Robert F. Young

“ All over Silk City you could hear the sad susurrus of their tiny bodies as they spun their colorful cocoons in the long low sheds thoughtfully provided for them by the good folk of Pastelsilks, Inc. Toward twilight, the whispering would fade away, then, with the timid twinkling of the first star, it would come to life again and build up and up and up until the night would be one great vast whispering of worms at work—-pink worms, green worms, blue worms, yellow worms, spinning silk such as had never been known before and will never be known again, for now the worms of Forget Me Not are dead. ”

“ Arriving at my living quarters, I removed my greendeck fatigues and laid them upon the arms of the rack beside the entrance, wondering as I always do on such occasions how Ho-Hat-Li-Tum, the company's morale manager, could have fallen for so blatantly whimsical an appointment as a clothes rack in the form of a life-size woman. Granted, greenship pilots lead lonely lives, but tell me this: how can the mere act of their laying their outer garments upon the outstretched arms of a brainless, speechless, feelingless mannequin in the least alleviate their loneliness? ”

“ I wanted desperately to fulfill your wishes by going to New Earth and attending Trevor University, and now I shall, because sitting here in this little room I have faced at last the very real possibility that you really do not love me. I had hoped that by entering your mind and leading you back through our moments together to the moment when we met and by freezing that moment and letting you find me in this room, you would be shocked into associating me with Eldoria rather than with the naive little girl sitting outside the arras—with sex, rather than with saintliness ”

“ Here in the form of an armored man on horseback was the quintessence of the Age of Chivalry—not the Age of Chivalry as exemplified by the vain and boasting nobles who had constituted nine-tenths of the knight-errantry profession and who had used the quest of the Holy Grail as an excuse to seek after mead and maidens, but the Age of Chivalry as it might have been if the ideal behind it had been shared by the many instead of by the few; the Age of Chivalry, in short, as it had come down to posterity through the pages of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. ”

“ Night had tiptoed in over the October countryside quite some time ago, but the village of Valleyview had not turned on so much as a single streetlight—nor, apparently, any other kind of light. All was in darkness, and not a soul was to be seen. Philip began to suspect that he had entered a ghost town, and when his headlights darted across a dark intersection and picked up the overgrown grass and unkempt shrubbery of the village park, he was convinced that he had. ”

“ A six-foot man of a past generation is the equivalent of a six-foot man of a future generation: it is only when you lift them from their respective eras and place them side by side that the difference in relative size becomes manifest. Thus, in the eyes of the inhabitants of the planet he was about to descend upon, Nathaniel Drake would be a figure of heroic proportions, while his ship would loom in the heavens like a small moon—
Or a small planet....
Beneath him lay the ruins of a once-magnificent structure. ”

“ The Idwandanans had clothed her in their choicest of pweitl hides, and she had gone back to combing her hair in its original style. Her pale blue eyes were clear and unwavering. The classic body with which Androids, Inc., had endowed her was unsullied by either time or the elements, Swenson had been born in space and had spent most of his life in space. He had never been to Earth, and he had never seen an android. Consequently, he mistook Isolde for a real woman—a woman of heroic proportions, perhaps, but a woman radiant with the beauty he had looked for all his life and never found, till now. ”

“ I had heard tales of the zealots who guarded the matrimonial sanctity of society; I had even visited the Coliseum when a stoning was taking place and seen the battered bloody bodies of the victims lying in the dirt of the arena. But somehow neither the tales nor the bodies had driven home the truth that overwhelmed me now.
When the inevitable metal crisis followed the production-consumption orgy of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the material world began to fall apart, the people turned to religion for succor. ”

“ Ryan stood by the fire alone. He was the youngest male of the tribe. He and Merium had been the last children to be born. The tribe had numbered in the hundreds then, and the hunting had been good, the dogs still tame and easy to find. There had been other tribes too, wandering over the dust-veiled land. Ryan wondered what had become of them. But he only pretended to wonder. In his heart, he knew.
It was growing colder. He added more driftwood to the fire and watched the flames gorge themselves. Flames were like men, he thought. ”

“ Gordon faced Sonya. "Now maybe you'll tell me why they married us," he said.
"I will tell you on the way back to our ships."
She did not speak again till they reached the top of the ridge. Then, after she got her breath back, she said. "They married us because, underneath their demigod exteriors, they are nothing more than bronze-age puritans. Yesterday, when the man and woman saw us standing together by the brook, they were bewildered because neither of us was wearing what to them is a universal symbol of marriage—a metal collar—and when you touched me they were shocked. ”

