Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (65 page)

But there was no joy.

He took to sitting leaden and apart, watching for a sign.

"This time?"

No.

Not yet. Never.

Ten to the eleventh times two … fifty percent chance of finding
Earth within three thousand years. It was the scouter all over again.

The lovepile reformed without him, and he turned his face away, not eating
until they pushed food into his mouth. If he stayed totally inert, surely
they would grow bored with him and put him out. No other hope. Finish me
… soon.

They made little efforts to arouse him with fondlings, and now and then a
harsh jolt. He lolled unresisting. End it, he prayed. But still they
puzzled at him in the intervals of their games. They mean well, he
thought. And they miss the stuff I brought them.

Bushbaby was coaxing.

"—first a suave effect, you know. Cryptic. And then a cascade of
sweet and sour sparkling over the palate—"

He tried to shut it out. They mean well. Falling across the galaxy with a
talking cookbook. Finish me.

"—but the arts of combination," Bushbaby chatted on. "Like moving
food; e.g., sentient plants or small live animals, combining flavor with
the
frisson
of movement—"

He thought of oysters. Had he eaten some once? Something about poison. The
rivers of Earth. Did they still flow? Even if by some unimaginable chance
they stumbled on it, would it be far in the past or future, a dead ball?
Let me die.

"—and
sound,
that's amusing. We've picked up several races
who combine musical effects with certain tastes. And there's the sound of
oneself chewing, textures and viscosities. I recall some beings who sucked
in harmonics. Or the sound of the food itself. One race I caught
en
passant
did that, but with a very limited range. Crunchy. Crispy.
Snap-crackle-pop. One wishes they had explored tonalities, glissando
effects—"

He lunged up.

"What did you say?
Snap-crackle-pop?
"

"Why, yes, but—"

"That's it! That's Earth!" he yelled. "You picked up a goddamn
breakfast-food commercial!"

He felt a lurch. They were scrambling up the wall.

"A what?" Bushbaby stared.

"Never mind—take me there! That's Earth, it has to be. You can find
it again, can't you? You said you could," he implored, pawing at them.
"Please!"

The
Lovepile
rocked. He was frightening everybody,

"Oh,
please.
" He forced his voice smooth.

"But I only heard it for an instant," Bushbaby protested. "It would be
terribly hard, that far back. My poor head!"

He was on his knees begging. "You'd love it," he pleaded. "We have
fantastic food. Culinary poems you never heard of. Cordon bleu!
Escoffier!" he babbled. "Talk about combinations, the Chinese do it four
ways! Or is it the Japanese? Rijsttafel! Bubble-and-squeak! Baked Alaska,
hot crust outside, inside co-o-old ice cream!"

Bushbaby's pink tongue flicked. Was he getting through?

He clawed his memory for foods he'd never heard of.

"Maguay worms in chocolate! Haggis and bagpipes, crystallized violets,
rabbit Mephisto! Octopus in resin wine. Four-and-twenty blackbird pie!
Cakes with girls in them. Kids seethed in their mothers' milk—wait,
that's taboo. Ever hear of
taboo
foods? Long pig!"

Where was he getting all this? A vague presence drifted in his mind—his
hands, the ridges, long ago. "Amanda," he breathed, racing on.

"Cormorants aged in manure! Ratatouille! Peaches iced in champagne!"
Project,
he thought. "
Pâté
of fatted goose liver studded with
earth-drenched truffles, clothed in purest white lard!" He snuffled
lustfully. "Hot buttered scones sluiced in whortleberry syrup!" He
salivated. "Finnan haddie soufflé, oh, yes! Unborn baby veal
pounded to a membrane and delicately scorched in black herb butter—"

Bushbaby and Ragglebomb were clutching each other, eyes closed. Muscle was
mesmerized.

"Find Earth! Grape leaves piled with poignantly sweet wild fraises,
clotted with Devon cream!"

Bushbaby moaned, rocking to and fro.

"Earth! Bitter endives wilted in chicken steam and crumbled bacon! Black
gazpacho! Fruit of the Tree of Heaven!"

Bushbaby rocked harder, the butterfly clamped to its breast.

Earth, Earth,
he willed with all his might, croaking "Bahklava!
Gossamer puff paste and pistachio nuts dripping with mountain honey!"

