Iterations by Robert J. Sawyer
Cohen savored the terrified squealing. He wallowed in the sensation of the animal, mad with fear, moving inside that living prison.
And at last, with a great, glorious release, Cohen put the animal out of its misery, allowing the rex to swallow it, the furball tickling as it slid down the giant’s throat.
It was just like old times.
Just like hunting humans.
And then a wonderful thought occurred to Cohen. Why, if he killed enough of these little screaming balls of fur, they wouldn’t have any descendants. There wouldn’t ever be any Homo sapiens. In a very real sense, Cohen realized he was hunting humans—every single human being who would ever exist.
Of course, a few hours wouldn’t be enough time to kill many of them. Judge Hoskins no doubt thought it was wonderfully poetic justice, or she wouldn’t have allowed the transfer: sending him back to fall into the pit, damned.
Stupid judge. Why, now that he could control the beast, there was no way he was going to let it die young. He’d just—
There it was. The fissure, a long gash in the earth, with a crumbling edge. Damn, it was hard to see. The shadows cast by neighboring trees made a confusing gridwork on the ground that obscured the ragged opening. No wonder the dull-witted rex had missed seeing it until it was too late.
But not this time.
Turn left, thought Cohen.
Left.
His rex obeyed.
He’d avoid this particular area in future, just to be on the safe side. Besides, there was plenty of territory to cover. Fortunately, this was a young rex—a juvenile. There would be decades in which to continue his very special hunt. Cohen was sure that Axworthy knew his stuff: once it became apparent that the link had lasted longer than a few hours, he’d keep any attempt to pull the plug tied up in the courts for years.
Cohen felt the old pressure building in himself, and in the rex. The tyrannosaur marched on.
This was better than old times, he thought. Much better.
Hunting all of humanity.
The release would be wonderful.
He watched intently for any sign of movement in the underbrush.
The Contest
Author’s Introduction
This is the oldest story in the book. It was written in November 1978—my last year in high school—for my English teacher William Martyn, a man who encouraged me enormously and remains a friend to this day. The story was first published (for no pay) in 1980 in White Wall Review, the literary journal put out by Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, edited that year by Ed Greenwood, who went on to be a major force in Dungeons and Dragons. (I was a student at Ryerson from 1979 to 1982, and co-edited White Wall Review myself in 1982).
In 1982, I sold reprint rights to Isaac Asimov, Terry Carr, and Martin H. Greenberg for their anthology 100 Great Fantasy Short Short Stories—and this time I was paid!
In 1985, I wrote and narrated three hour-long documentaries about science fiction for CBC Radio’s Ideas series; for that project, I got to interview Asimov in his Manhattan penthouse. I brought along just one book for him to sign: not one of his famous novels, but rather a copy of 100 Great Fantasy Short Short Stories, the book that contained this, my first professional fiction publication.
The Contest
“It’s getting too much for me,” said the leader of the Party in Power, his voice thundering through the sky. “I propose a simple contest, winner take all.”
“Oh?” replied the leader of the Opposition, the syllable materializing as a puff of flame. “This intrigues me. The terms?”
“We select a mutually agreeable subject, an average man, and measure his tendencies toward our respective sides. The party whose ideology he leans to will gain custody of the species for all time. I’m getting too old to fight over each individual with you. Do you agree to the contest?”
“It sounds like a Hell of an idea.”
“It is done, then.”
John Smith was, of course, the perfect choice. He was of average height and average weight, of average intellect and income. Even his name was average. He went to work that morning just another one of four billion people, but, during his lunch hour, he became the sole object of attention of two great minds.
“Aha!” proclaimed the leader of the Party in Power, whom henceforth we shall call G. “Observe his generosity: his gratuity is over twenty percent of the total bill. My point.”
“Not so fast,” interposed the leader of the Opposition, D. “Look into his mind for his motive. The magnitude of the tip is intended to impress the buxom secretary he is dining with. His wife, I suspect, would not approve. The point is mine.”
John Smith left the table with his secretary and proceeded through the streets to their place of employment. Catching sight of a matronly woman ahead soliciting donations for a worthwhile charity, he crossed the road early.
“Generosity, you said?” D smiled. “My point.”
Returning to his office ten minutes late, Smith settled to his work. His secretary buzzed him to say that his wife was on the phone.
“Tell her I’m in a meeting,” Smith commanded.
“Three zip,” said D.
Smith next entered his purely personal luncheon date on his company expense account.
“You’re lagging behind,” said D, satisfied. “I would say he is a staunch supporter of my party. Four.”
“Perhaps,” said G, “perhaps.”
At 4:50, Smith left his office to go home. “Don’t worry. I won’t count that against him,” said D, comfortable in his lead.
On the subway, Smith read over the shoulder of the man sitting beside him, averting his eyes from the old woman standing nearby.
“Five.”
Walking from the subway station to his house, he threw a candy bar wrapper onto his neighbor’s lawn.
“Is littering a sin?” asked D.
“I’m not sure,” allowed G.
“It’s unimportant. The outcome is inevitable.”
Entering his house, Smith called a greeting to his fat wife and sat down to read the newspaper before dinner. His wife asked him to take the dog for a walk before they ate. He left something else on his neighbor’s lawn this time.