“ One can picture Rosemary high in the sky, faithfully carrying out her assignment. One can see her sitting there before the instrument panel of the Rainbow 6 looking at dawns and sunsets and stars. One can see the slow drift of cloud and continent beneath her. Australia now, and now the vast blueness of the Pacific ... and now the west coast rising out of mists of distances and air, and beyond it, the vast green blur of the land that gave her birth. Little Barbara Frietchie riding on a star.... Far beneath her now, highways wind; rivers run down to seas. ”

“ Pain tightened his throat when he looked at Deirdre's delicate profile and copper-colored hair, intensified when he lowered his eyes to the remembered blueness of her graduation dress. The diamond brooch that he had given her as a graduation present, and which she had proudly pinned upon her bodice for the whole wide world to see, made him want to cry. His self-image of two weeks ago shocked him. There were lines on the face that did not as yet exist, and the brown hair was shot with streaks of gray that had yet to come into being. ”

“ He grew still, too—immobile in the strange, yet peaceful, summer night. He was standing on a grassy plain, and the plain spread out on either hand to promontories of little trees. Before him, the land sloped gently upward, and was covered with multicolored flowers that twinkled like microcosmic stars. In the distance, the lights of a village showed. To his right, a riotous green-rose bush bloomed, and beneath it Zarathustra sat, wagging his tail.
Philip took two steps forward, stopped and looked up at the sky. It was wrong somehow. ”

“ It was a pleasant afternoon, mild for November—a time for wandering in woods, a time to take it a little easy, a time to knock off some of the scavengers and pests you'd neglected during the first days of pheasant and rabbit season, a time to get your eyes down to hair-line fineness for the first ecstatic day of deer. Red squirrels were easy, of course, a little beneath the dignity of a true hunter, but when you tried to bore them in vital spots you got some pretty good practice out of it. ”

“ The decision had been a wise one: "Easy Money" looked more like a horse than most real horses did, could travel twice as fast, and was as easy to ride and to maneuver as a golp jetney. It was light-brown in color with a white diamond on its forehead, it was equipped with a secret croup-compartment and an inbuilt saddle, and its fetlock-length trappings were made of genuine synthisilk threaded with gold. It wore no armor—it did not need to: weapons manufactured during the Age of Chivalry could no more penetrate its "hide" than a tooth pick could.
Come on, Easy Money, Mallory encephalopathed. ”

“ Afraid to love anyone. Once, it hurt me even to think like this. Now, it is all past. I am married now, and I love my wife. Annabelle Leigh is a part of yesterday, and yesterday is gone. I can think now of the moments we spent together, and the moments no longer bring pain. I can think of us working together in the vineyards, tending the vines, and I can think of her standing in the sun at harvest time, her arms filled with blue clusters of grapes and the sunlight spilling goldenly down upon her. ”

“ The ingots from his last hearth-heat were due to be removed from his soaking pits in a few minutes, and he could not let them over-stay their time. The life of a M.A.N., model 8M, was not an easy one. But then, he had known that when he had bequeathed his brain to the Company.
He was not sorry. Far better to build bases on the wind-torn surface of Jupiter than to lie in cold and eternal oblivion beneath the unheeding surface of Earth. And there was the longevity factor to be considered too. As a man, even if he had lived, he probably wouldn't have reached the age of ninety. ”

“ By the time I regained my vision the 'copter was high above the lombardies, the exhumed car-casket swinging wildly beneath the still-opened hatch.
Don't shoot! my mind screamed to Kester. Don't shoot! But the words were locked in my throat and I could not utter them. I could only stand there helplessly, waiting for the disintegrating beam to lance out from the tower, waiting for the 'copter and the ghouls—and my conniving Julia—to become bright embers in the night sky. ”

“ It was his very attitude, I believe, that gave me the strength and the determination to gain the Uxurient after the tube broke free and began lashing wildly back and forth. For a long while I lay gasping on the greendeck; then, when my breath came back, I recoiled the tube, secured the tube-lock, and lifted into space. The soil-solution vat was not as full as I would have wished, but by careful rationing I knew that I could make its contents suffice. Whether I could or not, I wanted no more part of the world I had just left. I never want to see the place again. ”

“ The news, when it arrived in Moscow, had something of the impact of a hydrogen bomb, and when it leaked through a hitherto unsuspected crevice in the Kremlin, there was a sort of chain-reaction throughout the entire Soviet Union. It was at this point in his political career that the Soviet premier discovered a universal truth: people the world over, whether they be communistic or capitalistic, have a very large soft spot in their hearts when it comes to babies.
That spring, Venus outshone herself, and hung in the evening sky over Moscow somewhat in the manner of the star over Bethlehem. ”

“ Three pairs of eyes burned darkly. "You ask us that?" Miss Stoddart said. "Callous creature who did a maiden's innocence affront!" said Officer Finch. "And sought sanctuary in ill-fitting robes of righteousness!" said Vera Velvetskin. The three faces moved together, blurred and seemed to blend into one. The three voices were raised in unison: "You know who we are, Nathan Blake. You know who we are!"
Blake stared at them open-mouthed. Then he turned and fled.
It had taken man a long time to discover that he was a god in his own right and that he too was capable of creating universes. ”

