The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant (9 page)

“Sikes,” she said, and seemed relieved it was not someone more threatening. “Good to see you again.”

“You tricked me,” he said. “You stole my move.”

She shook her head and laughed softly. “I had my own strategy,” she said, “and beat you with it. You were too foolish to see that the game extends beyond the boundaries of the board. I broke no rules.”

“I don't care,” said Sikes, “have the strategy. What I want is to see you again. I haven't been able to think of anything but you,” he said.

“Feel free to think of me,” she said, “but I have as little interest in you as I might a single kernel on the twenty-ninth space of a spiral labyrinth riddled with rot.”

“What about the holiday?” he asked. “The clearing in the trees?”

“You, Sikes, were a victim of the winner's conceit,” she said. “Goodnight.” She turned to leave.

He could not let her go and so employed a new intuitive strategy, one devoid of intellect and logic. His only goal was to touch her again. He put his hands around the soft flesh of her throat and held on with all his strength until her arms stopped flailing and she slumped, lifeless, against him. When the city lights were brought up again hours later, the citizens on their way to work found him in the same spot, clutching her to him in a vicelike embrace. The security officers were called out, and the game closed down around him.

Honis Sikes was found guilty and sentenced to banishment. On the day of his sentencing, he begged the magistrate that he simply be executed on Aldebaran and not be sent out into space to some nameless planet. The good man on the bench felt the horror of Sikes's situation and, never having had to banish someone from the city before, had a difficult time refusing him. But in the end, after consulting with the other magistrates, they all concluded that his crime was too heinous and if their ancestors insisted on one thing that would ensure the perpetuation of the celestial city, it was the upholding of the law as it was written.

The probe that was to be Sikes's new island in the void for what would end up being the next four hundred years was not much larger than he was. Inside was a suspended animation chamber called a cocoon, for the process that was used to preserve human life on long space flights was one borrowed from the chrysalis stage of Earth caterpillars. Those insects wrapped themselves in a cocoon and then through their own organic chemistry changed into a liquid state only to be reformed from that mucous later into the guise of a butterfly. Through the use of technology and inorganic chemistry, so too was the case with the body of the traveler in this device. Sikes's bone and muscle, flesh and blood, would again cohere out of the liquid sleep, the only difference being he would not come forth a resplendent winged creature but merely the same old Sikes.

Along with the criminal were stowed a microwave rifle with rechargeable pack, a knife, a handheld fire starter, a single set of clothing, and a heavy coat. There was also a small, six-by-six cube sealed in a bag that when released would draw in the ambient water vapor and grow to become a modest boxlike shelter with a door and a window. The prisoner was allowed to request a personal belonging and Sikes requested his favorite labyrinth board and set of kernels. All of this was done with the understanding that, surely, the outcast had little chance for survival on an alien world. Still, it eased the consciences of the people of Aldebaran and was in keeping with their humane philosophy.

Sikes was stuffed, screaming for the mercy of death, into the cocoon cylinder of his temporary space tomb. In minutes he was deep in the liquid sleep, his physical being sloshing back and forth within as the small vessel was wheeled to the launch pad in the underground of the city. The controls had been set so that the probe would wander through the universe until its sensors, acute spectrographs that used a technique called light dissection, picked up signs of a habitable planet. Then the navigational devices would take over; the single rocket would fire and send him to his new home.

Criminal probe #87659 was shot into the absolute zero of space in the wake of the turning city, a gleaming chrome kernel cast into a game without boundaries. One would think that Sikes's mind might be a complete blank, but no. There was, even in that suspended state, a dim sort of consciousness; a psychedelic inner realm of intermittent ghost life and insect memory, like pieces of a shattered mirror taking wing.

