The Best of Science Fiction 12

"I had thought," I said, "that I might go on display. Yes, the carnival, the circus, no matter how small ... "

But the fisheye had already given its answer.

"I suppose," said Number Two, "that you would like me to see that a proper suit is made, the beginnings of tights and a brocade ... vest, shall we call it? Pink or blue? No, let's make it gold or silver with touches of red. I can sew it up myself out of silk and satin and, if you like, with little white wings to give the feeling of lightness to it all. Would you like them on the shoulder blades or buttocks?"

And she'll do it. I know she will and it will be better than I could possibly have conceived it myself, luminous as a peacock, gay as Santa Claus. I know Miss Number Two. Somehow, instinctively, she will touch the seed of my inner dream and make it grow into something greater than itself. Such work she will put into it! A month of hours. She'll hang it upon my wall and, with great joy, I'll dream of myself wearing it. I will grow old, leaning at my reading stand and dreaming, I know I will.

Then one day I will ask Mrs. Number One to put the suit on me. I will try (at least try, but she does have ways ... warm water and such) to withhold all else until she does, and then I'll know if it really fits or only seems to.

One of the odder words just now is hero, which has virtually turned itself inside out. The anti-hero is not just a literary device but a sociological phenomenon. In fiction, the only really bouncy types seem to be the Conans and Elrics — the figures of 'heroic fantasy.' In real life, the 'activist' heroes are actually anti-villians — the violence kids, Hell's Angels, Stokely and Rap. (Or is Dr. Spock the anti-villain, breaking the law by stepping carefully over a police barrier under the eyes of hundreds of carefully motionless police?) Even the natural heroes of our age — the astronauts-in-armour on their flaming charges — are committed to a sit-still stay-in-place talk don't-act performance. Indeed, the closer we get to the actuality of space travel (and we are very close; the less the prospect seems to inflame the public imagination; instead not just popular, but even scientific, interest in UFO's and flying saucers has been considerably renewed in the past two years.

Let them come to us: don't break security.

Translated by Michael Hamburger

01 15 24 P: This is Friendship Seven. I'll try to describe what I'm in here. I am in a big mass of some very small particles that are brilliantly lit up like they're luminescent. I never saw anything like it. They round a little [sic]; they're coming by the capsule, and they look like stars. A whole shower of them coming by.

01 15 57 P: They swirl around the capsule and go in front of the window and they're all brilliantly lighted. They probably average may be seven or eight feet apart, but I can see them all down below me, also.

01 16 06 CC: Roger, Friendship Seven. Can you hear any impact with the capsule? Over.

01 16 10 P: Negative, negative. They're very slow; they're not going away from me more than maybe three or four miles per hour. They're going at the same speed I am approximately. They're only very slightly under my speed. Over.

01 16 33 P: They do, they do have a different motion, though, from me because they swirl around the capsule and then depart back the way I am looking.

01 16 46 P: Are you receiving? Over.

01 16 55 P: There are literally thousands of them.

01 17 16 P: This is Friendship Seven. Am I in contact with anyone? Over.

(John Glenn, transcript of first orbital 'Mercury' flight, in The Coming of the Space Age.)

Two glass panes with dirt between and little tunnels from cell to cell: when I was a kid I had an ant-colony.

But once some of our four-to-six-year-olds built an ecologarium with six-foot plastic panels and grooved aluminium bar to hold corners and top down. They put it out on the sand.

There was a mud puddle against one wall so you could see what was going on under water. Sometimes segment worms crawling through the reddish earth hit the side so their tunnels were visible for a few inches. In hot weather the inside of the plastic got coated with mist and droplets. The small round leaves on the litmus vines changed from blue to pink, blue to pink as clouds coursed the sky and the pH of the photosensitive soil shifted slightly.

The kids would run out before dawn and belly down naked in the cool sand with their chins on the backs of their hands and stare in the half-dark till the red mill wheel of Sigma lifted over the bloody sea. The sand was maroon then, and the flowers of the crystal plants looked like rubies in the dim light of the giant sun. Up the beach the jungle would begin to whisper while somewhere an ani-wort would start warbling. The kids would giggle and poke each other and crowd closer.

Then Sigma-prime, the second member of the binary, would flare like thermite on the water, and crimson clouds would bleach from coral, through peach, to foam. The kids, half on top of each other, lay like a pile of copper ingots with sun streaks in their hair — even on little Antoni, my oldest, whose hair was black and curly like bubbling oil (like his mother's), the down on the small of his two-year-old back was a white haze across the copper if you looked that close to see.

More children came to squat and lean on their knees, or kneel with their noses an inch from the walls, to watch, like young magicians, as things were born, grew, matured, and other things were born. Enchanted at their own construction, they stared at the miracles in their live museum.

A small, red seed lay camouflaged in the silt by the lake/puddle. One evening as white Sigma-prime left the sky violet, it broke open into a brown larva as long and of the same colour as the first joint of Antoni's thumb. It flipped and swirled in the mud a couple of days, then crawled to the first branch of the nearest crystal plant to hang exhausted, head down from the tip. The brown flesh hardened, thickened, grew black, shiny. Then one morning the children saw the onyx chrysalis crack, and by second dawn there was an emerald-eyed flying lizard buzzing at the plastic panels.