Earth in twilight, p.1
Earth in Twilight, page 1
EARTH IN TWILIGHT
Doris Piserchia
www.sfgateway.com
Enter the SF Gateway …
In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:
‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’
Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.
The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.
Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.
Welcome to the SF Gateway.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Website
Also by Doris Piserchia
Author Bio
Copyright
Chapter 1
The ship from the stars was coming down into the open mouth of the steeple, and Whing was excited because he was about to confront a spaceman. As far as he knew there hadn’t been another of those specimens on Earth besides himself for a very long time.
He sped along a metal railing and hung out over the world to see if he alone was alerted to the impending landing. It seemed that he was. Earth looked like a big ball of yarn with a great many knitting needles sticking out of it. Loose yarn seemed to be strung from needle to needle, some of the strands so loose they nearly touched the land while others were so tight they were many thousands of miles up in the sky. Creatures great and greater made their nests on the bridges but none seemed to be aware that anything out of the ordinary was about to occur over their heads.
Whing had lost his wig while hanging from the side of the steeple as he hung now, had it fall from the little round knob back of his brow and drift away into the clouds. He took it from the head of a snape who somehow got onto one of the high bridges, and he missed the thing. For some reason he had felt more intelligent when wearing it.
There were no clouds obstructing his view at the moment and he could look down at an ocean. It looked like a little piece of slate.
Back up the side rail he went to find admission into the laboratory through one of the vent tunnels. On his way he passed Odeeda but didn’t wave or speak to her because he wasn’t in the mood for a domestic battle. She would soon give birth to his child and it wasn’t his intent that she become nervous or upset, at least not until the important moment. Then he would behave with her according to her performance.
The ship was a long cylinder from a planet called Laredo. All spacecraft were constructed in the same manner so that they would be able to dock in the tops of the steeples. Now the vehicle edged slowly down into the yawning mouth, blasting stardrive matter thousands of miles in every direction. Too high up to harm the planet, the material scattered on the solar wind and eventually dissipated light-years away.
With anxious anticipation Whing observed the monitoring screen inside the lab and waited for the spacemen to emerge from the lock into the pressurized confines of the steeple house. He considered it strange that the process was taking so long. There the lock was opening at last, and a pair of funny little objects moved from the ship into the corridor leading to the living quarters, but there were no men anywhere to be seen. As the lock suddenly closed, Whing experienced a stab of raw grief. He was lonely for his own kind, not the creatures living on the bridges between steeples but for those who plied the starpaths. Here one of the machines had docked in the maw but the pilot and his crew weren’t being hasty enough about making themselves visible. Whing wondered how long they would remain in their machine. When were they going to come out?
For the sake of curiosity he clambered into a tunnel that led into the living rooms and began picking his way along the slippery steel flooring. His movements alerted the two little stalks, who resembled pink and brown worms now that they had removed their outer skin and were naked. Whing was astonished that they were living creatures. Perhaps they were a necessary part of the ship’s complement, mechanics or some such, or they could be servants of the men. On second thought, they were probably entertainers.
All this was conjecture while the plain reality was that the worms displayed hostile reactions upon sight of the sentry coming through the large vent in their living room. All he had in mind at the moment was to find out if they were intelligent enough to communicate. Then he smelled them and realized how hungry he was.
One of the worms made him a small meal while the other ran into an elevator. Rather than chase the thing, Whing went back to the lab to watch the monitoring screen. Sooner or later the spacemen were bound to emerge from the ship.
He believed he was a man. In truth, he was a steeple sentry, not one of a kind but rare enough so that anyone coming onto the planet wouldn’t be anticipating him. He had evolved in the nooks and crannies of the skyscraper embedded in the Earth’s surface and jutting miles into space. His evolution had been rapid because the seepage from the chemical dump found its way into those same nooks and crannies. It was possible that one of his ancestors had been a mite or a beetle or some other leggy thing.
Somewhere along the way the lineage that eventually produced him lost its wings. The ultimate offspring of that lineage was too heavy to fly, but he could move like lightning in or out of the steeple parts. He was impervious to atmosphere or vacuum and possessed a brain pan that wasn’t exactly stuffed to the brim.
