He does not tire of it, though.
He loves it. He is in the grip of what some ancient poet once called the fascination of the abomination. He has gone up and down every street of the city, peering at this building and that one in unstinting admiration of their imperfections. For several days running, he makes it clear that he is searching for some building in particular, and then he finds it: a rambling old ruin of great size and formidable ugliness at the very edge of town, standing apart from everything else in a sort of private park.
“Here it is!” he cries. “The ancestral mansion! The house where my father was born!”
So Nikomastir still clings to the claim that he is of Akrakikan descent. There is no way that this can be true; the natives of this world are a chilly, bloodless folk with mean, pinched, hard souls, if they have souls at all and not just some clicking, chattering robotic mechanisms inside their skulls. Indeed, I have known robots with personalities far more appealing than anyone we have met thus far on Sidri Akrak. Nikomastir, bless him, is nothing at all like that. He may be silly and frivolous and empty-headed, but he also is sweet-natured and lively and amiable and vivacious, terms that have never yet been applied to any citizen of Sidri Akrak, and never will be.
Velimyle has tried to paint him again. Again the attempt was a failure. This time she is so distressed that I dare to breach the wall of privacy behind which she keeps her art and ask her what the difficulty is.
“Look,” she says.
She unrolls the second canvas. Against the familiar swirling colors of a typical Velimyle background I see the slender, angular form of Nikomastir, imprinted there by the force of Velimyle’s mental rapport with the psychosensitive fabric. But the features are all wrong. Nikomastir’s perpetual easy smile has given way to a dreadful, scowling grimace. His lip curls backward menacingly; his teeth are the teeth of some predatory beast. And his eyes—oh, Velimyle, those harsh, glaring eyes! Where is his cheerful sparkle? These eyes are hard, narrow, fierce, and above all else sad. The Nikomastir of Velimyle’s painting stares out at the universe with tragic intensity. They are the eyes of a god, perhaps, but of a dying god, one who knows he must give up his life for the redemption of his race.
“The first one was almost as bad,” Velimyle says. “Why is this happening? This isn’t Nikomastir at all. I’ve never had something like this happen.”
“Has he seen either of the paintings?”
“I wouldn’t let him. All I told him was that they didn’t come out right, that they would depress him if I showed them to him. And of course he didn’t want to see them after that.”
“Something about this planet must be shading your perceptions,” I say. “Burn this, Velimyle. And the other one, too. And forget about painting him until we’ve left here.”
Nikomastir wants to have a look inside the crumbling, lurching pile that he says is his family’s ancestral home. But the place, ruinous though it is, happens to be occupied by Akrakikans, a whole swarm of them, and when he knocks at the front door and grandly introduces himself to the majordomo of the house as Count Nikomastir of Sembiran, who has come here on a sentimental journey to his former paternal estate, the door is closed in his face without a word. “How impolite,” Nikomastir says, not seeming very surprised. “But don’t worry: I’ll find a way of getting in.”
That project gets tabled, too. Over the next few days he leads us farther and farther afield, well out into the uninhabited countryside beyond the boundaries of Periandros Andifang. The land out here is swampy and uningratiating, and of course there are the animals to contend with, and the insects, and the humidity. I can tell that Mayfly and Velimyle are growing a little weary of Nikomastir’s exuberance, but they both are as tolerant of his whims as ever and follow him loyally through these soggy realms. As do I—partly, I suppose, because we agreed long ago that we would journey everywhere as a single unit, and partly because I have been stung, evidently, by various hints of Mayfly’s and Velimyle’s that my recent crotchetiness could mean I might be getting ready for my next rebirth.
Then he turns his attention once more to the old house that he imagines once belonged to his family. “My father once told me that there’s a pool of fire behind it, a phosphorescent lake. He used to swim it when he was a boy, and he’d come up dripping with cool flame. I’m going to take a swim in it too, and then we can head off to the next planet. Whose turn is it to pick our next planet, anyway?”
“Mine,” I say quickly. I have Marajo in mind—the sparkling sands, the City of Seven Pyramids. “If there’s a lake behind that house, Nikomastir, I advise you very earnestly to stay away from it. The people who live there don’t seem to look favorably on trespassers. Besides, can’t you imagine the kind of nastinesses that would live in a lake on this world?”
