The Science-Fantasy Megapack Page 9

  “The resistance?” he echoed. “The resistance to what?”

  “To the ruling hegemony, the Artecrats, as we call them. You’re an embarrassment to them—which is why they’re killing you.”

  He stared at her. “Killing?”

  “Your food,” she said matter-of-factly, “was poisoned. You would have been dead in another two days.”

  He thought of the meals he had taken so far, the nausea that had followed. “Where are you taking me?”

  She laughed at that. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, Commander!”

  He nodded. “Okay, we’ll pass on that.” He considered his next question. “But can you tell me what’s happened to the Earth I left?”

  He eyes darkened at the question, and she nodded. “That would be a pleasure.”She nudged the tiller. They drew even closer to the bank, puttering quietly through the dappled shade.

  “Nearly fifty years after the Endeavor set off for the stars, the world almost ended. They called it the bio-war at the time. It wasn’t a war in the way you would understand, not nation against nation—more ideology against ideology. The casualties were unimaginable—abstract figures, Commander, so vast as to be almost meaningless. More than three quarters of the world’s population was wiped out in five years after the first bio-engineered plague was released.”

  “Three quarters…,” he echoed. “Four, five billion people?”

  She shrugged. “Approximately that, yes.”

  “Who was responsible?”

  “The disaffected, the un-enfranchised. Terrorist groups. Anarchists. Religious zealots.” She shrugged again. “They seemed to work on the principle that if they could not get what they wanted—power—then no one else should have it. After ten years, the human race was in danger of becoming extinct.”

  “What happened?”

  “A new order came to power. A regime as ruthless as it was determined to get what it wanted, at any cost.”

  “And it wanted?”

  “Stability, but not if it meant a return to the old ways. They despised the way the world had been. They blamed those in power before the bio-war for the state of the world. They set about ensuring that the war or anything like it could never happen again.”

  Marshall shook his head. “How could they do that?” he asked. Humans are humans, he thought.

  She raised a finger to her lips. “Shh!”

  He looked over his shoulder, following the direction of her gaze. They were approaching a split in the river: a wedge-shaped island divided the muddy flow into two thick streams. Buchi nudged the tiller and they edged up the narrower, right-most stream. She scanned the bank, her eyes wide, and said nothing.

  * * * *

  At last she cut the engine and they drifted towards the riverbank.

  From between the trees, startling him, a figure emerged. Buchi threw him a rope and he made fast the boat to the bole of a palm. The man—an African—stared at Marshall with an expression that combined disbelief and awe.

  Buchi gestured to Marshall, and he clambered onto the riverbank, the man assisting him with the obsequious care of a servant.

  Buchi hurried through the jungle, following a worn path. Marshall was minded to ask her again where they were going, but his guide’s headlong rush through dappled sunlight and verdant shadow prevented any interrogation.

  To think that just three days ago he was aboard the Endeavor, with Ki, heading home.…

  Ahead, Buchi slowed, and gestured for Marshall and the African to follow suit.

  Beyond Buchi, Marshall made out the shape of a small villa on a patch of raised ground. Perhaps half a dozen figures were emerging from the building—men and women, black and white—hurrying in the manner of people wanting to be away from somewhere, fast.

  Among them, Marshall made out a single diminutive figure, though his head warned him against hope.

  The group filed away from the villa, and Buchi gestured for Marshall and the other to follow her. Seconds later they met with the group on the path, and Buchi turned and watched Marshall, a big smile on her face, as he stopped and stared.

  Seconds later Ki was in his arms, clinging to him. He was speechless, unable to bring himself to articulate the joy and relief that slammed through him.

  She pulled her head back, staring at him. He took in the perfection of her feline features, high cheekbones and canted eyes. They had endured so much together, lived through such hardship. In all the universe they had only each other. He embraced her again, before Buchi touched his shoulder. “We should be moving.”

  The others were already running quickly through the jungle. Hand in hand, Marshall and Ki gave chase, Buchi following.

