Complete Stories (25 page)

“I’ll admit it, Polly,” it was saying. “I’m an alien. But a
good
alien. The Rull are the bad ones. They don’t even eat what they kill. We are, of course, fantastically advanced compared to you primitive bipeds. But we need your animal shiftiness, your low cunning!”

“Rhett,” screamed Polly. “Help! Horvath is an alien!” She darted past the slimy deceiver to stand near her husband, as near as she could get.

Rhett’s upper body and head were inside the maze now; it had grown that much. A glowing two-meter cube of passages surrounded him. The Pac-Man and the monsters raced this way and that. Bobbing and weaving, Rhett watched and controlled the chase. The planes of the hologram bathed his features in a golden, beatific light. The Pac-Man completed its circuit of a randomized space-filling curve…and the cube flickered to rest.

“Thirty,” said Rhett.

“Go!” shouted Horvath. “Go Rhett! Finish this board and we’ll be able to eat all the Rull worlds without losing a single ship!”

With each
uncha
Polly imagined a planet disappearing into some huge group-Horvath. Rull-monsters darted this way and that, trying to foil the Pac-Man, but crazy Rhett was too fast and random for
any
one. She wondered what to ask Horvath for. Riches, telepathy, the power of flight?

Suddenly the board was empty. Rhett had done it again! The huge maze drew back into the Pac-Man machine’s screen. The image of a jubilant alien appeared, burbling thanks. And then the screen blanked out.

“That was our leader,” said Horvath. “We can’t thank you enough. Anything you want is yours. Make a wish.”

“
PAC
,” said Rhett distantly. “
P,A,C
.
P
is Pentagon,
A
is Alien…I wish I could find out what
C
is.”

“You got it,” said Horvath. “Just push the Start button. And thanks again.” With a slow
zeent
ing noise the alien disappeared, feet first.

“Was he for real?” said Rhett.

“I can’t believe it,” wailed Polly. “You just blew our big wish. Who cares what
C
stands for!”

Rhett shrugged and pushed the Start button. There was a sizzling sound, and slowly the machine, and then the room, dissolved into clear white light.

“Greetings,” boomed a voice. “This is the Cosmos speaking. I wonder if you could help me out?”

============

Written in Summer, 1981.

Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
, June, 1982.

I wrote “Pac-Man” on summer vacation at the Outer Banks of North Carolina. My son Rudy Jr. and I had just discovered video arcades, and we spent a lot of time in them. Even though he was only nine, Rudy was much better at them than me. And now, nearly twenty years later, one of my favorite projects for teaching my computer science students is to have them write Pac-Man and Asteroids games.

When I sold this story to
Asimov’s
, the editor George Scithers thought it would be legally risky to use the trademarked name “Pac-Man,” and he insisted that we call it “Peg-Man.” Instead of having “P.A.C.” stand for “President, Alien, Cosmos,” P.E.G. stood for “President, Extraterrestrial, God.”

This is the first of several stories set in “Killeville,” a
Twilight Zone
kind of town inspired by Lynchburg, Virginia, where my family and I lived from 1980 to 1986.

The fragmented shells beneath Jane’s feet began to flicker and sway. She took her husband’s arm.

“Let’s go back, Morris.”

“Already?”

“I’m dizzy. The sun…it’s too much.”

Morris looked at her closely, his dark eyes concerned. She leaned against him, smiling weakly.

“You’re right,” said Morris. “It’s too much at noon like this. Let’s go back to Andrew’s.”

Jane shaded her eyes and looked back along the beach. The beach sand was pure white; the hot waves were pale blue. Grand Turk Island, March 22, 1992. This was their honeymoon.

Jane’s brother, Andrew, lived here, and they could stay with him for free. Andrew made his living teaching the occasional tourist to skin-dive.

Back at the house there was nothing doing. The shutters were closed against the heat. Andrew was lying on a couch, smoking and listening to soft Hawaiian music. In the next room, Andrew’s wife Julie lay on their bed’s white sheets, reading a Borges anthology.

“You see,” said Andrew as they came in. “I told you.”

“You were right,” grinned Morris. He did not enjoy talking to his brother-in-law.

“I almost had sunstroke,” said Jane. “Morris, too. It was like being hit on the head with a hammer.”

“At three we’ll go out in the boat,” promised Andrew. “We can go down off the shelf today.”

