Frost and Fire Page 9

  The ship gave a shudder. They turned toward the lock.

  “He’s cut it loose, whatever it was,” MacFarland stated.

  “It shouldn’t shake the whole ship that way,” Wade said.

  “It would if it accelerated away the instant it was freed,” said Juna.

  “But how could it, with all of its control circuits sealed?” Wade asked.

  She glanced at the greasy smears on her coveralls.

  “I reestablished its circuits when I learned the truth,” she told him. “I don’t know what percentage of its old efficiency it possesses, but I am certain that it is about to attack the berserker.”

  The lock cycled open, and Dorphy emerged, began unfastening his suit as it cycled closed behind him.

  “We’ve got to get the hell out of here!” MacFarland cried. “This area is about to become a war zone!”

  “You care to do the piloting?” Wade asked him.

  “Of course not.”

  “Then give me my gun and get out of my way.” He accepted the weapon and headed for the bridge.

  For so long as the screens permitted resolution, they watched—the ponderous movements of the giant berserker, the flashes of its energy blasts, the dartings and sudden disappearances and reappearances of its tiny attacker.

  Later, some time after the images were lost, a fireball sprang into being against the starry black.

  “He got it! He got it! Qwib-qwib got it!” Dorphy cried.

  “And it probably got him, too,” MacFarland remarked. “What do you think, Wade?”

  “What I think,” Wade replied, “is that I will never have anything to do with either of you again.”

  He rose and left to go and sit with Juna. He took along his recorder and some music. She turned from watching the view on her own screen and smiled weakly as he seated himself beside her bed.

  “I’m going to take care of you,” he told her, “until you don’t need me.”

  “That would be nice,” she said.

  Tracking. Tracking. They were coming. Five of them. The big one must have sent for them. Jump behind them and take out the two rear ones before the others realize what is happening. Another jump, hit the port flank and jump again. They’ve never seen these tactics. Dodge. Fire. Jump. Jump again. Fire. The last one is spinning like a top, trying to anticipate. Hit it. Charge right in. There.

  The last qwibbian-qwibbian-kel in the universe departed the battle scene, seeking the raw materials for some fresh repair work. Then, of course, it would need still more, for the replications. Who hath drawn the circuits for the lion?

  DAYBLOOD

  Vampire stories have always bothered me because the creatures go about biting people, who then turn into vampires who go about biting people, who… . There’s a geometrical progression here, and if you stop to think about it, pretty soon we’d all be vampires with no civilians left to bite. The situation always struck me as ecologically unsound, too. There are natural enemies and other limiting factors which control population explosions in other species. If everything were as given in the tradition, there would have to be something else as well Hence, my modest contribution to the canon of the undead… .

  * * *

  I crouched in the corner of the collapsed shed behind the ruined church. The dampness soaked through I the knees of my jeans, but I knew that my wait

  was just about ended. Picturesquely, a few tendrils of mist rose from the soaked ground, to be stirred feebly by predawn breezes. How Hollywood of the weather… .

  I cast my gaze about the lightening sky, guessing correctly as to the direction of arrival. Within a minute I saw them flapping their way back—a big, dark one and a smaller, pale one. Predictably, they entered the church through the opening where a section of the roof had years before fallen in. I suppressed a yawn as I checked my watch. Fifteen minutes from now they should be settled and dozing as the sun spills morning all over the east. Possibly a little sooner, but give them a bit of leeway. No hurry yet.

  I stretched and cracked my knuckles. I’d rather be home in bed. Nights are for sleeping, not for playing nursemaid to a couple of stupid vampires.

  Yes, Virginia, there really are vampires. Nothing to get excited about, though. Odds are you’ll never meet one. There just aren’t that many around. In fact, they’re damn near an endangered species—which is entirely understandable, considering the general level of intelligence I’ve encountered among them.