  They passed the villa, heading away from where they had left the boat, and Marshall’s curiosity increased. Buchi and her band seemed to have his interests in mind…but where were they heading? Who were these rebels? Who were the rulers of this new, remodelled world, the Artecrats, as Buchi had called them?

  Ahead, the leaders were slowing. Marshall made out the scintillating glint of water through foliage. They had arrived at another stretch of river, and Ki’s liberators were climbing into a small skip powered by an engine just as rudimentary as the first.

  They boat was almost full by the time Marshall, Ki and Buchi climbed on board. The others made room, shuffling up on hard slatted seats, steadying the new arrivals as they sat.

  The engine kicked and the skip surged upriver, keeping to the shade.

  Marshall looked around, realising that he and Ki were the center of attention. The men and women were smiling at them, almost shyly. They appeared the most ill-assorted collection of rebels that Marshall could imagine.

  “Ki Pandaung,” Buchi said, “welcome to Earth.”

  Ki nodded, her eyes guarded. “I hope you’ll be more open than the people who imprisoned me,” she said, glancing at Marshall.

  “We’ll try to answer whatever you need to know,” Buchi said. “Already I’ve told your Commander what has happened to the world since your departure.”

  “A descent into primitivism, as far as I can see,” Ki said.

  Marshall detected smiles all around. Buchi said, “Exactly!”

  Marshall told Ki, “Fifty years after we left Earth, a conflict called the bio-war broke out…,” and he gave her a shorter version of the story Buchi had recounted.

  When he finished, he paused and looked up, across the skip at Buchi. “Which brings me to the question I was about to ask,” he said. “How did the…the Artecrats, as you call them…bring about world stability after the bio-war?”

  A mutter passed through those gathered in the boat. Someone spat, significantly, into the river.

  Ki took Marshall’s hand and squeezed.

  Buchi said, “The world after the bio-war was a ravaged place. Countries as such no longer existed. The infrastructure of civilization was wrecked. Homo sapiens had reverted to savagery, living in tribes and preying on their neighbours. Little in the way of knowledge and culture survived.”

  “Then how did the Artecrats—?” Ki began.

  “A few people came together,” Buchi said. “They had a vision. They built a small community, began farming, became self-sufficient. They attracted other groups, who renounced violence for the new way. Perhaps the human race was sick and tired of conflict, of killing…at the time.” She paused, looked around at the staring eyes of her compatriots. She went on, “These people called themselves the Artecrats. They foreswore anything that smacked of the old way of life, of the old way that had brought the world to the state it was in. They renounced science and technology, or rather everything but the most rudimentary forms of technology. They used ploughs and such, but nothing mechanised. Machines were anathema, and those that used them or espoused their use were cast out—which at that time meant certain death. Society grew and prospered. Africa, where the Artecrats were based, became once more the cradle of humankind.”

  Ki was shaking her head in puzzlement. “And yet yo
u oppose the Artecrats?”

  Buchi held her head up proudly. “We oppose their ignorance, their wilful renunciation of the great heritage that made our race what it was, for good and bad. The Artecrats made the fundamental mistake of citing scientific progress as the sole reason for the bio-war, without taking into consideration the politics that divided the old world.”

  She paused, then went on, “Much that was great was lost when the Artecrats proscribed science and technology, my friends. But worse was to come. They were powerful, totally powerful, and their edicts went unopposed…at least to begin with. No longer satisfied with eradicating science, they set about eradicating from humanity itself the very scientific urge.”

  Ki and Marshall exchanged a glance. “How could they do that?”

  Buchi smiled, but without humor. “The Artecrats,” she said, “instituted a programme of genocide. They systematically put to death those people who they claimed were genetically different to themselves.”

  “Genetically different?” Ki said, “but surely the Artecrats—the survivors of the bio-war—were founded on a philosophy independent of genetic difference?”