“My father went swimming in that one,” Nikomastir replies, and gives me a defiant glare. “It’s perfectly safe, I assure you.”
I doubt, of course, that any such lake exists. If it’s there, though, I hope he isn’t fool enough to go swimming in it. My affection for the boy is real; I don’t want him to come to harm.
But I let the matter drop. I’ve already said too much. The surest way to prod him into trouble, I know, is oppose him in one of his capricious fancies. My hope is that Nikomastir’s attention will be diverted elsewhere in the next day or two and all thought of that dismal house, and of the fiery lake that may or may not be behind it, will fly out of his mind.
It’s generally a good idea, when visiting a world you know very little about, to keep out of places of unknown chemical properties. When we toured Megalo Kastro, we stood at the edge of a cliff looking down into the famous living sea, that pink custardy mass that is in fact a single living organism of gigantic size, spreading across thousands of kilometers of that world. But it did not occur to us to take a swim in that sea, for we understood that in a matter of hours it would dissolve and digest us if we did.
And when we were on Xamur we went to see the Idradin crater, as everyone who goes to Xamur does. Xamur is the most perfect of worlds, flawless and serene, a paradise, air like perfume and water like wine, every tree in the ideal place, every brook, every hill. It has only one blemish—the Idradin, a huge round pit that reaches deep into the planet’s primordial heart. It is a hideous place, that crater. Concentric rings of jagged cooled lava surround it, black and eroded and bleak. Stinking gases rise out of the depths, and yellow clouds of sulfuric miasma belch forth, and wild red shafts of roaring flame, and you peer down from the edge into a roiling den of hot, surging magma. Everyone who goes to Xamur must visit the Idradin, for if you did not see perfect Xamur’s one terrible flaw you could never be happy on any other world. And so we stared into it from above, and shivered with the horror we were expected to feel; but we were never at all tempted to clamber down the crater’s sides and dip our toes into that realm of fire below.
It seems unlikely to me that Nikomastir will do anything so stupid here. But I have to be careful not to prod him in the wrong direction. I don’t mention the lake to him again.
Our exploration of Sidri Akrak proceeds. We visit new swamps, new groves of fetid-smelling, malproportioned trees, new neighborhoods of misshapen and graceless buildings. One drizzly, disheartening day succeeds another, and finally I am unable to bear the sight of that brown sky and greenish sun any longer. Though it is a violation of our agreements, I stay behind at the hotel one morning and let the other three go off without me.
It is a quiet time. I spend the hours reflecting on our travels of years past, all the many worlds we have seen. Icy Mulano of the two suns, one yellow, one bloody red, and billions of ghostly electric life-forms glimmering about you in the frigid air. Estrilidis, where the cats have two tails and the insects have eyes like blue diamonds. Zimbalou, the sunless nomad world, where the cities are buried deep below the frozen surface. Kalimaka, Haj Qaldun, Vietoris, Nabomba Zom—
So many places, so many sights. A lifetime of wonderful experiences; and yet what
, I ask myself, has it all meant? How has it shaped me? What have I learned?
I have no answers, only to say that we will continue to go onward, ever onward. It is our life. It is what we do. We are travelers by choice, but also by nature, by destiny.
I am still lost in reverie when I hear Velimyle’s voice outside my window, calling to me, telling me that I must come quickly. “Nikomastir—” she cries. “Nikomastir!”
“What about him?”
But she can only gesture and wave. Her eyes are wild. We run together through the muddy streets, paying no heed to the bulky and grotesque Akrakikan monstrosities that occasionally intersect our path. I realize after a time that Velimyle is leading me toward the tumbledown house at the edge of town that Nikomastir has claimed as his family’s former home. A narrow, grassy path leads around one side of it to the rear; and there, to my amazement, I see the phosphorescent lake of Nikomastir’s fantasies, with Mayfly beside it, leaping up and down in agitation that verges on frenzy.