  Take this guy Brodsky as an example. He lives— pardon me, resides—near a town containing several thousand people. He could have visited a different person each night for years without ever repeating himself, leaving his caterers (I understand that’s their in-term these days) with little more than a slight sore throat, a touch of temporary anemia, and a couple of soon-to-be-forgotten scratches on the neck.

  But no. He took a fancy to a local beauty—one Elaine Wilson, ex-majorette. Kept going back for more. Pretty soon she entered the customary coma and underwent the nosferatu transformation. All right, I know I said there aren’t that many of them around—and personally I do feel that the world could use a few more vampires. But it’s not a population-pressure thing with Brodsky, just stupidity and greed. No real finesse, no planning. While I applaud the creation of another member of the undead, I am sufficiently appalled by the carelessness of his methods to consider serious action. He left a trail that just about anyone could trace here; he also managed to display so many of the traditional signs and to leave such a multitude of clues that even in these modern times a reasonable person could become convinced of what was going on.

  Poor old Brodsky—still living in the Middle Ages and behaving just as he did in the days of their population boom. It apparently never occurred to him to consider the mathematics of that sort of thing. He drains a few people he becomes particularly attracted to and they become nosferatu. If they feel the same way and behave the same way, they go out and recruit a few more of their caterers. And so on. It’s like a chain letter. After a time, everyone would be nosferatu and there wouldn’t be any caterers left. Then what? Fortunately, nature has ways of dealing with population explosions, even at this level. Still, a sudden rash of recruits in this mass-media age could really mess up the underground ecosystem.

  So much for philosophy. Time to get inside and beat the crowd.

  I picked up my plastic bag and worked my way out of the shed, cursing softly when I bumped against a post and brought a shower down over me. I made my way through the field then and up to the side door of the old building. It was secured by a rusty padlock, which I snapped and threw into the distant cemetery.

  Inside, I perched myself on the sagging railing of the choir section and opened my bag. I withdrew my sketchbook and the pencil I’d brought along. Light leaked in through the broken window to the rear. What it fell upon was mostly trash. Not a particularly inspiring scene. Whatever … I began sketching it. It’s always good to have a hobby that can serve as an excuse for odd actions, as an icebreaker …

  Ten minutes, I guessed. At most.

  Six minutes later, I heard their voices. They weren’t particularly noisy, but I have exceptionally acute hearing. There were three of them, as I’d guessed there would be.

  They entered through the side door also, slinking, jumpy—looking all about and seeing nothing. At first they didn’t even notice me creating art where childish voices had filled Sunday mornings with off-key praise in years gone by.

  There was old Dr. Morgan, several wooden stakes protruding from his black bag (I’ll bet there was a hammer in there, too—I guess the Hippocratic Oath doesn’t extend to the undead— primum, non nocere, etc.); and Father O’Brien, clutching his Bible like a shield, crucifix in his other hand; and young Ben Kelman (Elaine’s fiance), with a shovel over his shoulder and a bag from which I suspected the sudden odor of garlic to have its origin.

  I cleared my throat, and all three of them stopped, turned, bumped into each other.

  “Hi, Doc,” I said. “
Hi, Father. Ben …”

  “Wayne!” Doc said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Sketching,” I said. “I’m into old buildings these days.”

  “The hell you are!” Ben said. “Excuse me, Father … You’re just after a story for your damned newspaper!”

  I shook my head.

  “Really I’m not.”

  “Well, Gus’d never let you print anything about this, and you know it.”

  “Honest,” I said. “I’m not here for a story. But I know why you’re here, and you’re right—even if I wrote it up, it would never appear. You really believe in vampires?”

  Doc fixed me with a steady gaze.

  “Not until recently,” he said. “But, son, if you’d seen what we’ve seen, you’d believe.”

  I nodded my head and closed my sketchpad.

  “All right,” I replied, “I’ll tell you. I’m here because I’m curious. I wanted to see it for myself, but I don’t want to go down there alone. Take me with you.”

  They exchanged glances.

  “I don’t know …” Ben said.

  “It won’t be anything for the squeamish,” Doc told me.