Then Time was a maniac scattering dust, and miles had no meaning until, suddenly, for what seemed like an eternity, those shards of the shattered mirror flew together like pieces of a puzzle, assembling themselves, and Sikes awoke, reformed from the chemical soup that was himself. The panel of the cocoon slid open, the door of the probe drew back and he beheld his prison. He gasped frantically, trying to recall the process of respiration, and once he did, he screamed from the pain of the sunlight in his eyes. For the first hour on his new world, he lay where he was, dizzy and nauseous. These ill affects soon passed, and though he was weak, he managed to crawl out of the probe and onto the burning sands.

Sikes found the clothes where, four centuries earlier, they had told him they would be. Dressing quickly with shaking hands, he finally got his feet into the heavy boots that protected them somewhat from the searing heat of the red desert. He looked into the sky and saw that the sun was at midday. What he was unsure of was how long a day would be. Scanning the flat terrain, he saw no signs of life, not even the merest scrap of vegetation. His mind was still cloudy from the liquid sleep, but he managed to make a plan. He would retrieve the rifle and knife and shelter cube from the probe, pack the smaller items in the sack they had sent with him, and strike out in one direction. As long as his strength held out he would search, but if he did not find a more inviting landscape in his travels before he became too weak to continue, he would turn the rifle on himself and end his misery.

“Habitable planet, indeed,” he said aloud as he struck out due west from the probe. He went only a few yards before remembering the Maize board and pieces, and because of the comfort they provided, being a link to his previous life, returned to fetch them.

Walking on a planet with a yellow sky above him and not the reassuring scoop of the dome was frightening at first. He felt very much as if he had died and gone, a spirit, to another realm as in the religious Earth myths of old. Then he remembered more clearly his reason for being there, and he thought back through the thousands and thousands of miles and hours to Aldebaran and the image of Methina. Now with so much distance from her murder, he wondered what he had been thinking to have done something so unspeakable. The why of things was totally lost to his memory, but try as he might he could not forget the feel of her body and the long, bright wave of her hair.

Sikes journeyed far. His mouth was parched and perspiration rolled off him and evaporated before hitting the sand. He halted, wondering if it was time to use the rifle, and that is when he saw in the heat-rippled distance the definite outline of what he believed to be trees, a wide swath of them sprouting from the unforgiving sand. He made his way toward them, and at first they seemed to be receding as he approached. Eventually, he closed his eyes against the brightness of the day and doggedly continued to put one foot in front of the other. When he stopped to rest some time later, he opened his eyes and beheld before him an enchanted scene like something from a child's picture book of long ago.

He found himself standing on the edge of a forest whose trees were straight, blue-trunked giants topped with silver leaves. A little way in beyond them, he saw a meadow of long violet grass blowing in a wind that seemed only to exist within the boundary of the trees. Rushing forward, he ran in under the canopy of silver leaves and the second he was beneath their shade, he felt the heat in the soles of his boots subside and a breeze against his face. He had not yet thought about what his reason was to survive, but for the first time he had an inkling that it might be possible.

As it was, Sikes did survive, for within the borders of the roughly three-hundred-acre oasis he had stumbled upon there were three good-sized lakes, fruit-bearing trees, and wildlife in all its various and intricate forms. Surrounding his living prison was a vast sea of impassable red desert. This place was just large enough for him to feel comfortable in. Aldebaran had been no more than an island in a forbidding void, and so he was used to a life within definite boundaries. He thought of the oasis as a large Maize board, and as he went through his quiet days there he dreamed of strategies that would allow him to outsmart his crafty opponents, Boredom and Death.

He set up his camp next to one of the lakes. The water-vapor-absorbing structure they had sent with him only partially inflated since the climate of that area was so very dry. Still there was enough room for him to lie down inside and to store his belongings. The water in the lake was not only clean and satisfied his thirst, but it was composed of some other element than hydrogen and oxygen that gave it a sweet flavor.