Bushbaby pushed at Ragglebomb's head, and the pod seemed to twirl. "Ripe
Cornice pears," he whispered. "
Earth?
"

"That's it." Bushbaby fell over panting. "Oh, those foods, I want every
single one. Let's land!"

"Deep-dish steak and kidney pie," he breathed. "Pearled with crusty onion
dumplings—"

"Land!" Ragglebomb squealed. "Eat, eat!"

The pod jarred. Solidity. Earth.

Home.

"LET ME OUT!"

He saw a pucker opening daylight in the wall and dived for it. His legs
pumped, struck. Earth! Feet thudding, face uplifted, lungs gulping air.
"Home!" he yelled.

—And went headlong on the gravel, arms and legs out of control. A
cataclysm smote his inside.

"Help!"

His body arched, spewed vomit, he was flailing, screaming.

"Help, Help! What's wrong?"

Through his noise he heard an uproar behind him in the pod. He managed to
roll, saw gold and black bodies writhing inside the open port. They were
in convulsions too.

"Stop it! Don't move!" Bushbaby shrieked. "You're killing us!"

"Get us out," he gasped. "This isn't Earth."

His throat garroted itself on his breath, and the aliens moaned in
empathy.

"Don't! We can't move," Bushbaby gasped. "Don't breathe, close your eyes
quick!"

He shut his eyes. The awfulness lessened slightly.

"What is it? What's happening?"

"PAIN, YOU FOOL," thundered Muscle.

"This is your wretched Earth," Bushbaby wailed. "Now we know what they
tied your pain nerves to. Get back in so we can go—carefully!"

He opened his eyes, got a glimpse of pale sky and scrubby bushes before
his eyeballs skewered. The empaths screamed.

"Stop! Ragglebomb die!"

"My own home," he whimpered, clawing at his eyes. His whole body was being
devoured by invisible flames, crushed, impaled, flayed.
The pattern of
Earth,
he realized. Her unique air, her exact gestalt of solar
spectrum, gravity, magnetic field, her every sight and sound and touch—that
was what they'd tuned his pain-circuits for.

"
Evidently they did not want you back,
" said Muscle's silent voice.
"
Get in.
"

"They can fix me, they've got to fix me—"

"They aren't here," Bushbaby shouted. "Temporal error. No
snap-crackle-pop. You and your Baked Alaska—" Its voice broke
pitifully. "Come back in so we can go!"

"Wait," he croaked. "When?"

He opened one eye, managed to see a rocky hillside before his forehead
detonated. No roads, no buildings. Nothing to tell whether it was past or
future. Not beautiful.

Behind him the aliens were crying out. He began to crawl blindly toward
the pod, teeth clenching over salty gushes. He had bitten his tongue.
Every move seared him; the air burned his guts when he had to breathe. The
gravel seemed to be slicing his hands open, although no wounds appeared.
Only pain, pain, pain from every nerve end.

"Amanda," he moaned, but she was not here. He crawled, writhed, kicked
like a pinned bug toward the pod that held sweet comfort, the bliss of
no-pain. Somewhere a bird called, stabbing his eardrums. His friends
screamed.

"Hurry!"

Had it been a bird? He risked one look back.

A brown figure was sidling round the rocks.

Before he could see whether it was ape or human, female or male, the worst
pain yet almost tore his brain out. He groveled helpless, hearing himself
shriek.
The pattern of his own kind.
Of course, the central thing—it
would hurt most of all. No hope of staying here.

"
Don't! Don't! Hurry!
"

He sobbed, scrabbling toward the
Lovepile.
The scent of the weeds
that his chest crushed raked his throat. Marigolds, he thought. Behind the
agony, lost sweetness.

He touched the wall of the pod, gasping knives. The torturing air was real
air,
his
terrible Earth was real.

"
GET IN QUICK!
"

"Please, plea—" he babbled wordlessly, hauling himself up with lids
clenched, fumbling for the port. The real sun of Earth rained acid on his
flesh.

The port! Inside lay relief, would be No-Pain forever. Caress—joy—why
had he wanted to leave them? His hand found the port.

Standing, he turned, opened both eyes.

The form of a dead limb printed a whiplash on his eyeballs. Jagged, ugly.
Unendurable. But real—

To hurt forever?