“Well, I’m certainly entitled to a point for that,” said D.
“Crudity. Six to nothing.”
“Perhaps a more definitive test?”
“For instance?”
D waved his red arms and screams rose from an alley near Smith. “Help! Somebody help!” D chalked up another point as Smith turned deliberately away from the noise. G sent a police officer running past Smith.
“Did you hear anything?” shouted the cop.
“No. I don’t want to be involved.”
G frowned. D smiled.
Smith headed quickly back to his house, hurrying up the driveway as he heard the phone ringing. “It’s for you,” called out his wife.
He picked up the receiver. “Why, Christopher! I’ll be damned!”
“Would you care to play the best two out of three?” sighed G.
Stream of Consciousness
Winner of the Aurora Award
for Best Short Story of the Year
Author’s Introduction
Julie E. Czerneda is one of Canada’s newest, and best, SF novelists, but she has also worked for years in educational publishing. She commissioned me to write a biologically themed short story for an anthology that would be used to teach science through science fiction; the book, eventually entitled Packing Fraction, also contained stories by Julie, Charles Sheffield, Josepha Sherman, and Jan Stirling, plus poetry by my wife Carolyn Clink and illustrations by my friend Larry Stewart. Sudbury, Ontario, where this story is set, went on to feature prominently in my Neanderthal Parallax novels.
Stream of Consciousness
The roar of the helicopter blades pounded in Raji’s ears—he wished the university could afford a hoverjet. The land below was rugged Canadian shield. Pine trees grew where there was soil; li
There! A path through the wilderness, six meters wide and perhaps half a kilometer long: trees knocked over, shield rocks scraped clean, and, at the end of it—
Incredible. Absolutely incredible.
A large dark-blue object, shaped like an arrowhead.
Raji pointed, and the pilot, Tina Chang, banked the copter to take it in the direction he was indicating. Raji thumbed the control for his microphone. “We’ve found it,” he said, shouting to be heard above the noise of the rotor. “And it’s no meteorite.” As the copter got closer, Raji could see that the front of the arrowhead was smashed in. He paused, unsure what to say next. Then: “I think we’re going to need the air ambulance from Sudbury.”
Raji Sahir was an astronomer with Laurentian University. He hadn’t personally seen the fireball that streaked across the Ontario sky last night, flanked by northern lights, but calls about it had flooded the university. He’d hoped to recover a meteorite intact; meteors were a particular interest of his, which is why he’d come to Sudbury from Vancouver twenty years ago, in 1999. Sudbury was situated on top of an ancient iron-nickel meteorite; the city’s economy had traditionally been based on mining this extraterrestrial metal.
The helicopter set down next to the dark-blue arrowhead. There could be no doubt: it was a spaceship, with its hull streamlined for reentry. On its port side were white markings that must have been lettering, but they were rendered in an alphabet of triangular characters unlike anything Raji had ever seen before.
Raji was cross-appointed to the biology department; he taught a class called “Life on Other Worlds,” which until this moment had been completely theoretical. He and Tina clambered out of the copter, and they moved over to the landing craft. Raji had a Geiger counter with him; he’d expected to use it on a meteorite, but he waved it over the ship’s hull as he walked around it. The clicks were infrequent; nothing more than normal background radiation.
When he got to the pointed bow of the lander, Raji gasped. The damage was even more severe than it looked from above. The ship’s nose was caved in and crumpled, and a large, jagged fissure was cut deep into the hull. If whatever lifeforms were inside didn’t already breathe Earthlike air, they were doubtless dead. And, of course, if the ship carried germs dangerous to life on Earth, well, they were already free and in the air, too. Raji found himself holding his breath, and—
“Professor!”
It was Tina’s voice. Raji hurried over to her. She was pointing at a rectangular indentation in the hull, set back about two centimeters. In its center was a circular handle.
A door.
“Should we go inside?” asked Tina.
Raji looked up at the sky. Still no sign of the air ambulance. He thought for a moment, then nodded: “First, though, please get the camcorder from the helicopter.”
The woman nodded, hustled off to the chopper, and returned a moment later. She turned on the camera, and Raji leaned in to examine the door’s handle. It was round, about twenty centimeters across. A raised bar with fluted edges crossed its equator. Raji thought perhaps the fluting was designed to allow fingers to grip it—but, if so, it had been built for a six-fingered hand.
He grasped the bar, and began to rotate it. After he’d turned it through 180 degrees, there was a sound like four gunshots. Raji’s heart jumped in his chest, but it must have been restraining bolts popping aside; the door panel—shorter and wider than a human door—was suddenly free, and falling forward toward Raji. Tina surged in to help Raji lift it aside and set it on the ground. The circular handle was likely an emergency way of opening the panel. Normally, it probably slid aside into the ship’s hull; Raji could see a gap on the right side of the opening that looked like it would have accommodated the door.