“ On the first day of April of the year of our Lord, 1962, Francis Farnsworth Pfleuger brought into being a Möbius coincidence field and established multiple contact with the twenty-first satellite of the star Sirius, thereby giving the people of Valleyview access, via their back doorways, to a New World. Here we have come to live. Here we have come to raise our children. Here, in this idyllic village, which the noble race that once inhabited this fair planet left behind them when they migrated to the Greater Magellanic Cloud, we have settled down to create a new and better Way of Life. ”

“ What had gone out of the world during the last sixteen hundred years that had left sophisticated twenty-second century steel inferior in quality to naïve sixth-century wrought iron? What did Sir Galahad have that he, Mallory, lacked? Mallory shook his head. He did not know.
The moonlit "towers" of the Yore had become visible through the trees before it occurred to him that before riding away the man just might have removed the Sangraal from the black rohorse's croup. At first thought, such a possibility was too absurd to be entertained, but not on second thought. ”

“ Full of love, full of love, full of love!... And in the cabin, vineyards blossomed, flowers bloomed; there rose a blue-bright sun, and in its radiance the boy and the girl walked, the boy Nathaniel and the girl Annabelle Leigh, and the wind blew and the grass sang and the trees put their heads together in rustling consultations ... and all the while, the hull-beams creaked and the grav generator murmured, and the spectral Fly by Night sped on its way to Iago Iago.
It was fitting that a ghost should fall in love with a ghost. ”

“ If it resembles fiction more than it does fact, the similarity is wholly intentional, for it is only through fiction that the past can be brought back to life.
When Gordon Andrews first saw the girl, he took it for granted that she was a Venusian—a natural enough assumption in view of the fact that he was on Venus. She was kneeling beside a small brook, humming a little tune and washing out a pair of stockings, and so intent was she on her tune and her task that she did not hear him when he stepped out of the forest behind her. ”

“ I myself will cast the first stone. But before I do, you'll confess. When the Hour is near, you'll realize the enormity of your lust, just as they all do, and you'll fall on your knees and ask forgiveness. And when you do, you'll automatically absolve Julia of all guilt. All guilt, do you understand, Bartlett? Julia's purity must be restored. Julia's purity has to be restored! ”

“ He was aghast. "They wouldn't dare cut off your hands!"
"They dare much, fair knight. Know ye naught of the customs of the land?"
He was silent. What in the world was he going to do about her? She would probably wait here for him until she starved to death or, equally as distressing, until she was apprehended. Abruptly he shrugged his shoulders—to the extent that his pauldrons permitted—and remounted the rohorse. Why should it matter to him what became of her? He'd returned to the Age of Chivalry to steal the Sangraal, not to play nursemaid to damosels in distress. ”

“ Judith, apparently, had opened the back door, for a breeze was wafting through the downstairs rooms—a breeze laden with the scent of flowers and the dew-damp breath of growing grass. He frowned. The month was October, not June, and since when did flowers bloom and grass grow in October? He concluded that the scent must be artificial.
Zarathustra was regarding him with large golden eyes from the middle of the living-room floor. The animal did somehow bring to mind a little old man, although he could not have been more than two or three years old. “You're not very good company,” Philip said. ”

“ If Rosemary could have been legally enticed, for example, into letting her picture appear in a cigarette ad, cigarette consumption probably would have doubled overnight. It is one thing to be an obscure Barbara Frietchie and quite another to be a famous one, and the patriotic devotion shining in a person's eyes can, through the thaumaturgy of photography and touch-up, be transmuted into a sensual gleam. ”

“ I believe that stone can take on life and that this great man did rise from the ruins of His desecrated temple to walk upon the land; like a towering giant He walked, a giant with the fires of righteousness burning in His eyes, and He did raise His voice against the bombs falling and He did wipe the incandescence from the hellish heavens with His terrible gaze, and the thunder of His tread did set the very earth to trembling as He walked down the Potomac to the sea, 'Lo, I have arisen,' He proclaimed. ”

“ A thick carpet the color of Martian waterways lay upon the floor, contrasting pleasantly with the golden tapestries that adorned all four walls. The sleeping dais was oval and took up nearly half the floor space. It was strewn with scarlet cushions.
Blake sat down upon it. Nervously he watched Eldoria slip out of her white street robe, his eyes moving back and forth from her smooth dark skin to the arras. The incense thickened around him.
She noticed the back-and-forth movement of his eyes. "You need not fear the little one," she said, laying her hand upon his knee. "She will not enter." ”