She points toward the water. “Out there—there—” On this ugly world, even a phosphorescent lake can somehow manage to be an unlovely sight. I saw one once on Darma Barma that flashed like heavenly fire in rippling waves of cobalt and amethyst, magenta and gold, aquamarine and emerald and jade. But from this lake emanates the most unradiant of radiances, a dull, prosaic, sickly gleam, dark-toned and dispiriting, except in one place off toward the farther shore, where a disturbance of some sort is setting up whirlpools of glinting metallic effects, swirls of eye-jabbing bright sparkles, as though handfuls of iron filings are being thrown through a magnetic field.
The disturbance is Nikomastir. He—his body, rather—is tossing and heaving at the lake’s surface, and all about him the denizens of the lake can be seen, narrow scaly jutting heads popping up by the dozens, hinged jaws snapping, sharp teeth closing on flesh. A widening pool of blood surrounds him. They, whatever they are, are ripping him to shreds.
“We have to get him out of there,” Mayfly says, her voice congested with horror and fear.
“How?” I ask.
“I told him not to do it,” says trembling Velimyle. “I told him, I told him, I told him. But he plunged right in, and when he was halfway across they began to break the surface, and then—then he began screaming, and—”
Mayfly plucks urgently at my sleeve. “What can we do? How can we rescue him?”
“He’s beyond rescuing,” I tell her hollowly.
“But if we can get his body back,” she says, “there’ll be a way to revive him, won’t there? I know there is. Scientists can do anything nowadays.” Velimyle, more tentatively, agrees. Some kind of scientific miracle, Nikomastir gathered up and repaired somehow by the regeneration of tissue—
But tissue is all that’s left of him now, frayed sorry scraps, and the creatures of the lake, frantic now with blood lust, are devouring even those in furious haste.
They want me to tell them that Nikomastir isn’t really dead. But he is: really, really, really dead. Dead forever. What has been played out on this shore today was not a game. There is nothing that can be saved, no way to regenerate. I have never seen the death of a human being before. It is a dizzying thing to contemplate: the finality, the utterness. My mind is whirling; I have to fight back convulsions of shock and horror.
“Couldn’t you have stopped him?” I ask angrily, when I am able to speak again.
“But he wanted so badly to do it,” Mayfly replies. “We couldn’t have stopped him, you know. Not even if we—”
She halts in mid-sentence.
“Not even if you had wanted to?” I say. “Is that it?” Neither of them can meet my furious gaze. “But you didn’t want to, did you? You thought it would be fun to see Nikomastir swim across the phosphorescent lake. Fun. Am I right? Yes. I know that I am. What could you have been thinking, Mayfly? Velimyle?”
There is no sign of Nikomastir at the surface any longer. The lake is growing still again. Its phosphorescence has subsided to a somber, tarnished glow.
For a long time, none of us is capable of moving. Silent, pale, stunned, we stand with bowed heads by the shore of that frightful lake, scarcely even able to breathe.
We are in the presence of incontrovertible and permanent death, which to us is a novelty far greater even than the living sea of Megalo Kastro or the blue dawn of Nabomba Zom, and the immense fact of it holds us rooted to the spot. Was this truly Nikomastir’s ancestral world? Was his father actually born in that great old falling-down house, and did he really once swim in this deadly lake? And if none of that was so, how did Nikomastir know that the lake was there? We will never be able to answer those questions. Whatever we do not know about Nikomastir that we have already learned, we will never come to discover now. That is the meaning of death: the finality of it, the severing of communication, the awful unanswerable power of the uncompromising curtain that descends like a wall of steel. We did not come to Sidri Akrak to learn about such things, but that is what we have learned on Sidri Akrak, and we will take it with us wherever we go henceforth, pondering it, examining it.
“Come,” I say to Mayfly and Velimyle, after a time. “We need to get away from here.”
So, then. Nikomastir was foolish. He was bold. He has had his swim, and now he is dead. And why? Why? For what? What was he seeking on this awful world? What were we? We know what we found, yes, but not what we were looking for. I wonder if we will ever know.
He has lived his only life, has Nikomastir, and he has lost it in the pursuit of idle pleasure. There is a lesson in that, for me, for Velimyle, for Mayfly, for us all. And one day I will, I hope, understand what it is.
All I do know after having lived these hundreds of years is that the universe is very large and we are quite small. We live godlike lives these days, flitting as we do from world to world, but even so we are not gods. We die: some sooner, some later, but we do die. Only gods live forever. Nikomastir hardly lived at all.
