The Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction Part 9

"At least it's no worse," says the tech. He pauses. "Can you manage the payoff?"

The payoff. The precision-engineered and carefully timed upslope leading to climax. The Big Number. I've kept the stim tracks plateaued for the past three sets. "Coining," I say. "It's coming. There's time."

"You're in bad trouble with New York if there isn't," says the tech. "I want to register a jag. Now."

"Okay," I say.

Love me Eat me All of me "Better," the tech says. "But keep it rising. I'm still only registering a sixty per cent."

Sure, b.a.s.t.a.r.d. It isn't your brain burning with the output of these million strangers. My violence surprises me. But I push the stim up to seventy. Then Nagami goes into a synthesizer riff, and Jam sags back against a vertical rank of amps.

"Robbie?" It comes into my left ear, on the in-house com circuit reserved for performer and me alone.

"I'm here, Jain.""You're not trying, babe,"

I stare across the stage and she's looking back at me. Her eyes flash emerald in the wave from Hollis'

color generator. She sub-vocalizes so her lips don't move.

"I mean it."

This is new territory," I answer. "We never had a million before." I know she thinks it's an excuse.

"This is it, babe," she says. "It's tonight. Will you help me?"

I've known the question would come, though I hadn't known who'd articulate it-her or me. My hesitation stretches much longer in my head than it does in realtime. So much pa.s.sion, Rob. . . . It seems to build. Would you kill for me? "Yes," I say.

"Then I love you," and breaks off as the riff ends and she struts back out into the light. I reluctantly touch the console and push the stim to seventy-five. Fifty tracks are in. Jain, will you love me if I don't?

A bitter look Eighty. I engage five more tracks. Five to go. The crowd's getting d.a.m.n near all of her. And, of course, the opposite's true.

A flattering word Since I first heard her in Was.h.i.+ngton, I've loved this song the best. I push more keys. Eighty-two.

Eighty-five. I know the tech's happily watching the meters.

A kiss The last tracks cut in. Okay, you're getting everything from the decaying food in her gut to her deepest buried childhood fears of an empty echoing house.

Ninety.

A sword And the song ends, one last diminis.h.i.+ng chord, but her body continues to move. For her there is still music.

On the com circuit the tech yells: "Idiot! I'm already reading ninety. Ninety, d.a.m.n it. There's still one number to go."

"Yeah," I say. "Sorry. Just . . . trying to make up for previous lag-time."

He continues to shout and I don't answer. On the stage Nagami and Hollis look at each other and at the rest of the group, and then Moog Indigo slides into the last number with scarcely a pause. Jain turns toward my side of the stage and gives me a soft smile. And then it's back to the audience and into the song she always tops her concerts with, the number that really made her.

Fill me like the mountains Ninety-five. There's only a little travel left in the console slides.

The tech's voice is aghast. "Are you out of your mind, Rob? I've got a ninety-five here-d.a.m.ned needle's about to peg. Back off to ninety."

"Say again?" I say. "Interference. Repeat, please."

"I said back off! We don't want her higher than ninety."

Fill me like the sea Jain soars to the climax. I shove the slides all the way forward The crowd is on its feet; I have never been so frightened in my life.

"Rob! I swear to G.o.d you're canned, you-"

Somehow Stella's on the com line too: "You son of a b.i.t.c.h! You hurt her-"

Jain flings her arms wide. Her back impossibly arches.

All of me One hundred.

I cannot rationalize electronically what happens. I cannot imagine the affection and hate and l.u.s.t and fear cascading into her and pouring back out. But I see the antenna mesh around her naked body glowing suddenly whiter until it flares in an actinic flash and I shut my eyes.

When I open them again, Jain is a blackened husk tottering toward the front of the stage. Her body falls over the edge into the first rows of spectators.

The crowd still thinks this is part of the set, and they love it.XII No good-bys. I know I'm canned. When I go into the Denver Alpertron office in another day and a half to pick up my final check, some subordinate I've never seen before gives me the envelope.

"Thanks," I say. He stares at me and says nothing.

I turn to leave and meet Stella in the hall. The top of her head comes only to my shoulders, and so she has to tilt her face up to glare at me. She says, "You're not going to be working for any promoter in the business. New York says so."

"Fine," I say. I walk past her.

Before I reach the door, she stops me by saying, "The initial report is in already."

I turn. "And?"

"The verdict will probably end up accidental death. Everybody's bonded. Jain was insured for millions. Everything will turn out all right for everyone." She stares at me for several seconds. "Except Jain. You b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

We have our congruencies.

The package comes later, along with a stiff legal letter from a firm of attorneys. The substance of the message is this: "Jain Snow wished you to have possession of this. She informed you prior to her demise of her desires; please carry them out accordingly." The packet contains a chrome cylinder with a screw cap. The cylinder contains ashes; ashes and a few bone fragments. I check. Jain's ashes, unclaimed by father, friends, or employer.

I drive west, away from the soiled towers of the strip-city. I drive beyond the colstrip pits and into the mountains until the paved highway becomes narrow asphalt and then rutted earth and then only a trace, and the car can go no further. With the metal cylinder in one hand I flee on foot until I no longer hear sounds of city or human beings.