  Father O’Brien just nodded.

  “I don’t know about having anyone else in on this,” Ben added.

  “How many more know about it?” I asked.

  “It’s just us, really,” Ben explained. “We’re the only ones who actually saw him in action.”

  “A good newspaperman knows when to keep his mouth shut,” I said, “but he’s also a very curious creature. Let me come along.”

  Ben shrugged and Doc nodded. After a moment Father O’Brien nodded too.

  I replaced my pad and pencil in the bag and got down from the railing.

  I followed them across the church, out into a short hallway, and up to an open, sagging door. Doc flicked on a flashlight and played it upon a rickety flight of stairs leading down into darkness. Slowly then, he began to descend. Father O’Brien followed him. The stairs groaned and seemed to move. Ben and I waited till they had reached the bottom. Then Ben stuffed his bag of pungent groceries inside his jacket and withdrew a flashlight from his pocket.

  He turned it on and stepped down. I was right behind him.

  I halted when we reached the foot of the stair. In the beams from their lights I beheld the two caskets set up on sawhorses, also the thing on the wall above the larger one.

  “Father, what is that?” I pointed.

  Someone obligingly played a beam of light upon it.

  “It looks like a sprig of mistletoe tied to the figure of a little stone deer,” he said.

  “Probably has something to do with black magic,” I offered.

  He crossed himself, went over to it and removed it.

  “Probably so,” he said, crushing the mistletoe and throwing it across the room, shattering the figure on the floor and kicking the pieces away.

  I smiled, I moved forward then.

  “Let’s get the things open and have a look,” Doc said.

  I lent them a hand.

  When the caskets were open, I ignored the comments about paleness, preservation, and bloody mouths. Brodsky looked the same as he always did—dark hair, heavy dark eyebrows, sagging jowls, a bit of a paunch. The girl was lovely, though. Taller than I’d thought, however, with a very faint pulsation at the throat and an almost bluish cast to her skin.

  Father O’Brien opened his Bible and began reading, holding the flashlight above it with a trembling hand. Doc placed his bag upon the floor and fumbled about inside it.

  Ben turned away, tears in his eyes. I reached out then and broke his neck quietly while the others were occupied. I lowered him to the floor and stepped up beside Doc.

  “What—?” he began, and that was his last word.

  Father O’Brien stopped reading. He stared at me across his Bible.

  “You work for them?” he said hoarsely, darting a glance at the caskets.

  “Hardly,” I said, “but I need them. They’re my life’s blood.”

  “I don’t understand …”

  “Everything is prey to something else, and we do what we must. That’s ecology. Sorry, Father.”

  I used Ben’s shovel to bury the three of them beneath an earthen section of the floor toward the rear—garlic, stakes, and all. Then I closed the caskets and carried them up the stairs.

  I checked around as I hiked across a field and back up the road after the pickup truck. It was still relatively early, and there was no one about.

  I loaded them both in back and covered them with a tarp. It was a thirty-mile drive to another ruined church I knew of.

  Later, when I had installed them safely in their new quarters, I penned a note and placed it in Brodsky’s hand:

  Dear B,

  Let this be a lesson to you. You are going to have to stop acting like Bela Lugosi. You lack his class. You are lucky to be waking up at all this night. In the future be more circumspect in your activities or I may retire you myself. After all, I’m not here to serve you.

  Yours truly,

  W P.S. The mistletoe and the statue of Cernunnos don’t work anymore. Why did you suddenly get superstitious?

  I glanced at my watch as I left the place. It was eleven fifteen. I stopped at a 7-11 a little later and used their outside phone.

  “Hi, Kiela,” I said when I heard her voice. “It’s me.”

  “Werdeth,” she said. “It’s been a while.”

  “I know. I’ve been busy.”

  “With what?”

  “Do you know where the old Church of the Apostles out off Route 6 is?”

  “Of course. It’s on my backup list, too.”

  “Meet me there at twelve thirty and I’ll tell you about it over lunch.”