  “That’s what you might think,” Buchi replied. “But the Artecrats thought otherwise. They had a theory to account for the war. They claimed to have discovered that humankind was divided in a way other than the usual established divisions, of sex, race, philosophy, etc.”

  Ki shook her head. “In what way?” she said.

  “Neurologically,” Buchi said. “The Artecrats claimed that humankind was divided, up here—” she touched her head “—into those that were predisposed to the arts, and those predisposed to science and technology. The old right brain, left brain dichotomy.” She smiled. “They had people…little better than witch-doctors, in our opinion…who claimed that they could detect Technos at birth. And they proceeded to cull the human race of all those with a scientific propensity.”

  Marshall looked at Ki, and wondered at the world in which he found himself.

  “Even today,” Buchi went on, “thousands of innocent children are butchered every month.…”

  The boat slowed, the engine cutting from a steady putter to a slow chug. Marshall peered through the shade to the blinding dazzle of sunlight ahead. Heads were turning, as if in anticipation of reaching journey’s end.

  Ki said, “And you people oppose the regime of the Artecrats?”

  Buchi smiled. “We call ourselves the Technos. We are the few who fell through the net, who were not ‘detected’ at birth. We exist side by side with the Artecrats, but live a shadow life studying the old ways, reviving as best we can the scientific lore of those who went before us.”

  Marshall asked, “And you wish us to join you, to oppose the Artecrats, teach you what we know?”

  The African laughed. Others around her smiled. “Together we will embark upon a journey to re-establish the human race to what it was, to what it should be.”

  “I don’t see how that would be possible,” Ki objected, “if the Artecrats rule what’s left of Earth.”

  Buchi said, “We monitored your broadcasts. We had prayed for years that you might return. When we read that you had lost your crew.…”

  “What?” Marshall asked, suspicious.

  Buchi merely smiled in reply and pointed ahead. The jungle to their right was thinning to reveal a flat, parched open area—a clearing familiar from their descent.

  Marshall’s breath caught in his throat.

  Sitting proudly in the center of the clearing, stanchioned on ram-rods like a praying mantis, was their shuttle. It had been under guard at one point, but now the guards were gathered in the margin of the jungle, a gaggle of bemused looking men watched over by a group of rebels armed with crude pistols and swords.

  “We are trained in many disciplines,” Buchi said. “We will take the place of your crew, and learn as we work.”

  Ki stared at him. They had returned home in despair, their mission a failure, and now they were being offered another chance.

  Buchi went on, “We will head inwards, on a vector towards the core, and search until we find habitable, Earth-like planets.”

  “And then?” Ki asked.

  The boat slowed and nudged the bank. Buchi leapt out, assisting Marshall and Ki, followed by the others. They paused to stare up at the magnificent, rearing shape of the shuttle.

  Buchi pointed at a colleague, already hurrying across the clearing towards the shuttle. The man was toting a heavy backpack. “We have devised our own device for genetically testing new-borns—this one based on scientific principles. Among the stars we will found a society of Technocrats, and the human race will fulfil its destiny.”

  As Buchi set off, followed by her disciples, Ki grabbed Marshall’s arm and held him back. “They’re as bad as the Artecrats!” she said. “Can you imagine a totalitarian regime consisting of only scientists!”

  “The oppressed,” Marshall murmured, “often mimic the only lead they have known.”

  Tears appeared in Ki’s eyes. “And where would we fit into such a society?”

  He smiled. He was a scientist by vocation. But in his heart he had always called himself an artist. On the return journey to Earth he had filled his time, quite apart from loving Ki, in writing poetry.

  And Ki had created sweeping plasma graphics of the nova in a bid to purge her grief.

  Ki said, “I couldn’t remain on Earth, part of a society that would rather see me dead.”

  “Then we’ll join the Technos,” Marshall said, taking her hand and drawing her towards the shuttle. “Over the years ahead we’ll work to make them see the blindness of their vision.”

  They ran across the clearing, beneath the merciless sun of Africa, and joined the rebels as they swarmed aboard the shuttle.