"We can't wait!" Bushbaby wailed. He thought of its golden body flying
down the light-years, savoring delight. His arms shook violently.

"Then go!" he bellowed and thrust himself violently away from the
Lovepile.

There was an implosion behind him.

He was alone.

He managed to stagger a few steps forward before he went down.

The End

© 1972, 2000 by James Tiptree, Jr.; First appeared in
The Magazine
of Fantasy and Science Fiction
; reprinted by permission of the
author's estate and the estate's agent, The Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.

Harlan Ellison

"Give me some light!"

Cry: tormented, half-moan half-chant, cast out against a whispering
darkness; a man wound in white, arms upflung to roistering shadows, sooty
sockets where eyes had been, pleading, demanding, anger and hopelessness,
anguish from the soul into the world. He stumbled, a step, two, faltering,
weak, the man returned to the child, trying to find some exit from the
washing sea of darkness in which he trembled.

"Give me some light!"

Around him a Greek chorus of sussurating voices; plucking at his garments,
he staggered toward an intimation of sound, a resting place, a goal. The
man in pain, the figure of
all
pain, all desperation, and nowhere
in that circle of painful light was there release from this torment.
Sandaled feet stepping, each one above an abyss, no hope and no safety;
what can it mean to be so eternally blind?

Again, "Give me some light!"

The last tortured ripping of the words from a throat raw with the
hopelessness of salvation. Then the man sank to the shadows that moved in
on him. The face half-hidden in chiaroscuro, sharp black, blanched white,
down and down into the grayness about his feet, the circle of blazing
white light pinpointing him, a creature impaled on a pin of brilliance,
till closing, closing, closing it swallowed him, all gone to black,
darkness within and without, black even deeper, nothing, finis, end,
silence.

Richard Becker, Oedipus, had played his first role. Twenty-four years
later, he would play it again, as his last. But before that final
performance's curtain could be rung, twenty-four years of greatness would
have to strut across stages of life and theatre and emotion.

Time, passing.

When they had decided to cast the paranoid beggar in
Sweet Miracles,
Richard Becker had gone to the Salvation Army retail store, and bought a
set of rags that even the sanctimonious saleswomen staffing the shop had
tried to throw out as unsalable and foul. He bought a pair of cracked and
soleless shoes that were a size too large. He bought a hat that had seen
so many autumns of rain its brim had bowed and withered under the
onslaught. He bought a no-color vest from a suit long since destroyed, and
a pair of pants whose seat sagged baggily, and a shirt with three buttons
gone, and a jacket that seemed to symbolize every derelict who had ever
cadged an hour's sleep in an alley.

He bought these things over the protests of the kindly, white-haired women
who were
doing their bit for charity,
and he asked if he might step
into the toilet for a few moments to try them on; and when he emerged, his
good tweed jacket and dark slacks over his arm, he was another man
entirely. As though magically, the coarse stubble (that may have been
there when he came into the store, but he seemed too nice-looking a young
man to go around unshaved) had sprouted on his sagging jowls. The hair had
grown limp and off-gray under the squashed hat. The face was lined and
planed with the depravities and deprivations of a lifetime lived in
gutters and saloons. The hands were caked with filth, the eyes lusterless
and devoid of personality, the body grotesquely slumped with the burden of
mere existence. This old man, this skid from the Bowery, how had he gotten
into the toilet, and where was the nice young man who had gone in wearing
that jacket and those slacks? Had this
creature
somehow overpowered
him (what foul weapon had this feeble old man used to subdue a vital,
strong youth like that)? The white-haired Good Women of Charity were
frozen with distress as they imagined the strong-faced, attractive youth,
lying in the bathroom, his skull crushed by a length of pipe.

The old bum extended the jacket, the pants, and the rest of the clothing
the young man had been wearing, and in a voice that was thirty years
younger than the body from which it spoke, he explained, "I won't be
needing these, ladies. Sell them to someone who can make good use of
them." The voice of the young man, from this husk.

And he paid for the rags he wore. They watched him as he limped and rolled
through the front door, into the filthy streets; another tramp gone to
join the tide of lost souls that would inevitably become a stream and a
river and an ocean of wastrels, washing finally into a drunk tank, or a
doorway, or onto a park bench.