  CONSTRUCTING A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL

  Sylvia Burack asked me for an essay for The Writer, and I did the following piece. A large chunk of it tells of the considerations which went into the composition of my novel Eye of Cat. I don’t believe I’ve ever recorded the things I do and think in writing a book in such detail, before or since. Still, it’s a short piece, and for those of you who care about such matters I am including it here.

  * * *

  The late James Blish was once asked where he got his ideas for science fiction stories. He gave one _ of the usual general answers we all do—from observation, from reading, from the sum total of all his experiences, et cetera. Then someone asked him what he did if no ideas were forthcoming from these. He immediately replied, “I plagiarize myself.”

  He meant, of course, that he looked over his earlier works for roads unfollowed, trusting in the persistence of concerns and the renewal of old fascinations to stimulate some new ideas. And this works. I’ve tried it occasionally, and I usually find my mind flooded.

  But I’ve been writing for over twenty years, and I know something about how my mind works when I am seeking a story or telling one. I did not always know the things that I know now, and much of my earlier writing involved groping—defining themes, deciding how I really felt about people and ideas. Consequently, much of this basic thinking accomplished, it is easier for me to fit myself into the driver’s seat of a fresh new story than it once was. It may be the latest model, but the steering is similar, and once I locate the gearshift I know what to do with it.

  For example: Settings. For me, science fiction has always represented the rational—the extension into a future or alien environment of that which is known now—whereas fantasy represented the metaphysical—the introduction of the unknown, usually into an alien environment. The distinctions are sometimes blurred, and sometimes it is fun to blur them. But on a practical, working level, this generally is how I distinguish the two. Either sort of story (I never tire of repeating) has the same requirements as a piece of general fiction, with the added necessity of introducing that exotic environment. Of the three basic elements of any fiction—plot, character, and setting—it is the setting that requires extra attention i
n science fiction and fantasy.

  Here, as nowhere else, one walks a tightrope between overexplaining and overassuming, between boring the reader with too many details and losing the reader by not providing enough.

  I found this difficult at first. I learned it by striving for economy of statement, by getting the story moving quickly and then introducing the background piecemeal. Somewhere along the line I realized that doing this properly could solve two problems: The simple exposition of the material could, if measured out in just the right doses, become an additional means of raising reader interest. I employed this technique to an extreme in the opening to my story “Unicorn Variation,” in which I postponed for several pages describing the unusual creature passing through a strange locale.

  A bizarrerie of fires, cunabulum of light, it moved with a deft, almost dainty deliberation, phasing into and out of existence like a storm-shot piece of evening; or perhaps the darkness between the flares was more akin to its truest nature—swirl of black ashes assembled in prancing cadence to the lowing note of desert wind down the arroyo behind buildings as empty yet filled as the pages of unread books or stillnesses between the notes of a song.

  As you see, I was careful to tell just enough to keep the reader curious. By the time it became apparent that it was a unicorn in a New Mexico ghost town, I had already introduced another character and a conflict.

  Characters are less of a problem for me than settings. People are usually still people in science fiction environments. Major figures tend to occur to me almost fully developed, and minor ones do not require much work. As for their physical descriptions, it is easy at first to over-describe. But how much does the reader really need? How much can the mind take in at one gulp? See the character entirely but mention only three things, I decided. Then quit and get on with the story. If a fourth characteristic sneaks in easily, okay. But leave it at that initially. No more. Trust that other features will occur as needed, so long as you know. “He was a tall, red-faced kid with one shoulder lower than the other.” Were he a tall, red-faced kid with bright blue eyes (or large-knuckled hands or storms of freckles upon his cheeks) with one shoulder lower than the other, he would actually go out of focus a bit rather than grow clearer in the mind’s eye. Too much detail creates a sensory overload, impairing the reader’s ability to visualize. If such additional details are really necessary for the story line itself, it would be better to provide another dose later on, after allowing time for the first to sink in. “Yeah,” he replied, blue eyes flashing.