So be it. We have learned what we have learned from Nikomastir’s death, and now we must move on. We are travelers by nature and destiny, and we will go forward into our lives. Tomorrow we leave for Marajo. The shining sands, the City of Seven Pyramids. Marajo will teach us something, as Xamur once did, and Nabomba Zom, and Galgala. And also Sidri Akrak. Something. Something. Something.
THE COLONEL RETURNS TO THE STARS
Many of science fiction’s best editors were top-flight writers also—John W. Campbell, Jr., H.L. Gold, Frederik Pohl, and Anthony Boucher are four who come to mind right away. They had varying attitudes about selling stories to themselves. John Campbell, who was one of the leading s-f writers of the 1930’s, let it be known quite publicly that editing a monthly science fiction magazine was a job that didn’t leave much time over for writing stories, and in any case selling stories to yourself was a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. Therefore he announced that he was giving up writing when he took over Astounding in 1937, and would turn any good story ideas he might have thenceforth over to one of his regular writers; and so he did. Anthony Boucher published half a dozen or so of his own stories in Fantasy & Science Fiction in the 1950’s, but nobody minded that, because Boucher wrote splendid short stories. Horace Gold had three or four stories in his Galaxy Science Fiction in the same era, but sent most of his work elsewhere. On the other hand, Fred Pohl, who had had plenty of stories in Galaxy when Gold was editing it, continued selling fiction to it after he took over the magazine himself in 1961—again, a sensible move, because Pohl had been one of Galaxy’s most popular writers almost since its inception.
I never edited a monthly science-fiction magazine—nobody ever asked me to, and I wouldn’t have accepted if someone had, because I wouldn’t have wanted such a huge distraction from my primary career as a writer. I did, for a decade or so beginning in 1969, edit the annual original-fiction anthology New Dimensions, but I never ran anything of my own in it, since I had plenty of markets for my work elsewhere and didn’t want to occupy space in the anthology t
hat I could be devoting to fiction by talented new writers. (I did, though, use plenty of my own stories in the various reprint anthologies I edited over the years, but always because I felt they fitted the theme of the anthology at least as well as something I might have chosen by another writer.)
By 2003 I had pretty much given up editing anthologies on a regular basis, having done dozens of the things over the previous 37 years and regarding them as a sufficient statement of what I considered excellence in science fiction to be. Except for the occasional big item like the two Legends books and Far Horizons, I withdrew to the sidelines and let whippersnappers like Gardner Dozois and Martin H. Greenberg take over the anthology franchise. But when Doubleday’s Science Fiction Book Club came around to me with a proposal that I edit a collection of six original novellas dealing with the exploration of worlds beyond our solar system, I found the idea too appealing to resist.
I rounded up a bunch of colleagues—Nancy Kress, James Patrick Kelly, Mike Resnick, Walter Jon Williams, and Stephen Baxter—pressed money into their hands, and set them to work. And, fond as I am of writing about the great interstellar spaces, I decided to grab one of the six slots for myself, even though I had been becoming less and less active as a writer and was muttering about retiring entirely (something I still haven’t quite managed to achieve.)
And so the novella “The Colonel Returns to the Stars” came into being in December, 2003—my first new story in a year and a half. Since it’s a story about someone who thinks he has retired from active practice of his profession but finds himself dragged helplessly back into it, some have seen a certain autobiographical component to the plot, and I will not try to deny that. The anthology that contains it, Between Worlds, was published by the Science Fiction Book Club in 2004.
——————
On the day that the Colonel found himself seized by circumstances and thrust back against his will into active service he had risen early, as usual, he had bathed in the river of sparkling liquid gold that ran behind his isolated villa in a remote corner of the Aureus Highlands, he had plucked a quick handful of dagger-shaped golden leaves from the quezquez tree for the little explosive burst of energy that chewing them always provided, and he had gone for his morning stroll along the glimmering crescent dunes of fine golden powder that ran off down toward the carasar forest, where the slender trunks of the long-limbed trees swayed in the mild breeze like the elongated necks of graceful lammis-gazelles. And when the Colonel got back to the villa an hour later for his breakfast the stranger was there, and everything began to change for him in the life that he had designed to be changeless forever more.