“ We were aboard the 'copter in an instant. Julia's experienced fingers made deft maneuvers on the control panel and then we were aloft, soaring over the amphitheater, the sky blue above us, the stoning platform a chiaroscuro of gray- and black-garbed men and women below us. The arena proper was a bleak expanse of packed dirt, unrelieved by a single blade of grass. I could hear the obscene murmur of the crowd above the whirring of the blades. ”

“ Mallory laughed. He had gotten the best of the bargain after all. At least there was no smog in the fifteenth century.
Who was he supposed to be? he wondered. Had his name gone down in history by any chance?
Abruptly he gasped. Was he the Sir Thomas Malory with estates in Northampshire and Warwickshire? Was he the Sir Thomas Malory who had compiled and translated and written Le Morte d'Arthur? Almost nothing about the man's life was known, and probably the little that was known had been assumed. He could have popped up from nowhere, made his fortune through foreknowledge, and been knighted. ”

“ Indeed, I think that the only machine the Sirians lacked was one that could manufacture food out of whole cloth. But consider the most important advantage of all: when we go to bed at night we can do so without being afraid that sometime during our sleep a thermonuclear missile will descend out of the sky and devour us in one huge incandescent bite. If we've made a culture hero out of our village idiot, it's no more than right, for unwittingly or not, he opened up the gates of paradise. ”

“ When remembering Rosemary, it is fitting that one should think of the sun and the sky. It is equally fitting that one should think of the snow and the rain. For Rosemary is nothing if she is not all of these things. ”

“ Now, picture people working in the fields and in the vineyards; picture trees, and children playing underneath them; picture housewives coming out back doors and shaking homemade rugs that look like little rainbows; picture toy-like trains humming over anti-grav beds from town to town, from city to city, tying in the entire enchanting scheme of things with the spaceport at Vin Bleu. Finally, picture a narrow road winding among the vineyards, and a man walking along it. A man? No, not a man—a ghost. A tall gaunt ghost in spectral space-clothes. A ghost named Nathaniel Drake. ”

“ The silence between Julia and myself became intolerable. I pondered the meaning of the word "compatibility," and wondered why unconscious rapport should manifest itself in conscious hatred.
I remembered my own lonely childhood—the long evenings spent in my parents' hive apartment, the endless dissension between my mother and my father, my father's relegation to the parlorette couch and my mother's key in the bedroomette door, their suicidal leap twenty stories to the street when I was nineteen years old. ”

“ Judith Darrow wasn't really moving out of Valleyview after all. She only thought she was.
Philip went on. The breeze was all around him. It blew through his hair, kissed his cheeks and caressed his forehead. The stars shone palely down. Some of the land was under cultivation, and he could see green things growing in the starlight, and the breeze carried their green breath to his nostrils. He reached the highway and began walking along it. ”

“ A moment later she returned carrying a small stereo-snapshot. She handed it to him. The hill was a high one, and Annabelle was outlined sharply against a vivid azure backdrop. She was wearing a red dress that barely reached her knees and which let the superb turn of her calves and thighs come through without restraint. Her waist was narrow, and the width of her hips was in perfect harmony with the width of her shoulders—details which her Church of the Emancipation uniform had suppressed. Spring sunlight had bleached her hair to a tawny yellow and had turned her skin golden. ”

“ I could hear the distant shuffling of feet on the stoning platform and the faraway murmur of many voices.
Taigue was still fasting. Ordinary MEP officers were usually content to fast their required day per week and to let it go at that. But Taigue was not an ordinary MEP officer. He stood before me like a Bunyanesque caricature. Caverns had appeared above the ridges of his cheek bones and his eyes had retreated into their depths where they burned like banked fires.
"Short hair becomes you, Mr. Bartlett," he said, but his irony lacked its usual edge. ”

“ Aghast, Mallory stepped back. Sir Galahad moved in, sword upraised again. Mallory raised his own sword, caught the full force of the terrific down-rushing blow on the blade. His sword was cut cleanly in two, his left pauldron was cleanly cleaved, and a great numbness afflicted his left shoulder. He went down.
He stayed down.
Sir Galahad leaned over him, unbroken sword uplifted. The cross in the center of the snow-white shield was a bright and burning red. "Ye must yield you as an overcome man, or else I may slay you." ”

“ Killing Mary Legs would be like killing the sun and the stars and the sky, and even if a man could kill these things he would not do so, and neither would he kill Mary Legs."
"I did not kill her on purpose," he introduced himself and told the King about the Fly by Night's encounter with the Lambda-Xi field, of how he had locked Saint Annabelle Leigh in the starboard storeroom to die. "If I had not been so selfish," he concluded, "she would still be alive today."
The King looked at him pityingly. "And now your hands are bloodied, and you must seek her ghost."
"Yes," said Drake. ”