Fantastic Stories Presents: Science Fiction Super Pack #2. Randall Garrett

immaculateness that seemed excessive in this post-Bohemian circle. There was a decided musical quality to his speech, as he made polite comments upon being introduced to each of us, and an exactness in sentence-structure, word-choices and enunciation that bespoke the foreigner. Jocelyn took him around with the air of conducting a quick tour through a museum, then settled him momentarily with the music group, now in darkest Schoenberg, only partially illuminated by “Wozzek”. I watched Fayliss long enough to solidify an impression that he was at ease here—but not merely in this particular discussion. It was a case of his being simply at ease, period.

      Kutrov was watching him, too, and I saw now that there would be a most-likely permanent digression. Too bad—I’d had a feeling that when he came to his point, it would have been a strong one. “Hungarian, do you suppose?” he asked.

      Alva examined the evidence. Fayliss had high cheekbones, longish eyes, with large pupils. He was lean, without giving an impression of thinness. He had not taken off his gloves, and I wondered if he would come forth with a monocle; if he had, it would not have seemed an affectation.

      “I wouldn’t say Slavic,” Alva said. He started off on ethnology, and we toured the Near East again. I jumped into the break when Kutrov was swallowing beer and Alva lighting a cigaret to observe that Fayliss reminded me of some Egyptian portraits—although I couldn’t set the period. “If those eyes of his don’t shine in the dark,” I added, “they ought to.”

      *

      A BRIEF pause for appreciation, then Jocelyn was calling for all men’s attention. She managed to get it in reasonably short order, took a deep breath, then dived into announcing that our “special guest, Mr. Fayliss” was going to deliver a song-cycle.

      Fayliss arose, bowed slightly, then nodded to Mark Loring, who brought forth his oboe. “These songs were not conceived or composed in the form I am presenting them,” he said. “But I believe that the arrangement I use is an effective one.

      “I call this, ‘Song of the Last Men’.” He nodded again to Loring, and the performance began. His voice was affecting, and his artistry unmistakable. And there were overtones in his voice that gave an added eeriness to the weird music itself.

      The songs told of the feelings, the memories, and despair of a nearly-extinct people—one which had achieved a great culture and a world-wide civilization. The singer knows that the civilization has been destroyed; that the people created by this culture and civilization are gone, the few survivors being pitiful fellaheen, unable to rebuild or bring forth a culture of their own. There is despair at the loss of the comforts the civilization they knew brought them, sorrow at their inability to share in its greatness—even in memory; and a resigned certainty that they are the last of the race—they will soon be gone, and no others shall arise after them.

      There was silence when Fayliss finished, then discreet but firm applause, as if the audience felt that giving full reign to their approval would make an impious racket. Fayliss seemed to sense this feeling, and smiled as he bowed.

      “These are not songs of your people, are they?” asked Jocelyn.

      Fayliss shook his head. “Oh no—they are far removed from us. I am merely an explorer of past cultures and civilizations, and I enjoy adapting such masterpieces of the past as I can find. This arrangement was made for you; I shall make a different one for my own people, so that the sonic values of the music and the words agree with each other.”

      Kutrov blinked, then asked him—“Well, can you tell us something more about the people who created this cycle? It has a familiar ring to it, yet I cannot tie it in with any past culture I have heard of.”

      Jocelyn cut in with the regretful announcement that Mr. Fayliss had another appointment, and called for a note of thanks to him for coming. More applause—this time unrestrained. Fayliss smiled again and swept his eyes around us, as if filled with some amusing secret. Then he said to Kutrov, “You would find them quite understandable.”

      I wandered over to the window, in search of air, and noted that someone had indiscreetly left a comfortable chair vacant. I was near the door, so that I could hear Jocelyn say to Fayliss: “It was—very moving. Why, I could almost feel that you were singing about us.”

      Fayliss smiled again. “That is as it should be.”

      “Of course,” chimed in Loring, who’d come up to ask Fayliss if he could have a copy of the score, “that’s the test of expert performance.”

      The lights were dimmed again by the fog of tobacco smoke, and I could see the street quite clearly by moonlight. I decided I would watch Fayliss, and see if his eyes did glow in the dark. I saw him go down the sidewalk, with that graceful stride of his, his hands in his pockets. But I couldn’t see his eyes at all.

      Then a gust of wind tugged his hat, and, for an instant I thought he’d have to go scrambling after it. But, quick as a rapier thrust, a tail darted out from beneath his dress coat, caught the hat, and set it back upon his head.

      Riya’s Foundling

      By Algis Budrys

       Now, if the animal we know as a cow were to evolve into a creature with near-human intelligence, so that she thought of herself as a “person” ...

      The loft of the feed-house, with its stacked grainsacks, was a B-72, a fort, a foxhole—any number of things, depending on Phildee’s moods.

      Today it was a jumping-off place.

      Phildee slipped out of his dormitory and ran across the yard to the feed-house. He dropped the big wooden latch behind him, and climbed up the ladder to the loft, depending on the slight strength of his young arms more than on his legs, which had to be lifted to straining heights before they could negotiate the man-sized rungs.

      He reached the loft and stood panting, looking out over the farm through the loft door, at the light wooden fences around it, and the circling antenna of the radar tower.

      Usually, he spent at least a little time each day crouched behind the grainsacks and being bigger and older, firing cooly and accurately into charging companies of burly, thick-lipped UES soldiers, or going over on one wing and whistling down on a flight of TT-34's that scattered like frightened ducks before the fiery sleet of his wing rockets.

      But today was different, today there was something he wanted to try.

      He stood up on his toes and searched. He felt the touch of Miss Cowan’s mind, no different from that of anyone else—flat, unsystematic.

      He sighed. Perhaps, somewhere, there was someone else like himself. For a moment, the fright of loneliness invaded him, but then faded. He took a last look at the farm, then moved away from the open door, letting his mind slip into another way of thinking.

      His chubby features twisted into a scowl of concentration as he visualized reality. The scowl became a deeper grimace as he negated that reality, step by step, and substituted another.

       F is for Phildee.

       O is for Out.

       R is for Reimann.

       T is for Topology.

       H is for heartsick hunger.

      Abruptly, the Reimann fold became a concrete visualization. As though printed clearly in and around the air, which was simultaneously both around him and not around him, which existed/not existed in spacetime, he saw the sideslip diagram.

      He twisted.

      *

      Spring had come to Riya’s world; spring and the thousand sounds of it. The melted snow in the mountaintops ran down in traceries of leaping water, and the spring-crests raced along the creeks into the rivers. The riverbank grasses sprang into life; the plains turned green again.

      Riya made her way up the path across the foothills, conscious of her shame.