“Great,” said Morris. “How deep?”

With slow, economical gestures, Andrew lit another cigarette. “As the spirit moves us. My equipment’s good for a hundred meters. Last week I saw whales down there. A whole pod.”

It was four-thirty by the time they were actually in the boat. Everything happened late down there. Island time. As a gesture towards assimilation, Morris had stopped wearing his digital watch. Now he was sitting back by the boat’s electric motor, happy to be doing something. Up in the front of the boat with her brother, Jane smiled back at her husband.

“Don’t forget to exhale on the way up,” Andrew cautioned her. “And stay near me. Yesterday, every time I looked for you, all I could see was a flipper sticking out from behind a reef.”

“I love it down there,” said Jane. “The flip and flow of it, everything so alive and full of color. It’s a relief from my job at the cancer labs. All the doctors do is kill things. Sad, colorless little mice. There’s a sort of blender that liquifies a mouse every thirty seconds.”

“At least Morris doesn’t kill things,” muttered Andrew. “What’s he supposed to do with those computers anyway?”

“It was something to do with breaking codes. A universal decoder. But you should ask him yourself, Andrew. You never talk to him. Aren’t you glad to see us?”

“Oh, sure, Sis. At least he finally married you. I didn’t like the way he was living off you all last year, and still not committing himself. This way he can’t bug out when he gets his degree and the bucks start rolling in.”

“Morris would never do that, Andrew.”

The sun had filled the boat’s batteries with a good charge. Before long, they’d jounced out to where the water-color changes. Near the shore it’s turquoise, but when you get out to where the continental shelf drops off, the water suddenly looks deep green. Andrew threw an anchor out and signaled Morris to cut the motor. The air was hot and damp, palpable as wet silk. It’d be good to get underwater.

“Okay,” said Andrew, relaxed and professional. “Let’s get our wet suits on. It’s cold down there.”

Morris helped Jane into the tight rubber garment. “I can’t believe we’re doing this. Somehow I never thought that I would spend a honeymoon skin-diving in the Caribbean. This is just fantastic.”

“Stick near me and exhale on the way up,” repeated Andrew. “I think we’ll go down fifty meters today. No point going much further…it gets gloomy after that. And dangerous.”

“How deep
is
the water here?” asked Morris.

“Down off the shelf it’s over a mile. Two thousand meters.”

“Unreal. Can we bring up some sponges?”

“I’ll give you a knife for your belt. But I don’t really like bringing live things up. They belong down there. Up here they just lie around and stink.”

Andrew checked the anchor again, and then they donned facemasks, flippers, weights and airleaves. The airleaves were the latest in scuba equipment: folded packs of special gas-exchange membrane. Instead of carrying your air in a pressurized tank, you could simply extract it from the water around you. The airleaves were, in effect, artificial gills. They made it possible to stay down much longer.

Underwater now, Jane looked up at the boat, an odd slipper-shape black against the wrinkled mirror of the water’s surface. She took an almost sensual pleasure at drawing air in through her mouthpiece. When she breathed out, the vibrations of the bubbles filled her ears with lively sound. Morris was above her, Andrew below. All around them darted bright bits of color—parrot fish, tetras, clown-fish, lupes—vibrant flecks, wheeling like shattered light. Now Andrew was waving to Jane, gesturing her closer. He’d found something. Gently flapping her hands, Jane sank to his level.

Using the butt of his spear, Andrew prodded a small, untidy-looking fish. At the first touch of the spear, the fish stopped swimming and puffed itself up. A blow-fish! Now it was the size of a basketball, all spiny and uptight. As her smile was invisible, Jane showed her amusement with a happy hand-wave. Morris joined them, and they swam a bit deeper.

It was like being at the lip of a tremendous cliff. Directly beneath them was the sandy bottom which slopes up to become Grand Turk’s beach. But a few meters ahead the bottom stopped abruptly. Fighting a feeling that she would fall, Jane swam out over the edge. A sheer wall of fissured rock dropped down beneath her, down and down into invisibility. A mile of water.

Something touched Jane’s elbow. Morris. His eyes were wide and excited behind the glass of his face-mask. With a long outrush of bubbles, he kicked himself down past the cliff’s edge, down past a group of protruding sponges. Andrew and Jane followed.