Raji and Tina stepped inside. Although the outer hull was opaque, the inner hull seemed transparent—Raji could see the gray-blue sky vaulting overhead. Doubtless there were all kinds of equipment in between the outer and inner hulls, so the image was perhaps conveyed inside via bundles of fibre optics, mapping points on the exterior to points on the interior. There was plenty of light; Raji and Tina followed the short corridor from the door into the ship’s main habitat, where—
Tina gasped.
Raji felt his eyes go wide.
There was an alien being, dead or unconscious, slumped over in a bowl-shaped chair in the bow of the ship. The fissure Raji had seen outside came right through here as a wide gap in the hull; a cool breeze was blowing in from outside.
Raji rushed over to the strange creature. There was, at once, no doubt in his mind that this creature had come from another world. It was clearly a vertebrate—it had rigid limbs, covered over with a flexible greenish-gray hide. But every vertebrate on Earth had evolved from the same basic body plan, an ancestral creature with sensory organs clustered around the head, and four limbs. Oh, there were creatures that had subsequently dispensed with some or all of the limbs, but there were no terrestrial vertebrates with more than four.
But this creature had six limbs, in three pairs. Raji immediately thought of the ones at the top of the tubular torso as arms, and the much thicker ones at the bottom as legs. But he wasn’t sure what the ones in the middle, protruding halfway between hips and shoulders, should be called. They were long enough that if the creature bent over, they could serve as additional legs, but they ended in digits complex and supple enough that it seemed they could also be used as hands.
Raji counted the digits—there were indeed six at the end of each limb. Earth’s ancestral vertebrate had five digits, not six, and no Earthly animal had ever evolved with more than five. The alien’s digits were arranged as four fingers flanked on either side by an opposable thumb.
The alien also had a head protruding above the shoulders—at least that much anatomy it shared with terrestrial forms. But the head seemed ridiculously small for an intelligent creature. Overall, the alien had about the same bulk as Raji himself did, but its head was only the size of a grapefruit. There were two things that might have been eyes covered over by lids that closed from either side, instead of from the top and bottom. There were two ears, as well, but they were located on top of the head, and were triangular in shape, like the ears of a fox.
The head had been badly banged up. Although the alien was strapped into its seat, a large hunk of hull material had apparently hit it, cutting into one side of its head; the debris that had likely done the damage was now lying on the floor behind the being’s chair. Interestingly, though, the head wound showed no signs of bleeding: the edges of it were jagged but dry.
At first Raji could see nothing that might be a mouth, but then he looked more closely at the middle limbs. In the center of each circular palm was a large opening—perhaps food was drawn in through these. In place of peristalsis, perhaps the creature flexed its arms to move its meals down into the torso.
Assuming, of course, that the alien was still alive. So far, it hadn’t moved or reacted to the presence of the two humans in any way.
Raji placed his hand over one of the medial palms, to see if he could detect breath being expelled. Nothing. If the creature still breathed, it wasn’t through its mouths. Still, the creature’s flesh was warmer than the surrounding air—meaning it was probably warm blooded, and, if dead, hadn’t been dead very long.
A thought occurred to Raji. If the breathing orifices weren’t on the middle hands, maybe they were on the upper hands. He looked at one of the upper hands, spreading the semi-clenched fingers. The fingers seemed to be jointed in many more places than human fingers were.
Once he’d spread the fingers, he could see that there were holes about a centimeter in diameter in the center of each palm. Air was indeed alternately being drawn in and expelled through these—Raji could feel that with his own hand.
“It’s alive,” he said excitedly. As he looked up, he saw the air ambulanc
The ambulance attendants were a white man named Bancroft and a Native Canadian woman named Cardinal. Raji met them at the entrance to the downed ship.
Bancroft looked absolutely stunned. “Is this—is this what I think it is?”
Raji was grinning from ear to ear. “It is indeed.”
“Who’s injured?” asked Cardinal.
“The alien pilot,” said Raji.
Bancroft’s jaw dropped, but Cardinal grinned. “Sounds fascinating.” She hustled over to the hoverjet and got a medical kit.
The three of them went inside. Raji led them to the alien; Tina had remained with it. She had the palm of her hand held about five centimeters in front of one of the alien’s breathing holes. “Its respiration is quite irregular,” she said, “and it’s getting more shallow.”
Raji looked anxiously at the two ambulance attendants.
“We could give it oxygen…” suggested Bancroft tentatively.
Raji considered. Oxygen only accounted for 21% of Earth’s atmosphere. Nitrogen, which makes up 78%, was almost inert—it was highly unlikely that N2 was the gas the alien required. Then again, plants took in carbon dioxide and gave off oxygen—perhaps giving it oxygen would be a mistake.
No, thought Raji. No energetic life forms had ever appeared on Earth that breathed carbon dioxide; oxygen was simply a much better gas for animal physiology. It seemed a safe bet that if the alien were indeed gasping, it was O2 that it was gasping for. He motioned for the ambulance attendants to proceed.
Cardinal got a cylinder of oxygen, and Bancroft moved in to stand near the alien. He held the face mask over one of the alien’s palms, and Cardinal opened the valve on the tank.
Raji had been afraid the creature’s palm orifices would start spasming, as if coughing at poisonous gas, but they continued to open and close rhythmically. The oxygen, at least, didn’t seem to be hurting the being.