thing of Famine-not out of Bibles, not out of the histories of men-a thing that lay like a pestilence of the sea upon the warm, white beaches of Miami, black with humanity running, screaming, milling-a thing that was greedy and that fed!

Tatters of bright rag swirled in its sluggish eddies, oozed from its gelid depths; fragments of white bone, chalk-white and etched, rose and were spewed on the white sands. Arms of it flowed like hot wax, knowingly, hungrily. Veins in it, pale like clear ribbons of white jade in green translucency, ran blossom-pink, ran rose, ran crimson-red.

Maria Elsa Sturm lay in the white sand, in the warm sun, in the strong arms of healthy Rudolf Weltmann, under the unseeing eyes of Heinrich Sturm. Zoologist Heinrich Sturm woke to the world with horror in his eyes, horror in his brain, shrieking horror come stark into this life. Zoologist Heinrich Sturm saw tongues of the green-sea-stuff licking over Miami's bone-white sands, supping up morsels of kicking life, spewing out dead things that were not food. Zoologist Heinrich Sturm saw the Incredible, mountain-high, suck up the golden straw that was Maria Strum, suck up the brown, strong straw that was Rudolf Weltmann, swell like a flooding river against the sea-wall at his feet, purling and dimpling with greedy inner currents-saw it ebb and lie drowsing, relis.h.i.+ng its prey-saw the bright, scarlet rag that had wrapped Maria Sturm oozing up out of its green horridness, saw the black rag that had clothed Rudolf, saw twowhite, naked skulls that dimpled its glistening surface before they were sloughed away among tide-rows of eaten bones.

League-long and hill-high the wave that was not a wave lay glutting on young flesh, supping up hot blood. League-long and hill-high, with the little insect myriads of mankind running and screaming, standing and dying-with the buzzing wings of mankind circling over it and men's little weapons peppering at its vast, full-fed imperturbability. Bombs fell like grain from a sower's fist, streaming shadows of them raining out of the bare blue sky. Vast sound shattered the ears of gaping men, crus.h.i.+ng in windows, shaking down ceilings, thundering with boastful vengeance. Fountains of green jelly rose stringily; wounds like the pit of Kimberly opened and showed sea-green, shadowed depths, stirring as the sea stirs, closing as the sea closes, with no scar. Bricks crumbled in little streams from a broken cornice; gla.s.s tinkled from gaping windows; men wailed and babbled and stared in fascination at Death. And Zoologist Heinrich Sturm stood alone, a gray old rock against which the scrambling tide beat and broke, seeing only the golden body of Maria Elsa Sturm, the laughing upturned face of Maria Elsa Sturm, the night-blue eyes and poppy lips of Maria Elsa Sturm . . .

Long waves swelled sleepily against the far blue of the Gulf Stream, and sank and swelled again, and creamed in soft foam against the bone-white sands. Wave after wave, rising and falling and rising higher with the flooding tide. Waves rising to lap the sea-green tumulus, to bathe its red-veined monstrousness whose crimson rills were fading to pink, to grey, to lucent white. Waves laving it, tickling its monstrous fancies, pleasing it mightily. Waves into which it subsided and left Miami's white beaches naked for a league save for the windrows of heaped bones and the moist, bright rags that had been men's condescension to the morality of men.

Cameras ground clickingly along that league-long battlefront while horror fed; microphones gathered the scream of the sight of Death from a thousand quavering lips-but not mine.

Men turned away, sickened, to turn and stare again with horrid fascination at the wet white windrows that were girls' bones and men's bones, and children's-but not I.