Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 2

The music I had heard before, but only in overture.

The Arachnid had grown to three times its size. It towered nine feet high out of the shattered lid of the control tank, leaves tumid and inflamed, its calyx as large as a bucket, raging insanely.

Arched forward into it, her head thrown back, was Jane.

I ran over to her, my eyes filling with light, and grabbed her arm, trying to pull her away from it.

“Jane!” I shouted over the noise. “Get down!”

She flung my hand away. In her eyes, fleetingly, was a look of shame.

While I was sitting on the stairs in the entrance Tony and Harry drove up.

“Where’s Jane?” Harry asked. “Has anything happened to her? We were down at the Casino.” They both turned toward the music. “What the hell’s going on?”

Tony peered at me suspiciously. “Steve, anything wrong?”

Harry dropped the bouquet he was carrying and started toward the rear entrance.

“Harry!” I shouted after him. “Get back!”

Tony held my shoulder. “Is Jane in there?”

I caught them as they opened the door into the shop.

“Good God!” Harry yelled. “Let go of me, you fool!” He struggled to get away from me. “Steve, it’s trying to kill her!”

I jammed the door shut and held them back.

I never saw Jane again. The three of us waited in my apartment. When the music died away we went down and found the shop in darkness. The Arachnid had shrunk to its normal size.

The next day it died.

Where Jane went to I don’t know. Not long afterward the Recess ended, and the big government schemes came along and started up all the clocks and kept us too busy working off the lost time to worry about a few bruised petals. Harry told me that Jane had been seen on her way through Red Beach, and I heard recently that someone very like her was doing the nightclubs this side out of Pernambuco.

So if any of you around there keep a choro-florist’s and have a Khan-Arachnid orchid, look out for a golden-skinned woman with insects for eyes. Perhaps she’ll play i-Go with you, and I’m sorry to have to say it, but she’ll always cheat.

How do you put together on anthology?

I read. When I find a story I like, I mark it for re-reading. (The Merril Theory of Lit’ry Criticism is simple: any story I can’t enjoy as much the second—or fourth—time as the first does not deserve to be printed more than once.)

But once in a while I finish a story with no mental reservations whatsoever. “The Other Man” was a good bit longer than I wanted, but my immediate response was to reach for the phone and find out for sure whether rights would be available.

Sturgeon was hesitant. Seems there was another one— and just half as long—he wanted me to see first. When I read it (“And Now the News . . .”) I appreciated his uncertainty, and cursed my own. If Tony Boucher had not made up my mind for me, by selecting the shorter story for his own anthology, I might be sitting there yet, looking from one to the other. . . .

When he saw her again, he all but yelled—a wordless, painful bleat, one concentrated syllable to contain five years of loneliness, fury, self-revilement and that agony peculiar to the victim of “the other man.” Yet he controlled it, throwing it with a practiced reflex to a tensing of his abdomen and the transient knotting of thigh muscles behind the desk, letting the impact strike as it should, unseen.

Outwardly, he was controlled. It was his job to know the language of eyelids, jaw muscles, lips, and it was his special skill to make them mute. He rose slowly as his nurse ushered her in and while she took the three short paces to meet him. He studied her with an impassive ferocity.

He might have imagined her in old clothes, or in cheap clothes. Here she was in clothes which were both. He had allowed, in his thoughts of her, for change, but he had not thought her nose might have been broken, nor that she might be so frighteningly thin. He had thought she would always walk like something wild . . . free, rather . . . but with stateliness, too, balanced and fine. And indeed she still did so; somehow that hurt him more than anything else could.

She stopped before the desk. He moved his hands behind him; her gaze was on them and he wanted her to look up. He waited until Miss Jarrell discreetly clicked the door shut.

“Osa,” he said at last.

“Well, Fred.”

The silence became painful. How long did that take—two seconds, three? He made a meaningless sound, part of a laugh, and came around the desk to shift the chair beside it. “Sit down, for heaven’s sake.”

She sat down and abruptly, for the first time since she had entered the office, she looked directly at him. “You look— you look well, Fred.”

“Thanks.” He sat down. He wanted to say something, but the only thing that would come readily to his lips was: “You’re looking well, too”—such a patent lie that he couldn’t tell it. And at last he found something else to say: “A lot has happened.”

She nodded and her gaze found a corner of the tooled-leather blotter frame on the desk. She studied it quietly.

“Five years,” she said.

Five years in which she must have known everything about him, at first because such a separation is never sharp, but ragged, raveled, a-crackle with the different snaps of different threads at different times; and later, because all the world knew what he was, what he had done. What he stood for.

For him, five years at first filled with a not-Osa, like a sheet of paper from which one has cut a silhouette; and after that, the diminishing presence of Osa as gossip (so little of that, because anyone directly involved in gossip walks usually in a bubble of silence); Osa as rumor, Osa as conjecture. He had heard that Richard Newell had lost—left—his job about the time he had won Osa, and he had never heard of him working again.

Glancing at Osa’s cheap clothes now, and the new small lines in her face, he concluded that whatever Newell had found to do, it could not have been much. Newell, he thought bitterly, is a man God made with only one victory in him and he’s used it up.

“Will you help me?” Osa asked stridently.

He thought, Was I waiting for this? Is this some sort of reward, her coming to me for help? Once he might have thought so. At the moment, he did not feel rewarded.

He sat looking at her question as if it were a tangible object, a box of a certain size, a certain shape, made of some special material, which was not to be opened until he had guessed its contents.

Will you help me? Money? Hardly—Osa may have lost a great deal, but her towering pride was still with her. Besides, money settles nothing. A little is never enough and helps only until it is gone. A little more puts real solutions a bit further into the future. A whole lot buries the real problem, where it lives like a cancer or a carcinogen.

Not money, then. Perhaps a job? For her? No, he knew her well. She could get her own jobs. She had not, therefore she didn’t want one. This could only mean she lived as she did for Newell’s sake. Oh, yes, he would be the provider, even if the illusion starved her.

Then a job for Newell? Didn’t she know he couldn’t be trusted with any responsible job and was not constituted to accept anything less? Of course she knew it.

All of which left only one thing. She must be sure, too, that Newell would accept the idea or she would not be here asking.

He said, “How soon can he start therapy?”

She flickered, all over and all at once, as if he had touched her with a high voltage electrode—the first and only indication she had evinced of the terrible tensions she carried. Then she raised her head, her face lit with something beyond words, something big enough, bright enough, to light and warm the world. His world. She tried to speak.