A Separate War and Other Stories (22 page)

We followed our GPV's tracks back to where we'd lost control of it, and a little way beyond, all of our radios started chattering. They had observed some of what was happening from orbit, and the commander of the Marine detachment was about to send an assault team after us, assuming the helicopter had been hijacked, though by whom and for what reason was not clear.

Whoopie and I were glad to leave the service the next year, resisting a fairly sizable reenlistment bonus in exchange for a degree of sanity. Ten years later, we're still together, with a normal kid and fairly normal jobs. As far as we know, the Lalande Effect is still a mystery.

In a universe full of mysteries, some of them wonderful.

(2004)

Margaret Stevenson walked up the two flights and came to a plain wooden door with the nameplate
relationships, ltd.
She hesitated, then knocked. Someone buzzed her in.

She didn't know what to expect, but the simplicity surprised her: no receptionist, no outer office, no sign of a laboratory. Just a middle-aged man, conservative business suit, head fashionably shaved, sitting behind an uncluttered desk. He stood and offered his hand. “Mrs. Stevenson? I'm Dr. Damien.”

She sat on the edge of the chair he offered.

“Our service is guaranteed,” he said without preamble, “but it is neither inexpensive nor permanent.”

“You wouldn't want it to be permanent,” she said.

“No.” He smiled. “Life would be pleasant, but neither of you would accomplish much.” He reached into a drawer and pulled out a single sheet of paper and a pen. “Nevertheless, I must ask you to sign this waiver, which relieves our corporation of responsibility for anything you or he may do or say for the duration of the effect.”

She picked up the waiver and scanned it. “When we talked on the phone, you said that there would be no physical danger and no lasting physical effect.”

“That's part of the guarantee.”

She put the paper down and picked up the pen, but hesitated. “How, exactly, does it work?”

He leaned back, lacing his fingers together over his abdomen, and looked directly at her. After a moment, he said, “The varieties of love are nearly infinite. Every person alive is theoretically able to love every other person alive, and in a variety of ways.”

“Theoretically,” she said.

“In our culture, love between a man and a woman normally goes through three stages: sexual attraction, romantic fascination, and then long-term bonding. Each of them is mediated by a distinct condition of brain chemistry.

“A person may have all three at once, with only one being dominant at any given time. Thus a man might be in love with his wife, and at the same time be infatuated with his mistress, and yet be instantly attracted to any stranger with appropriate physical characteristics.”

“That's exactly—”

He held up a hand. “I don't need to know any more than you've told me. You've been married twenty-five years, you have an anniversary coming up…and you want it to be romantic.”

“Yes.” She didn't smile. “I know he's capable of romance.”

“As are we all.” He leaned forward and took two vials from the drawer, a blue one and a pink one. He looked at the blue one. “This is Formula One. It induces the first condition, sort of a Viagra for the mind.”

She closed her eyes and shook her head, almost a shudder. “No. I want the second one.”

“Formula Two.” He slid the pink vial toward her. “You each take approximately half of this, while in each other's company, and for several days you will be in a state of mutual infatuation. You'll be like kids again.”

She did smile at that. “Whether he knows he's taken it or not?”

“That's right. No placebo effect.”

“And there is no Formula Three?”

“No. That takes time, and understanding, and a measure of luck.” He shook his head ruefully and put the blue vial away. “But I think you have that already.”

“We do. The old-married-couple kind.”

“Now, the most effective way of administering the drug is through food or drink. You can put it in a favorite dish, one you're sure he'll finish, but only after it's been cooked. Above a hundred degrees Centigrade, the compound will decompose.”

“I don't often cook. Could it be a bottle of wine?”

“If you each drink half, yes.”

“I can force myself.” She took up the pen and signed the waiver, then opened her clutch purse and counted out ten hundred-pound notes. “Half now, you said, and half upon satisfaction?”

“That's correct.” He stood and offered his hand again. “Good luck, Mrs. Stevenson.”

 

The reader may now imagine any one of nine permutations for this story's end. In the one the author prefers, they go to a romantic French restaurant, the lights low, the food wonderful, a bottle of good Bordeaux between them.

She excuses herself to go to the ladies' loo, the vial palmed, and drops her purse. When he leans over to pick it up, she empties the vial into the bottle of wine.

When she returns, she is careful to consume half of the remaining wine, which is not difficult. They are both in an expansive, loving mood, comrades these twenty-five years.

As they finish the bottle, she feels the emotion building in her, doubling and redoubling. She can see the effect on him, as well: his eyes wide and dilated, his face flushed. He loosens his tie as she pats perspiration from her forehead.