At last the trees end and I climb over bare mountain grades. I rest briefly when the pain in my lungs is too sharp to ignore. At last I reach the summit.

I scatter Jain's ashes on the wind.

Then I hurl the empty cylinder down toward the timberline; it rolls and clatters and finally is only a distant glitter on the talus slope.

"Jain!" I scream at the sky until my voice is gone and vertigo destroys my balance. The echoes die. A s Jain died.

I lie down unpeacefully-exhausted-and sleep, and my dreams are of weathered stone. And I awake empty.

From Compet.i.tion 15:

Examples of sf t.i.tles that have been retranslated back into English after appearing in a French history of SF.

I Am Crying, Said the Policeman, PHILIP K. d.i.c.k He Has a Hole in His Head and His Teeth Glow in the Dark, ROGER ZELAZNY Nocturnal and Diurnal Animals, ROGER ZELAZNY R Is for s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p, RAY BRADBURY The Tin Men Go to Sleep, ISAAC ASIMOV All Animals Are Vegetables, CLIFFORD SIMAK -Cambridge University Science Fiction Society A Box of Scruples, JAMES BLISH Dendrites, LESTER DEL REYGet Out of My Way! Get Out of My Way!, HARRY HARRISON A For Whatever, DAMON KNIGHT Humaner, THEODORE STURGEON A Serious Undertaking, HAL CLEMENT -Chris Riesbeck Towards Here Is Coming An Evil Thing, RAY BRADBURY Rascal Moon, ALOIS BUDRYS To Your Broadcast Bodies, Get Yourselves, PHILIP JOSE FARMER Tales of A Moribund Bird, HARLAN ELLISON Farther Than Apollo, BARRY MALZBERG -Michael Bishop Sturgeon Lives Comfortably, THEODORE STURGEON Mr. Robot, That's Me, ISAAC ASIMOV GutS, LESTER DEL REY We Sold s.p.a.ce, POHL & KORKBLUTH Shove Over! Shove Over!, HARRY HARRISON Don't Ask, Dragoon, GORDON d.i.c.kSON A Bit Unclear, H, BEAM PIPER Not That One, TOM TRYON -Darnel P. Dern -John Bittingsley Here is yet another treat from the master of the contemporary chiller. And speaking of chills, Robert Bloch's latest book is a collection of scary stories published by Doubleday and t.i.tled Cold Chills.

Nina

by ROBERT BLOCK

After the love-making Nolan needed another drink.

He fumbled for the bottle beside the bed, gripping it with a sweaty hand. His entire body was wet and clammy, and his fingers shook as they unscrewed the cap. For a moment Nolan wondered if he was coming down with another bout of fever. Then, as the harsh heat of the rum scalded his stomach, he realized the truth.

Nina had done this to him, Nolan turned and glanced at the girl who lay beside him. She stared up through the shadows with slitted eyes unblinking above high cheekbones, her thin brown body relaxed and immobile. Hard to believe that only moments ago this same body had been a writhing, wriggling coil of insatiable appet.i.te, gripping and enfolding him until he was drained and spent.

He held the bottle out to her. "Have a drink?"

She shook her head, eyes hooded and expressionless, and then Nolan remembered that she didn't speak English. He raised the bottle and drank again, cursing himself for his mistake.

It had been a mistake, he realized that now, but Darlene would never understand. Sitting there safe and snug in the apartment in Trenton, she couldn't begin to know what he'd gone through for her sake-hers and little Robbie's. Robert Emmett Nolan II, nine weeks old now, his son, whom he'd never seen. That's why he'd taken the job, signed on with the company for a year. The money was good, enough to keep Darlene in comfort and tide them over after he got back. She couldn't have come withhim, not while she was carrying the kid, so he came alone, figuring no sweat.

No sweat. That was a laugh. All he'd done since he got here was sweat. Patrolling the plantation at sunup, loading cargo all day for the boats that went downriver, squinting over paperwork while night closed down on the bungalow to imprison him behind a wall of jungle darkness. And at night the noises came-the hum of insect hordes, the bellow of caimans, the snorting snuffle of peccary, the ceaseless chatter of monkeys intermingled with the screeching of a milling mindless birds.

So he'd started to drink. First the good bourbon from the company's stock, then the halfway-decent trade gin, and now the cheap rum.

As Nolan set the empty bottle down he heard the noise he'd come to dread worst of all-the endless echo of drums from the huts huddled beside the riverbank below. Miserable wretches were at it again.

No wonder he had to drive them daily to fulfill the company's quota. The wonder was that they did anything at all after spending every night wailing to those d.a.m.ned drums.

Of course it was Moises who did the actual driving; Nolan couldn't even chew them out properly because they were too d.a.m.ned dumb to understand plain English.

Like Nina, here.

Again Nolan looked down at the girl who lay curled beside him on the bed, silent and sated. She wasn't sweating; her skin was curiously cool to the touch, and in her eyes was a mystery.

