Short Fiction quotes

Six months and three days after the Peace of Shanghai was signed and the great War of 1965⁠–⁠1970 declared at an end by an exhausted world, a young man huddled on a park bench in New York, staring miserably at the gravel beneath his badly worn shoes.

He had been trained to fill the pilot’s seat in the control cabin of a fighting plane and for nothing else. The search for a niche in civilian life had cost him both health and ambition.

“What’s the proposition?” asked Featherstone wearily.

He no longer believed in luck.

“I’m Gregory Farson,” the other returned as if that should answer the question.

Garin frowned at the map. He wasn’t so sure about that explanation, but Farson was paying the bills. The flyer shrugged away his uneasiness.

Much could be forgiven a man who allowed one to eat regularly again.

Four days later they set out. Helmly, one of the engineers, Rawlson, a pilot, and Farson occupied the first plane. The other engineer and pilot were in the second and Garin, with the extra supplies, was alone in the third.

Urg raised his hand in salute and the door clicked into place. Garin stood alone, pledged to bring the Daughter out of the Caves of Darkness.

There is no night or day in Tav since the blue light is steady.

But the Folk divide their time by artificial means. However Garin, being newly come from the rays of healing, felt no fatigue. As he hesitated, the Ana chattered and pointed confidently ahead.

Before them was a dense wood of fern trees. It was quiet in the forest as Garin made his way into its gloom and for the first time he noted a peculiarity of Tav.

There were no birds.

The portion of the woodland they had to traverse was but a spur of the forest to the west. After an hour of travel they came out upon the bank of a sluggish river. The turbid waters of the stream were a dull saffron color.

“I’ll admit that I love Thrala—have loved her since that moment when I saw her on the steps of the morgel pit in the caves.

Since when has it become a crime to love that which may not be yours⁠—if you do not try to take it?

”

She came straight from her cushions into his arms when she read what was in his face. They needed no words.

And in that hour began Garin’s life in Tav.

The stairway to Asti’s Temple was plain enough to see and there would be those to essay the steep climb hoping to find a treasure which did not exist. For

Asti was an austere God, delighting in plain walls and bare altars.

His last priest had lain in the grave niches these three years, there would be none to hold that gate against intruders.

“Memphir was old. But mayhap there were those who raised cities on Erb before the first hut of Memphir squatted on tidal mud.

Men forget knowledge in time.

Even in Memphir the lords of the last days forgot the wisdom of their earlier sages—they fell before the barbarians easily enough.”

Her hands touched the scaled skin of the suit she still wore and then rubbed across her own smooth flesh. Could one have come from the other, was she of the blood and heritage of Lur?

“Not so!” Lur’s mind, as quick as his flickering tongue, had caught that panic-born thought.

“You are of the blood of this space wanderer. Men from the riven colonies must have escaped to safety. Look at this man, is he not like the men of Memphir—as they were in the olden days of the city’s greatness?”

But to me it appears that Asti is not yet done with the pattern He was weaving there. To each of you He granted a second life.

Do not disdain the Gifts of Asti, Daughter of Erb!

”

Only this Steena was no glamour babe. She was as colorless as a Lunar plant—even the hair netted down to her skull had a sort of grayish cast and I never saw her but once draped in anything but a shapeless and baggy gray spaceall.

Steena was strictly background stuff and that is where she mostly spent her free hours⁠—in the smelly smoky background corners of any stellar-port dive frequented by free spacers.

If you really looked for her you could spot her—just sitting there listening to the talk—listening and remembering. She didn’t open her own mouth often. But when she did spacers had learned to listen.