It's all but unbearable! She has to confess, so that he will know there's nothing physically wrong with him. She takes the empty pink vial from her purse and opens her mouth to explain—

He opens his hand and the empty blue vial drops to the table. He grabs the tablecloth…

 

They are released on their own recognizance once the magistrate understands the situation.

But they'll never be served in that restaurant again.

(2005)

Who among us is not enriched by a return to our roots? Billions of people and others have gone to great expense and trouble to find their way back—not just to the place where they were born, but to the various worlds to which they can trace their distant ancestors and affines and primary clones.

But not one in a million has gone
all
the way back.

For many centuries since Old Earth was condemned as officially uninhabitable, it has been sitting unused, a reliquary for archaeologists and historians, and a “worst-case” scenario for terraformers—notoriously, the most unmarketable piece of real estate in Sirius Sector. Now, at the dawn of the 125th century, the Disney-Bertelsmann Consortium is proud to announce that Terra is returning to usefulness, ready to take a new and important place in the human and humanized universe.

(A “century” was once a significant fraction of the human life span, and for the first thirty or so twyops after the discovery of consciousness, centuries were used as a primary chronological unit.)

Beginning at midnight, 1021.9445 Two-Pop, with allowances for relativistic contraction (31 December 12400 Old Style), DBC will be offering monthlong Catastrophe Tours of Old Earth. A multigigacredit undertaking, Catastrophe Tours will thrill humans and others by re-creating the unique sequence of disasters that finally resulted in the Diaspora and Rebirth.

FEEL THE HORROR as trillions of anaerobic microorganisms strangle in an atmosphere that slowly poisons itself with oxygen! DBC's unique “Time Out” (
) field compresses centuries into seconds, so that with your own eyes, or similar organs, you can watch the evolution of the tiny creatures who would become the rulers of a transformed planet.

SEE THE TERROR as a mighty asteroid crashes into the Yucatán Peninsula! With DBC's “Time Out” (
) field, follow the shock wave in excruciating slow motion, as it circles the planet, destroying thousands of species and paving the way for the temporary primacy of mammals on Earth.

(DBC offers to sufficiently armored species the special option of “surfing” the shock wave; watching in real time as it pulverizes everything in its path. Individuals must be able to withstand impulses greater than one thousand gees and temperatures greater than molten iron.)

For a cooler time, FREEZE YOUR WHATEVER OFF as ice fields expand from the poles nearly to the equator! Again, DBC's “Time Out” (
) field speeds up the process so that what was once an excruciating strangulation becomes a breathtaking crystalline transformation.

An optional winter sports package is available for suitably hardy species, although DBC takes no responsibility for your safety. Some of the animals are big, and all of them are hungry.

THRILL TO THE FOUR HORSEMEN Mortality Play as the “human” race, in its primal incarnation, is decimated time and again by war, pestilence, famine, and plague. They aren't real, of course, by modern standards, but their suffering is real enough!

LAUGH AT THE “FINAL TRUMP”—whose humorous double meaning will be explained—when a combination of ultimate weapons with greed finally ends war and suffering by eliminating nearly all potential victims! Customers with sufficiently developed appreciation of irony, and lovers of symmetry, will be amused by the rightness of the ultimate disappearance of oxygen, and the return of the planet to its original anaerobic owners.

Disclaimer: No advanced life-forms are harmed by this entertainment. The only creatures that still survive on Earth are a few hardy, rapidly mutating species, who thrive on disaster.

(2000)

Trapped. From the waterfront bar to a crap game to a simpleminded ambush in a dead-end alley.

He didn't blame them for being angry. His pockets were stuffed with their money, greasy crumpled fives and tens. Two thousand and twenty of their hard-earned dollars, if his memory served him right. And of course it did.

They had supplied three sets of dice—two loaded, one shaved. All three were childishly easy to manipulate. He let them win each throw at first, and then less and less often. Finally, he tested their credulity and emptied their pockets, with ten sevens in a row.

That much had been easy. But now he was in a difficult position. Under the transparent pretext of finding a bigger game, the leader of the gang had steered him into this blind alley, where five others were hiding in ambush.

And now the six were joined in a line, advancing on him, pushing him toward the tall Hurricane fence that blocked the end of the alley.

Jeff started pacing them, walking backwards. Thirty seconds, give or take a little, before he would back into the fence and be caught. Thirty seconds objective…

Jeff froze and did a little trick with his brain. All the energy his strange body produced, except for that fraction needed to maintain human form, was channeled into heightening his sensory perceptions, accelerating his mental processes. He had to find a way out of this dilemma, without exposing his true nature.

The murderous sextet slowed down in Jeff's frozen eyes as the ratio of subjective to objective time flux increased arithmetically, geometrically, exponentially.

