The Seventh Science Fiction MEGAPACK ®. Robert Silverberg
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a major drug deal going down tonight: alphanella seeds from somewhere out in the Albion Cluster, ten times as powerful as heroin. We’ll be mounting a raid in about four hours. The buyers and sellers both figure to have plenty of muscle standing guard, and it’s likely to get pretty hairy.
I hope so.
I’ve already locked my weapons away.
A BRIEF DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES, by Michael Kurland
I have traveled this limitless universe for many tens of thousands of years, flitting where I wish at speeds that photons envy. I have moved backward through time and met myself coming and going, and explored the C 2 paradox as eagerly as others rummage through attic trunks full of old dreams. And I am not bored.
My name is Deradan, and I am immortal, and I am omniscient, or as omniscient as practical in this uncausal universe, and I used to be a man.
“Tell me how it was, Deradan. Tell me about the old days,” Thrayna said, perching on a silver crystal, her voice the tinkle of sapphire bells with ruby overtones. She was born after the transformation, and she loves the stories of the olden days, when we were mortal and the worlds were young.
“We lived on Earth,” I told her, “billions of us. All crammed together on a single planet.”
Her eyes enlarged and I could see galaxies reflected in their depths. “Earth,” she said. “Where is Earth?”
I thought. “That way,” I told her, pointing an arrow of chromed fire.
“And you all left one day, just like that—poof?” Her poof was an orange-yellow sparkle that bounced around the surface of the airless planetoid on which we sat, and evanesced as suddenly as it had appeared.
“Not so quick,” I told her. “Nor so thorough. They dribbed and drabbed along as they decided that changing was wiser than staying. Some took centuries to decide. Some, I Imagine, are there yet, unchanged.”
“People?” she asked. “With skin covering bone and blood coursing through muscle and organ? Delicate-gross, beautiful-ugly people?”
“So I imagine.”
She thought about this, allowing her thoughts to sparkle visibly in her corona. “Take me,” she said brightly. “Show me!”
I allowed the coordinates of Old Earth to form in my brain and then headed off through a cluster of newborn stars toward the withershins corner of the compact spiral galaxy that is our Milky Way. Thrayna followed, faster than light in diamonds, as fast as the essence of thought.
Earth was where it should have been, and still as it had been: a light-blue globe laced with puffy white. I had forgotten how painfully beautiful it was. We spiraled toward the surface.
“Greetings, Deradan!” The hollow nonsound thrummed strongly in my mind.
Thrayna bounced and blossomed with joy. “The planet is saying hello to you,” she giggled, whirling and condensing about a nucleus of mist and dust, forming a voluptuous feminine cyclone that enclosed a rainbow.
“Who speaks?” I asked aloud. There was no reply.
“Who speaks?” I projected the thought about me, darting it here and there among the ruins where we stood.
All was silent but for the wind that was Thrayna.
I lofted into the air and sought a sign of life in the tumbled stone, cracked concrete, and rotten metal ruins that lay about us for leagues around. Plant life there was: grasses, trees, shrubs and a myriad of delicate, lovely flowers. Animal life abounded: foxes, hares, moles, songbirds, worms, insects innumerable. But of human life, of intelligent life, there was no sign.
“Come,” I told Thrayna. “Let us seek out what primitive humans may remain on Earth.
“Splendid!” Thrayna agreed. “Let us discover who spoke. Was that a human?”
“I don’t know who or what it was,” I admitted “but human it was not. Not old-style human. They could not do thus.”
“They couldn’t do much,” Thrayna said. “It must have been awfully small, awfully closed, awfully dull to be a human.”
I tried to remember what it had been like “We did not find it so,” I said.
“How was it then?”
“It was as it is, I imagine,” I told her. “Let us find some people and see how it is with them, then you will know.”
I rose and headed straight as an arrow toward I-knew-not-what, hoping to intersect some vast city teeming with human commerce. I was loath to admit to Thrayna that I no longer recognized the landmarks of this globe that had been my home. Had it changed so much in the brief millennia. I wondered, or had I?
The city appeared, a speck on the horizon, and grew into its vastness as we approached. It was as empty, as devoid, as defunct, as all before it. But it was not ruined and rotten, as was the place we had left. The buildings were there: squat cubes and tall cylinders and lacy spires, with a spiderweb of roads and slidewalks and covered skyways. All intact, pristine, and ready for use. But whoever had used them was no longer there.
“No humans,” Thrayna observed, spinning about and showering a rainbow of fine sparks where she moved.
“No humans,” I agreed.
“Perhaps they have all become as we; perhaps they have left Earth and now inhabit the universe.”
“Perhaps.”
“Why is the city so fresh and clean if it is deserted?”
“It is tended by computers,” I told her. “Soulless machines that are all mind, that do the drudge work for the human race. The city will remain as it is for the next ten thousand years—or hundred thousand—waiting for the people to return.”
“What if the inhabitants have become as we, incorporeal beings of pure energy, drawing sustenance from the stars—immortal souls free to roam the universe?”
“If that is so, then I don’t think they will be coming back. Unless, as we, they wish to visit their childhood home.”
“And where was your childhood home?” Thrayna asked. “Where did you—who were born of Earth, of flesh and blood—metamorphose into beings such as I, who are at one with the stars?”
“Where?”
“Yes, Deradan, where on Earth? And how? How does an Earthman become a star-roamer?”
“I do not know the process except in the vaguest form,” I told her. “Others invented and perfected it. But I think I can find the location of the Box.”
“Let us find the Box,” she said. “What sort of box is it we seek?”
“It is what we called the building that housed the transformation. The Box.”
“Why?”
I tried to remember. Stars had been formed and planets had lost their atmosphere in the intervening years. But the memory was there. Memory is never lost to us, it just becomes progressively more difficult to retrieve, the longer it is dormant. “We called it the Box because it was a great, cubelike structure, isolated in one of the most inaccessible parts of the world.”
“Inaccessible?”
“To us, as we were then.”
“Where was it?”
“In the far south. By the southern pole.”
“Let us go. I would see the box from which you came.”
We lofted and flew south. The southern hemisphere was buried under a new ice age, which looked to be well advanced. In a few moments we were approaching the pole. The Box was still where it had been, clearly visible, resting on the surface of an ice-sheet that must have been miles thicker than when I had last visited.