Laurence Janifer: Poems are Made by Fools Like Me

Rocket Central—a clearing among several glades—was a quarter of a mile ahead when I stopped, sat down with a carefully inaudible sigh of relief, and began to put some of the weaponry in order. There is a great deal to be said for weapons not marked Some Assembly Required, but if you have to carry the damned things before use, you may not have many options. I owned a medium-range beamer assembly, complete with sights so complicated they were almost useless, and a bomb-thrower our ancestors would have called a Bazooka, though why a bomb-thrower would be named for a chewing-gum I have never really figured out.

The beamer sights were good for one thing without being hooked up; they could tell me if there was a rocket in residence a quarter of a mile away. The damned thing had to be hot, even after the hour or so it had been waiting, and it certainly wasn’t made of the same things as the trees, animals or dirt of the planet. Not unless Tree was much, much stranger than the drones had been telling me.

I set the sights up (a five-minute job, and I wonder whether anybody, at any time, has needed to use a medium-range beamer assembly, and has actually had the five minutes to set up its sights properly) and took one peek, and there it was, sitting in its clearing as if it had never even thought of flying over and trying to pot me. It had an innocent look hung on its nose, and I wanted very badly to rush out and paste it one.

Instead, I set up the Bazooka, aimed it very carefully, and fired. There was a hell of a noise, the Bazooka went backward about four inches in hard ground, and a smoking arc went through the edge of my glade and landed at the far edge of Rocket Central, maybe fifteen feet from the rocket.

I worried for a second that I’d cut it too fine, and damaged the damned thing, but it was a strong, spirited little rocket. It swayed a little on the ground, and then, when the explosion had come and gone, it started moving.

It didn’t rise up in the air. It just started turning, fairly rapidly, as if it were trying to screw itself into the dirt. What it was doing, I saw, was hunting for the vengeful fellow who had tried to shoot it.

I wasn’t, of course, hard to find. The rocket homed in on me, stopped its turning slowly, came round about eight more degrees, and opened a port up near the nose. The barrel of something or other poked a little way through the port, and wavered up and down for a second or two.

Then it fired. It missed the Bazooka by about two feet, because I had been crouched just about two feet from it.

By the time the shot arrived, I was three feet the other side of my weapon. I watched the ammunition expend itself against a yellow-tan tree, one of the bigger ones, and the tree didn’t explode; it just sighed and disappeared. Apparently it had become impalpable dust, carried away by the air.

An extremely nasty rocket. I could have crouched where I’d been and let the beam or whatever it was bounce off me, but there’s such a thing as boasting. Better, anyhow, to have the damned thing miss me; that way it would keep on trying, and I would find out a bit more.

I had most of my instrumentation trained on the rocket by then, and it was reading out heat changes, attitude changes, composition of rocket, a variety of interior scans of the thing, and so on. The rocket, having missed with its first shot, took a second, and this time it hit the Bazooka, which collapsed almost as fast as the tree had disappeared. It had been shredded.

The Bazooka had not been made out of Tree-wood. The rocket was shooting large bundles of very small circular saws, as I could tell from the tinkly clatter of their landing, and a few slow-motion bounces here and there—and the teeth on those blades were something very powerful indeed.

My readouts, meanwhile, were telling me something I did not want to believe. There really was some sort of being inside that rocket.

Second by second, the interior readout refined itself. The being inside of it looked human: two arms, two legs, head, torso, all in what seemed normal proportion. I began to wonder just how detailed the scan could get, and as the figure in the rocket—a figure small enough to move around a little in there, despite all the machinery!—got more and more human I switched the readout a bit to focus in on the head and shoulders.

Maybe I would recognize the fellow.

Maybe, on the other hand, it would turn out to be Little Red Riding Hood. Or Captain Nemo.

The rocket fired once more, missing everything except the air above the shredded Bazooka. Then it cleared its throat, the gun disappeared and the port closed, and another port, further down on the rocket, opened. This time what came out was a puff of black smoke.

Poison gas?

The smoke rolled slowly toward me just at the level of the button-grass, which turned an instant deep brown and seemed to go limp.

I did not hesitate. I got up, abandoning my heavy weaponry and some of the instruments, and ran like a frightened deer. I didn’t think I had much of a chance, but I wasn’t stopping to assess odds, I was running, and running took all my attention.

Pretty soon I was in a forest instead of a glade, puffing and blowing—and covered with sweat—and the black smoke was nowhere to be seen. Apparently, I told myself, it had a nice short lifetime, dissipating or somehow mixing with Tree’s air pretty quickly. Or else it had just used itself up on button-grass, small animals, and anything else available.

I was, apparently, safe once more, and on my way back to the comforts of my log cabin.

I was also on my way to do some very hard thinking, because I had seen the face of the rocket’s operator, if that’s what he was, very plainly in those final two or three seconds.

I’d recognized him, all right. He was Gerald Knave, Survivor—but (if you remember the old, old joke) quite a bit smaller.

Very well: I was dreaming. Soon I would wake up in my Key West Cabin, to find out that all the limes were dead. Or I would wake up somewhere else, to find out that my entire life had been a dream, and that I was, perhaps, eight years old.

Or, of course, not.

It began to occur to me, as I made my way back to my log cabin, that somebody really hated me. Somebody wanted me dead, and was doing a very earnest job of making wishes come true. How this involved a miniature Gerald Knave I had no idea, but that had to be a necessary piece of the puzzle; nobody would add it in as an afterthought, especially since the miniature was, under normal circumstances, invisible to its target.

No, there had to be a very good reason for the miniature to be Gerald Knave’s miniature. My only thought at that moment, as I opened the log cabin door and more or less fell inside, shutting and sealing the door as I fell, was a brief one, labeled sympathetic magic.

The miniature, in other words, was some sort of doll or copy of me, meant to do me very special harm because it had my qualities. Someone had stolen bits of my skin or hair or fingernails, and used the bits in making the miniature, and that gave the miniature some sort of creepy and uncanny power over me (perhaps only over my remaining skin, hair or fingernails, to be sure).

There were actually people who believed that sort of thing, back not too many centuries. I’m sure that there are people somewhere in the Comity who still believe it, because there are always people, somewhere, who will believe anything you can even vaguely imagine, and forty or fifty things you’d have sworn you couldn’t. Mother Nature does indeed get exceptionally weird now and then, but she is not even a patch on human nature, after all.

The trouble with feeling superior to the sympathetic magic people was that, while I truly didn’t want to add sympathetic m. to my own little library of possibilities, I didn’t have anything else around that seemed any more plausible.