A drop of sweat rolled from the leader's brow, fell two feet in a fraction of a second, a foot in the next second, an inch in the next, a millimeter, a micron…

Now.

 

A pity he couldn't just kill them all, slowly, painfully. Terrible to have artistic responsibility stifled by practical obligations. Such a beautiful composition.

They were frozen in attitudes ranging from the leader's leering, sadistic anticipation of pleasure (dilettante!), to the little one's ill-concealed fear of pain, of inflicting pain, to Jimmy's unthinking, color-blinded compulsion to take apart, destroy…ah, Jimmy, slave of entropy, servant of disorder and chaos, I will make of you an epic, a saga.

I
would
, that is. I
could
.

But Llarvl said…

That snail. Insensitive brute.

Next time out I'll get a supervisor who can
understand
.

But next time out, I'll be too old.

Even now I can feel it.

Damn that snail!

The ship hovered above a South American plantation. People looked at it and saw only the sky beyond. Radar would never detect it. Only a voodoo priest, in a mushroom trance, felt its presence. He tried to verbalize and died of a cerebral occlusion.

Too quick. Artless.

Llarvl was talking to him “Bluntly, I wish we didn't have to use you, Braxn.” His crude race communicated vocally, and the unmodulated, in-and-out-of-phase thought waves washed a gravelly ebb and flow of pain through Braxn's organ of communication. He stored the pain, low intensity that it was, for contemplation at a more satisfactory time.

He repeated: “If only we had brought someone else of your sort, besides your father, of course. Shape-changers are not such a rarity.” He plucked out a cilium in frustration, but of course felt no pain. Braxn was too close; sucked it in.

“A G'drellian poet. A poet of pain. Of all the useless baggage to drag around on a survey expedition…” He sighed and ground his shell against the wall. “But we have no choice. Only two bipeds aboard the ship, and neither of them is even remotely mammalian. And the natives of this planet are acutely xenophobic. Hell, they're
omni
phobic. Even harder to take than you, worthy poet.

“But this is the biggest find of the whole trip! The crucial period of transition—they may be on the brink of civilization; still animals, but rapidly advancing. Think of it! In ten or twenty generations they'll be human, and seek us, as most do. We've met thousands of civilized races, more thousands of savage ones; but this is the first we've found in transition. Ethnology, alien psychology, everything”—he shuddered—“even your people's excuse for art, will benefit immeasurably.”

Braxn made no comment. He hadn't bothered to form a speech organ for the interview. He knew Llarvl would do all the talking anyway.

But he had been studying, under stasis, for several hours. Knowing exactly what needed to be done, he let half his body disintegrate into its component parts and started to remold them.

First the skeleton, bone by thousandth bone; the internal organs, in logical order, glistening, throbbing, functioning; wet-red muscle, fat, connective tissue, derma, epidermis; smooth and olive, fingernails, hair, small mole on the left cheek.

Vocal cords, virgin, throb contralto: “Mammalian enough?”

“Speak Galactic!”

“I said, ‘Mammalian enough?' I mean, would you like them bigger,” she demonstrated, “or smaller?”

“How would I know?” snapped Llarvl, trying to hide his disgust. “Pick some sort of statistical mean.”

Braxn picked a statistical mean between the October and the November Playmate of the Month.

With what he thought was detached objectivity, Llarvl said, “Ugly bunch of creatures, aren't they?” About one hundred million years ago, Llarvl's race had one natural enemy—a race of biped mammals.

With a silvery laugh, Braxn left to prepare for planetfall.

Braxn had studied the Earth and its people for some ten thousand hours, subjective time. She knew about clothes, she knew about sex, she knew about rape.

So she appeared on Earth, on a dirt road in South America, without a stitch. Without a blush. And her scholastic observations were confirmed, in the field, so to speak, in less than five minutes. She learned quite a bit the first time; less the second. The third time, well, she was merely bored.

She made him into a beautiful…poem?

She made him into a mouse-sized, shriveled brown husk, lying dead by the side of the road, his tiny features contorted with incredible agony.

She synthesized clothes, grey and dirty, and changed herself into an old, crippled hag. It was twenty minutes before she met another man, who…

Another dry husk.

Braxn was getting an interesting, if low, opinion of men, Bolivian farmers in particular; so she changed herself into one. The shoe on the other foot, she found, made things different, but not necessarily better. Well, she was gathering material. That's what Llarvl wanted.

She waited for a car to come by, reverted to the original voluptuous pattern, disposed of the driver when he stopped to investigate, took his form and his car, and started on her world tour.

Braxn tried to do everything and be everyone.