At times when provisions were low and nothing came clambering across the strands at lower levels he had a tidbit or two from the cadaver depository, or he snacked on tubes and vials in the research lab. One day he butted a gleaming cabinet that broke into shards and buried a piece of material in his brain. Odd coincidence drove it through one of the few penetrable points on his head. Clinging to the sliver were some frozen memory cells extracted from a long dead human and preserved in the cabinet for futurity. For a while the pierced part of Whing’s brain was comatose but then it revived and absorbed the living cells. That was when he began thinking he was a man. His knowledge was sketchy because individual cells didn’t hold much information and he had been inflicted with only a few.
A vermin came snooping about outside the five-foot-thick window, banged on it until Whing finally gave up waiting for the men to come out of the ship. The airlock he always used was large; otherwise he would have kicked down the walls, thereby rendering the compartment useless to legitimate astronauts. By the time he reached the outside, the vermin had run away. He could see it climbing down the girders below him but only for a moment or two did he consider giving chase. It was time for him to go home.
Odeeda had given birth. So disgusted was he that she hadn’t born a live child but only dropped a stupid egg that he kicked her out of the nest and all the way off the bridge. She fell several miles, fortunately landing on another set of strands. By the time she climbed back to her egg, Whing’s temper had dissipated and he was willing to make up with her. He was certain there was a live manchild of his somewhere in their future.
No more eggs, he warned her and then later he was angered anew when she tried to eat him. Somewhere back in her genealogy a particularly virulent individual had been so nearsighted that when her mate retreated in her nest to rest and then made a few innocent movements she mistook him for an edible stranger. Now Whing had to beat Odeeda on the back of the head with his fists so she would recognize him and leave off trying to destroy him.
He went back up to the lab and the monitoring screen to watch for the spacemen to come out of the craft. While resting and observing, he heard a noise in another part of the area, climbed into the vent and retraced his steps of several hours before. The brown worm who escaped into the elevator earlier had sneaked back inside, donned his strange clothing and was now attempting to get to the ship.
There wasn’t time for him to reach the airlock in the docking compound before Whing emerged from the vent, so he ran back into the elevator. Whing was a
All of a sudden the machine changed direction and went back up toward the vacuum of outer space. Whing wasn’t inconvenienced, being agile and strong. He began climbing upward once again. Inside the elevator the worm cringed and even seemed to swoon for a while, lay down on the floor of the cage and was quite motionless for several hours. Since Whing slept while he was awake, he didn’t know what the worm was doing. Instead of having a monitor that shut down an entire section of his brain every so often, he blinked on and off all the time like a light. He was asleep one moment and awake the next moment and then asleep, et cetera. Consequently he was never tired or invigorated but rather steamed along at a pace sufficiently active for his life-style; or his lifestyle was determined by the fact that physical extremes were foreign to him. He could climb a thousand miles of steeple rails in a few minutes so he didn’t consider that his was a shuffling species. However he didn’t have a great many comparisons available since he was unsociable and hadn’t much to do with anyone other than Odeeda.
During the time he was lost in reverie concerning the finer qualities of himself and his ancestors, the worm rode skyward in still another attempt to get to the ship. The sentry knew the stranger’s intent and stationed himself between the top of the el and the docking platform. Driven by hunger and perhaps other incentives, the worm forsook the elevator and ran through the living quarters to the frozen food cupboards. Gathering up an armful of items he raced back to the el and was safely on his journey downward before Whing could get through the lock.
Down the outside girders the large individual climbed at what seemed to him a slow pace. Through the window he spied on the worm who seemed to be doing the same thing to him. After staring for a time at the little ball atop the creature, the steeple sentry could begin making out facial features of a sort. The foreigner had on his artificial suit but inside he was a brown body with four appendages, long yellow hair and brown eyes. A revolting little piece of life he was and Whing longed to know why he existed and what he was about. His longing wasn’t intense, when he thought about it. Worms weren’t essential in the schemes of the universe, and this one would terminate in the belly of a denizen in the reaches below.
Now and then the worm ate and occasionally lay down in a swoon, and all the while the machine slid rapidly and silently toward the planet’s surface.
It didn’t take more than a day or two for Whing to decide to leave the being in the elevator to its fate and returned to the dizzy heights of the steeple. The air below made him feel stifled and clumsy. Though he could survive there and he would infrequently take a vacation on one of the lower strands, still, it wasn’t his favorite environment, being too crowded with foliage and overpopulated with creatures who had more belligerence than sense. Most of the lowlife hadn’t the intelligence to avoid the big blue sentry, with his nearly invulnerable hide and at least a portion of a man’s brain.