The first thing that Sikes became aware of was the length of the days and nights. They were not too different from the artificial ones that had been imposed on Aldebaran. The night always seemed a little longer than the day, if that was possible, and there was, with regularity, the hulking presence of a large ringed planet in the southern sky. The star that was the sun of this world burned much whiter and hotter than his childhood learning implant had said Earth's sun had, but it also appeared somewhat farther away.

Sikes surmised that the entire desert must have at one time been a forest, but because of some climate change or erosion the sands had overtaken the flora and dried up rivers and streams. Only in rare places like the oasis, where the water most likely came up from deep in the ground, were there pockets of life, miniatures of how things had once been on a grand scale. He also knew that somewhere on the planet, not farther away than birds would want to migrate, there must have been a different terrain since flocks of different types of small winged creatures infested the trees for a week or two and then were gone.

In addition to the strange life forms of armored insects, large stupid fish with piglike faces he caught with his hands, and chittering little things that were a cross between lizards and chipmunks, there was a species of larger animal with which he shared the residence of the oasis. He was surprised at their number, given the surrounding hostile environment and the long time they must have existed within the boundary of the three hundred acres. They were disconcertingly bipedal, going almost upright with the same basic body form of two arms, two legs, a torso, and head, as humans. They were covered with long hair of various different shades, yet they were not human at all, not even primate.

The flesh of these creatures was soft, almost like plant meat, and they were so lacking in intelligence it seemed to Sikes that even the fish of the lakes were more cognizant. Hairy, walking asparagus was how he thought of them. At night, he heard their calls—the sound of a sickly old woman wheezing. They were, luckily, not aggressive. In fact, Sikes could walk right up to them and blow their brains out with the rifle. He found them an excellent source of sustenance, but found he could not cook them without first removing the head. Once they were dead, their eyes gave the illusion that all had finally become clear to them. Sikes killed them indiscriminately, sometimes for food and sometimes for sport to counteract boredom.

So this then became Sikes's life, the existence of the castaway. He had conceived of all manner of diversions in order to try to retain his sanity. At night he studied the stars, trying to determine in what quadrant of space his planet resided. During the day he hunted, practicing with the rifle so often that his aim was perfection itself. He replaced the kernels of corn from his Maize box with pebbles and played against himself every afternoon before the sun set. With nothing but time on his hands, what amazing strategies he came up with. The least of them made the Winner's Conceit look like the tactic of a dimwitted child. The kernels of corn he planted, in four neat rows and watered consistently every day. On the morning that he first saw the small green sprouts poking through the soil, he felt a sense of accomplishment like none he had experienced in his entire life.

Once he had established his presence in the oasis, he went on half-day journeys of exploration. The landscape of the entire expanse was fairly uniform in its composition. There were groves of the silver-leafed trees, small clearings and meadows of violet grass, and then the three lakes. Only in one spot at the northernmost extent of the oasis were there outcroppings of rock that jutted up from the soil in small hills. There were caves carved by erosion into the faces of these stony eruptions, and it was here where the two-legged creatures—the Geets, as he had come to call them, after the inventor of Maize—lived. On a particularly tedious afternoon, he sat a little way off from their colony and took target practice, drilling young and old alike with blasts from the rifle.

Though the seasons changed, they were but minor ripples in the natural routine of the land. They came every few weeks it seemed, and he could note them by transformations in the leaves of the blue-trunked trees. In one season the silver leaves shone at night, in another they dropped off, in the next the ones that had dropped off disintegrated into a kind of fuzz that blew on the breeze all over the oasis. Then the leaves sprouted and grew again and this cycle continued without fail.

The only other marker of the change in season was that with each permutation of the leaves, the Geets would give birth to a new brood of young. He could not tell if there were male and female Geets, for they all had two womanly breasts, or how they mated, but it was a certainty that, although they were short-lived, they were incredibly prolific.
I may very well utterly deplete the capacity of this rifle before all is said and done
, thought Sikes after putting a neat hole through the head of one a hundred yards away. Soon after this, he noticed that they had begun to flee when they knew he was nearby.