“He” was, in turn, doctor, lawyer, fencing coach, prostitute, auto racer, mountain climber, golf pro. He ran a pornography shop in Dallas, a hot dog stand at Coney Island, a death-sleep house in Peking, a Viennese coffeehouse, the museum at Dachau. He peddled Bibles and amulets, Fuller brushes and heroin. He was a society deb, a Bohemian poet, a member of Parliament, a
cul-de-jatte
in Monaco.

For operating expenses, when he needed small sums, he wove baskets, sold his body, dived for pennies, cast horoscopes.

Hustled pool.

The sweat drop had moved a hundredth of an inch. Must stop wasting time, but it's so hard to concentrate when it feels like you have all the time in the universe.

Braxn knew that he could remain in this state only a few more minutes (subjective) before he was stuck in it permanently. On the ship he could spend as much time as he wanted in mental acceleration, but here there was no apparatus to shock him out of it before trance set in. The trance would go on for more than a thousand years, such was his race's span of life. But to the six hoods he would age and die in a few seconds, reverting to his original form for an invisible nanosecond before dissolving into a small grey mound of dust.

He was seeing in the far infrared now, and definition was very poor. He switched to field recognition. The dull animals confronting him had dim red psionic envelopes, except for the one in agony, whose aura was bordered with coruscating violet flashes.

Electromagnetic. The ion fog around the leader's watch glowed pale blue. Leakage from the telephone and power lines made kaleidoscopic patterns in the sky. His back felt warm.

Warm?

He switched to visual again and searched the people's eyes for reflections. There—the little scared one—his eyes mirrored the fence, the Hurricane fence. Spaced with ceramic insulators…

He started to slow down his mind, speed up the world. The drop inched, fell to the ground with slow purpose; struck and flowered into tiny droplets.

Sound welled up around him.

“—eezuz Christ, he must be scared stiff!”

Braxn stumbled back toward the electrified fence, manufacturing adrenaline to substitute for his spent strength. His stomach knotted and flamed with impossible hunger. He received the pain and cherished it.

The leader advanced for the kill, bold and cocky, switchblade in his right hand, his left swinging a bicycle chain like a stubby lariat.

Braxn secreted a flesh-colored, rubbery coating over his body and, on top of that, a thin layer of saline mucus.

“Come, Retiarius!” he croaked.

“Huh?” The leader faltered in his advance, too late.

Braxn grabbed the bicycle chain and the fence simultaneously. There was a low, sixty-cycle hum, and the hood crumpled to the ground. He looped the chain around the scared one's neck and pulled him into the fence. Three to go.

The others had stopped, bewildered. Braxn, gaining strength at the expense of his temporary body, snatched the nearest one and hurled him into the fence. Another started to run, but Braxn used the chain as a bolo and brought him down. He dragged him screaming to the fence and shoved his face into it.

The only one left was Jimmy.

“Jimmy-baby!” The dim giant stood his ground, trying to understand what had happened, too sure of his own strength to be really afraid. He took a tentative step forward.

Now. The more fantastic, the better. He could do anything in front of this oaf.

Braxn kept the rubbery coating, but altered its reflective properties. Now it was flesh-colored to Jimmy. He kinked his hair, flattened his nose, broadened his lips, started to swell in height and breadth.

He was becoming a carbon copy of Jimmy—more true in the man's eyes than any photograph could be, for the specifications were coming from his own dim brain.

Thus the biceps were a bit larger, the face a little meaner, than a lying mirror would reflect. The teeth were square and white, and instead of the ugly mole on his cheek there was an incredibly virile scar that lanced down to his chin, catching the corner of his mouth in a perpetual arrogant sneer. He laughed, deep and hollow, mirthless.

“Whassa matter, you? Y'seen me before?”

Jimmy stood transfixed, a bewildered smile decorating his vacant face.

“Nuthin' faze you, Jim?” Braxn looked at the big Negro and cracked his knuckles. He let one finger fall off. It hit the ground, changed into a centipede, and scurried off. Jimmy followed its progress with awe. He looked up to his double again, smile gone, eyes narrowing.

Braxn dropped the patois. “Watch closely, Jimmy. You've got fear in you, like anybody else, and I think I know where to find it.”

The strong, manly face blurred for an instant and came back into focus. The scar was a puffy infected seam that defiled a face no longer vigorous or handsome. It pulled down the lower lip to expose a yellow canine. The face was lined with a delicate tracery of worry and pain, the grooves growing deeper and more complex in front of Jimmy's horrified eyes.

The hair, sprinkled with grey, grew white and was gone except for a dirty stubble on the twisted, knobby chin. Face as body wasted away; wrinkled parchment stretched tight over a leering death mask.