At his leisure, Whing climbed back up the spires that had always been his home. The closer he approached the topmost part of the maw the better he felt, until at last he stood on a section of the opening into which the spaceship had inched. It was there now, about a hundred and fifty miles lower, sitting and throbbing like a heart, with its computers thinking and its motors waiting for someone to give them a command. Somewhere inside were surely large blue spacemen who would make an appearance and be amazed when their humble relative revealed himself to them.
In a kind of salute he extended a horny finger toward the blazing lamp that was the sun. Streamers played out from its edges, tugged and strained as if they were being held captive by what looked like a solid rim. Now and then there was a belching movement that sent gobs of flame hurtling away into dark reaches.
The sentry felt a touch of loneliness as he stared at the void. What he needed was the scalp he had taken from the snape. It had made him feel good but it was gone now, having fallen down through the clouds. To retrieve it he must make the long trip to the lower strands or perhaps even all the way to the ground. With a sigh, he looked back at the splashing sun. It wasn’t worth going after; it wouldn’t be there when he arrived. Only up here was reality changeless. Down there it was a mad jungle.
Chapter 2
Pip knew as soon as he put on the hairy little wig Kadooka gave him that this was going to be the best scam he had ever pulled. The thing fit over the top of his skull and seemed to grow invisible fingers that went down inside his head to play with certain parts of his brain. They were his pleasure centers, without a doubt, and even as he realized what was happening he wasn’t disturbed. His brain wasn’t so holy that it couldn’t be messed with, even if permission was yet to be gained. In other words the pleasure the wig gave him felt so good that he didn’t care about anything.
The jolts or rushes weren’t so steady, intense or even frequent that he was immediately worn out, but in fact it took an entire day before he grew weary. It seemed fine to him. This way he could enjoy his fun and sleep at night. What could be better? He knew in a cloudy kind of way that the hat wasn’t a hat or wig at all but was a part of some creature that was now or had once been alive. It would be necessary for him to test it, try it out for a week or so, to discover its side effects. Hopefully it would have none. In the meantime the scam must go on. Big Kadooka must be gotten rid of. He must be lulled, his suspicions had to be put to rest, after which Pip intended to sneak away with the merchandise. Fraud was his profession and suckers his bread and butter, though he had never heard of such items.
“The ornad will be a fierce antagonist,” said Kadooka.
“Not to worry.”
“That’s easy for you to say while you’re wearing the hat. Maybe you ought to remove it until after the job is done. It could fog your judgment.”
“Who’s afraid of an old ornad?” said Pip, wondering what an ornad was. Probably one of those leaping uglies that lived on the bridges. He stood on a fat leaf growing from the trunk of an old tree whose beginning or end he couldn’t see. All that came into view was heavy jungle, green and damp with dew, while through a vast fern overhead peeped a patch of blue sky.
Slightly to his right and above him sat Kadooka on a limb, a large and lumbering man who made no threats with his mouth but a myriad of them with his expression and gestures. Now he squatted and leaned down to stare at the youth, who agreed to relieve him of the wig in exchange for the ornad’s disposal. The youth sold insurance, so he claimed. For payment he slew other people’s enemies. Kadooka’s opinions about such claims remained a mystery, as he was a brooding, scowling sort who looked as if he might prefer action to conversation; hostile action.
Kadooka had two pretty sisters named DeLoona and LaLa. The latter had told Pip with her eyes that if he wanted to come courting she wouldn’t be disagreeable.
He didn’t intend to court or even hang around because though he didn’t know what an ornad was he firmly believed in its existence. The proof positive of that fact lay on his head making his reality sublime. Perhaps too sublime. Usually he took payment in exotic foods, jewelry, fine clothing or similar items. Never before had he been offered an hallucinogen.
“It feels good, doesn’t it?” said Kadooka.
“I think I’ll go hunt for that old ornad.”
“He isn’t that way. I told you he was northeast, about a mile. Every once in a while he comes tearing into camp, and if you don’t do your job I might be forced to consider moving. I don’t intend doing that unless I have to and if I have to I’ll be mad.”
“I remember the direction. Don’t worry about my memory. You don’t expect me to approach him via a direct route, do you?”
Kadooka gave a nasty grin and leaned farther from the limb. He was brutish in appearance with only a piece of plantskin covering his middle. Pip had never seen so much chest hair on a man. “I don’t expect you to approach him from any route at all,” said Kadooka. “I think you’re trying to pull a fast one on me and I’m looking forward to beating your brains out. Insurance salesman, eh? What did you ever kill, twerp?”
