The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [168]
"They are murderous and beyond our comprehension," said the voice. "They have come from the places between the islands of stars, come with a blind, unreasoning hatred which cannot be turned aside except by lethal force. We had thought your world a victim of their murder. Instead, we find something worse, a world that has taken its own life. It is too late to offer our aid, but at least we can build you sanctuary, if, in return, some of your number will come with us, to fight."
"To fight?" A woman screamed in rage; her face ran with weeping wounds. "Is all life so stupid? Do you condemn us as murderers of our planet and then ask us to repeat the madness? No, we will not fight. Go away and let us die in our shame and folly."
"It is for each of you separately to make this choice," the voice said. "Understand this: they attack without quarter. And they are winning."
The price of life is death, Beth told herself, pressed against her husband's arm. Those who went from among this pitiful number surely would not return.
"Only some among you will suit our purpose," the voice explained. "The predators, the fighters. They must come with us. The others will remain, and we will restore to them a corner of their world. Come, you must decide. The stars are dying in our galaxy."
It was beyond most of them, this vision of a war between gods. Not gods, though, Wish Jerome told himself, merely life, exerted in an unconscionable violence to safeguard its own seed.
Fear blew across the group, chilling as the wind, but their decision, too, rose like a wind, beyond fear.
High above them, an opening dilated in the silver hull. The last of humanity went forward for their testing.
That was the way of it, sings memory, here in the dusk. They took our soul and gave us the comfort of emortality amid a new-built Xanadu. The stars came clear in the dark of an unclouded sky. We can look into the black night and know that somewhere out there the spindles are warring against an enemy too terrible for understanding or compassion. And our soul is with them, sweating, slaving in the agony of death and victory. We spin on, we and our quiet garden, in an anesthesia of contentment.
I see a hawk soaring on a high wave of song. His cry hangs in the air, and his lofty feathered body. Now he stoops, falls like a projectile, opens his wings, stills magically, climbs the sky again. It is cozy here, in the warmth of the sun. I seem, though, to remember a word from the past, from the repeated past. Why do I feel a stir of horror as I gaze upon my unaging hands? Did my innocence save me then? Perhaps, but I am innocent no longer. Our life will stretch on, for our bargain is sealed, and the sun is warm on our peace.
Still, the horror remains, as the memory remains, that the meek have inherited the earth.
THE MAN WHO WALKED HOME
James Tiptree, Jr
James Tiptree, Jr was the primary pseudonym used by Alice Sheldon (1915-87) and she hid her identity so well that almost everyone was deceived into believing she was a man. This, despite such stories as "The Women Men Don't See" (1973), which vividly revealed the distinctions between the sexes. Although she wrote two novels, Up the Walls of the World (1978) and Brightness Falls from the Air (1985), her strengths lay in the short story and her work constitutes some of the most remarkable fiction, not just of the 1970s - the chief decade for her writing - but in all speculative fiction. Her collections include Ten Thousand Light Years From Home (1973), Warm Worlds and Otherwise (1975)> and Star Songs of an Old Primate (1978), but perhaps the most representative single volume is Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1990), which critic John Clute called, "one of the two or three most significant collections of short SF ever published".
Tiptree wrote several stories dealing with a post-apocalyptic world, and to my mind the following (first published in 1972, hence the dates) is the most unusual, with a cataclysm arising from an experiment that