  * * * *

  Marshall and Ki stood before the viewscreen in the control nacelle of the Endeavor, staring down at planet Earth. Buchi and her people were ensconced in their acceleration pods, sleeping children dreaming of a bright new future.

  Ki knelt, examining the contents of the rebel’s backpack. She looked up at Marshall. “It’s so primitive it couldn’t detect the genetic difference between you and me!” she laughed.

  “Disable the device,” Marshall ordered. “We’ll claim it was affected by the transition to light speed.”

  Ki reached out and squeezed his fingers.

  They strapped themselves into the control couches and Marshall took one last look at the Earth. The globe showed the blue expanse of the Atlantic ocean, with the silver shape of the American continents fitting snugly along its length, like a yin-yang symbol.

  “Adieu, farewell Earth’s bliss,” Ki quoted. “This world uncertain is.…”

  And then the Endeavor accelerated, and the Earth was gone.

  I’LL KISS YOU GOODNIGHT, by Frederick H. Christian

  He has just gone, although his haunted face seems still to hang in the silent space before my eyes. I stand alone in the deserted hall, the small light above the porch casting its yellow tine across the stairway, and my mind screams like a tortured bird. I cannot escape what he has told me. It could not be true that in the age if interplanetary exploration, in a world on the threshold of the conquest of all major diseases, that so medieval a terror can still exist. And yet, and yet.…

  It began with the accident. It was my own fault, and I have no excuses for that. My mind full of other things, I stepped off a pavement without looking, straight into the path of an oncoming lorry.

  I woke up in hospital, encased in plaster, my head bandaged, my life in balance. Many blood transfusions, specialists’ examinations, two operations and six weeks later I was brought home in a wheelchair, and in the weeks since then I have been unable to work.

  The doctors spoke of slight brain damage caused by massive concussion, of damage to the optical nerves, of a hugely shocked metabolism. They said I might experience new and unknown allergies, headaches, even hallucinations. And so I braced myself for them, and
when they came they were not the shock to me they might otherwise have been.

  They were unconnected with anything within my previous experience. For instance, I have always loved Continental cooking, and my wife always has garlic cloves in the kitchen. She had to throw them out after I was violently ill when she used garlic in a salad we ate one evening. It got progressively worse until I could not bear the thought of that garlic and my entire body categorically refused to go into the kitchen where it was kept. I tried to conquer it, to make my mind the master of my sweating, convulsing frame, but it was no use. As soon as Elizabeth took the garlic out into the dustbin, the seizures passed and I was normal again.

  As time went by another curious thing happened. In the daytime, I found myself becoming more and more lethargic, less interested in the day-to-day events of our world, falling into deep sleeps from which my frantic wife could not awaken me.

  And yet at night, as soon as the sun was down, I was wide awake, all thought of slumber vanished, prowling the house and fighting a curious urge to go out, nowhere in particular, to roam, to prowl, to tread the soft stillness of the misty night.

  I discovered, too, that sunlight hurt my eyes, and that I could no longer stand the soft caress of the sun upon my skin. Where in other times I would have basked happily for months on end in the blazing heat on a Malaga beach, I could now hardly spend an hour in comfort on a dull day in the English countryside.

  The doctors shrugged their shoulders; they prescribed blood tonics and iron tablets and other drugs to combat what hey diagnosed as chronic anaemia. Strengthen your bloodstream, they told me, and you’ll be fit in no time. But none of their remedies worked.

  My wife and I were hardly what you would call regular churchgoers, but, like many families, we would attend our local parish church at Easter and Christmas. When Easter came, we drove down to the church. A strange sense of dread took possession of me; the nearer we got to the church, the more tense my entire body became. Sweat streamed from me as we turned into Church lane, and although I exerted every ounce of my willpower to prevent it, a high keening noise issued from my throat, terrorising my wife, who told me afterwards that she had never heard anything like it coming from a human being—and my wife was once a nurse in a mental hospital. The worst, however, was yet to come.