It was the mystery that Nolan had sensed the first time he saw her staring at him across the village compound three days ago. At first he thought she was one of the company people-somebody's wife, daughter, sister. That afternoon, when he returned to the bungalow, he caught her staring at him again at the edge of the clearing. So he asked Moises who she was, and Moises didn't know. Apparently she'd just arrived a day or two before, paddling a crude catamaran downriver from somewhere out of the denser jungle stretching a thousand miles beyond. She had no English, and according to Moises, she didn't speak Spanish or Portuguese either. Not that she'd made any attempts to communicate; she kept to herself, sleeping in the catamaran moored beside the bank across the river and not even venturing into the company store by day to purchase food.

"India," Moises said, p.r.o.nouncing the word with all the contempt of one in whose veins ran a ten per-cent admixture of the proud blood of the conquistadores, "Who are we to know the way of savages?" He shrugged.

Nolan had shrugged, too, and dismissed her from his mind. But that night as he lay on his bed, listening to the pounding of the drums, he thought of her again and felt a stirring in his loins.

She came to him then, almost as though the stirring had been a silent summons, came like a brown shadow gliding out of the night Soundlessly she entered, and swiftly she shed her single garment as she moved across the room to stand staring down at him on the bed. Then, as she sank upon his nakedness and encircled his thighs, the stirring in his loins became a throbbing and the pounding in his head drowned out the drums.

In the morning she was gone, but on the following night she returned. It was then that he'd called her Nina-it wasn't her name, but he felt a need to somehow identify this wide-mouthed, pink-tongued stranger who slaked herself upon him, slaked his own urgency again and again as her hissing breath rasped in his ears.

Once more she vanished while he slept, and he hadn't seen her all day. But at times he'd been conscious of her secret stare, a coldness falling upon him like an unglimpsed shadow, and he'd known that tonight she'd come again.

Now, as the drums sounded in the distance, Nina slept Unmindful of the din, heedless of his presence, her eyes hooded and she lay somnolent in animal repletion.

Nolan shuddered. That's what she was; an animal. In repose, the lithe brown body was grotesquely elongated, the wide mouth accentuating the ugliness of her face. How could he have coupled with this creature? Nolan grimaced in self-disgust as he turned away.

Well, no matter-it was ended now, over once and for all. Today the message had arrived from Belem: Darlene and Robbie were on the s.h.i.+p, ready for the flight to Manaos. Tomorrow morning he'd start downriver to meet them, escort them here. He'd had his qualms about their coming; they'd have toface three months hi this h.e.l.lhole before the year was up, but Darlene had insisted.

And she was right Nolan knew it now. At least they'd be together and that would help see him through. He wouldn't need the bottle any more, and he wouldn't need Nina.

Nolan lay back and waited for sleep to come, shutting out the sound of the drums, the sight of the shadowy shape beside him. Only a few hours until morning, he told himself. And in the morning, the nightmare would be over.

The trip to Manaos was an ordeal, but it ended in Darlene's arms. She was blonder and more beautiful than he'd remembered, more loving and tender than he'd ever known her to be, and in the union that was their reunion Nolan found fulfillment Of course there was none of the avid hunger of Nina's coiling caresses, none of the mindless thras.h.i.+ng to final frenzy. But it didn't matter; the two of them were together at last. The two of them, and Robbie.

Robbie was a revelation.

Nolan hadn't antic.i.p.ated the intensity of his own reaction. But now, after the long trip back in the wheezing launch, he stood beside the crib in the spare bedroom and gazed down at his son with an overwhelming surge of pride.

"Isn't he adorable?" Darlene said. "He looks just like you."

"You're prejudiced" Nolan grinned, but he was flattered. And when the tiny pink starsh.e.l.l of a hand reached forth to meet his fingers, he tingled at the touch.

Then Darlene gasped.

Nolan glanced up quickly. "What's the matter?" he said.

"Nothing." Darlene was staring past him. "I thought I saw someone outside the window."

Nolan followed her gaze. "No one out there." He moved to the window, peered at the clearing beyond. "Not a soul."

Darlene pa.s.sed a hand before her eyes. "I guess I'm just overtired," she said. "The long trip-"

Nolan put his arm around her. "Why don't you go lie down? Mama Dolores can look after Robbie."

Darlene hesitated. "Are you sure she knows what to do?"

"Look who's talking!" Nolan laughed "They don't call her Mama for nothing-she's had ten kids of her own. She's in the kitchen right now, fixing Robbie's formula. I'll go get her."

So Darlene went down the hall to their bedroom for a siesta, and Mama Dolores took over Robbie's schedule while Nolan made his daily rounds in the fields.

The heat was stifling, worse than anything he could remember. Even Moises was gasping for air as he gunned the jeep over the rutted roadway, peering into the s.h.i.+mmering haze.

Nolan wiped his forehead. Maybe he'd been too hasty, bringing Darlene and the baby here. But a man was ent.i.tled to see his own son, and in a few months they'd be out of this miserable sweatbox forever. No sense getting uptight; everything was going to be all right.