With each few meters of further descent, things changed. At one level there was color, at the next everything was blue, then brown, then grey. Jane noticed that as the pressure increased, the shape of her air-bubbles changed. Instead of being lovely musical spheres, they were now squeezed into nasty sickle-shaped saucers. The sound of the bubbles seemed like mocking laughter. The pressure, the dark, the cold…she felt so confused. Her ears hurt. How long had they been down? How deep were they? Morris was far below, darkly twitching. He should come back!

Looking around desperately, Jane found Andrew at her side. He showed her his depth gauge. Sixty meters. Was that a lot?
Stay
, Andrew signaled to her.
Don’t follow
. Then he kicked his way down after Morris. Jane held her nostrils and blew. With a sticky pop, her ears finally cleared. As the pain went, so did her panic. The satanic cackling of her air-bubbles changed to sweet chiming. Beneath the music sounded something else, something profound and solemn, some giant song that set her whole body athrill. Behind her were the jumbled surfaces of the cliff; far beneath her were Andrew and Morris, but there, out there in the depths, something vast was moving.

Strange giant fish. Two, three of them, as big as whales, singing a deep, mysterious song that Jane
felt
more than
heard
. The song had a dense, packed quality—each note was filled with hidden cadences and falls.

The creatures were pale-green, mottled here and there with ugly splotches of red. The oddest thing was that each of them bore bunches of tentacles were the pectoral fins might have been. Five tentacles per bunch. These were not creatures of Earth. Their vast, pale-purple eyes glowed feverishly. Were they ill? Their immense tails seemed to beat with an unhealthy stutter. Impossibly huge, impossibly weightless, they circled once, as if to stare at the humans, then glided off into the endless volume of sea.

Andrew reappeared, half-dragging Morris by one arm. Was some-thing wrong? Morris held his other arm against his chest, hugging something to himself. The knife-scabbard at his belt was empty.

Andrew pointed up towards the surface, then mimed bubbles coming out of his mouth.
Breathe out
. All the way to the surface. Jane fixed her wandering mind on that one thing.
Breathe out
.

Finally air, real air. Sunlight. She flopped over the gunwale and into the boat. Morris and Andrew were already there.

“What happened?” asked Jane. “I felt so strange.”

“That’s rapture of the depths,” said Andrew. “Nitrogen gets into your blood. I should have warned you. Morris here was ready to swim all the way down.”

“I was not,” protested Morris. “I just had to look at that funny sort of canyon in the cliff. You didn’t have to rush me like that, Andrew.”

“What did you do with my knife?”

“It broke. This thing, I pried it loose in there.” Morris held out the object that he’d been cradling against his chest. It was a narrow cone, six inches long and marked with an intricate pattern of black and grey rings.

“How beautiful,” exclaimed Jane. “Is it a seashell? Is there still something in it?”

Andrew took the object from Morris’s reluctant grasp and examined it closely. “I don’t think it’s a shell. A fossil, maybe, or some kind of coral. You look, Jane.”

The cone felt strangely heavy to Jane. The base and the tip were white. The tip was so fine that it curled back on itself like a wire. The main part of the cone was marked with many black rings, some broad, some fine. The base was somewhat hollowed out. Jane held the hollow up to her ear and listened, just as if it were a conch.

“It works,” she announced. “Even though it’s not a shell, it’s got the ocean sound in it. Try it, Morris.”

Morris pressed the cone to his ear, listening hard to the intricate pattern of hisses.

“Did you see the giant fishes?” Jane asked Andrew.

“There aren’t any whales today. We would have seen them spouting.”

“I know, Andrew. These weren’t whales. They were just as big, but they had tentacles. I heard them singing.”

Andrew regarded his sister quizzically. “That rapture of the depths really got to you, didn’t it?”

“This sound is interesting,” said Morris, the cone still pressed to his ear. “It sounds like the stripes look.”

Andrew’s wife, Julie, heated up a can of corned beef for supper. Almost no one on Grand Turk ate fresh fish, not even the natives. They preferred the glamour of canned or frozen imports. Washed down with bottle after bottle of Beck’s beer, the corned beef tasted pretty good. Morris told Julie of his adventure.

“There was a big rift in the cliff, a sort of canyon almost. I could see something bright towards the back.”

“You’re lucky there wasn’t a barracuda in there,” chided Andrew. “Or a moray eel. I don’t know why you couldn’t wait for me.”