For some time I lay on my back, smoking, watching the lightning make shadows on the ceiling. We had eaten all the foie gras and drunk one bottle of champagne. I thought of opening the brandy, but decided against it, with regret.
A long time passed. I’m not sure what I thought about. I didn’t sleep, but certainly my mind was in idle. It only gradually came to me that the ceiling, between lightning flashes, had turned gray.
I rolled over, gingerly, soggily. Everything was wet.
My watch said it was nine-thirty.
I crawled around the partition into the living room. I’d been ignoring the storm sounds for so long that it took a faceful of warm whipping rain to remind me. There was a hurricane going on. But charcoal-gray light was filtering through the black clouds.
So. I was right to have saved the brandy. Flood, storms, intense radiation, fires lit by the flare—if the toll of destruction was as high as I expected, then money was about to become worthless. We would need trade goods.
I was hungry. I ate two eggs and some bacon—still warm—and started putting the rest of the food away. We had food for a week, maybe . . . but hardly a balanced diet. Maybe we could trade with other apartments. This was a big building. There must be empty apartments, too, that we could raid for canned soup and the like. And refugees from the lower floors to be taken care of, if the waters rose high enough . . .
Damn! I missed the nova. Life had been simplicity itself last night. Now . . . Did we have medicines? Were there doctors in the building? There would be dysentery and other plagues. And hunger. There was a supermarket near here; could we find a scuba rig in the building?
But I’d get some sleep first. Later we could start exploring the building. The day had become a lighter charcoal gray. Things could be worse, far worse. I thought of the radiation that must have sleeted over the far side of the world, and wondered if our children would colonize Europe, or Asia, or Africa.
The Media Generation
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
Sandkings
George R. R. Martin’s varied output is divided among science fiction, fantasy, and horror and has earned him multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards as well as the Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association. Much of his best writing runs to novella length, where the scope of the narrative allows exploration of a variety of themes and ideas that cut across genre boundaries. “Sandkings” treats in a futuristic setting an idea as old as the horror classic Frankenstein: the irresponsibility of a man who plays at being God, and the peril he faces when his monster turns on him. “Nightflyers,” adapted for the screen in 1987, sets a haunted house scenario inside an interstellar spaceship. “A Song for Lya” explores the religious beliefs of an extraterrestrial culture as an outgrowth of its unique biology. “Meathouse Man” is one of several stories in which he puts a science fiction spin on the classic horror theme of the zombie. Martin began publishing fiction in 1971. His first novel, Dying of the Light, was published six years later and garnered praise for its detailed portrait of an extraterrestrial culture shaped by the singular nature of the planet it inhabits. Nearly all of Martin’s novels are distinguished by their meticulously conceived backgrounds. Fevre Dream, a period vampire tale, offers a vivid re-creation of life on the Mississippi River in the antebellum South. The Armageddon Rag evokes the American counterculture of the 1960s in its account of a rock band whose music channels the destructive energies and chaos of the time. A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords comprise the first three episodes in his epic Song of Ice and Fire heroic fantasy saga. Martin has also written the novel Wind-haven in collaboration with Lisa Tuttle. His short fiction has been collected in A Song for Lya and Other Stories, Songs the Dead Men Sing, Portraits of His Children, and Tuf Voyaging. He has written for a number of television series, including the new Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast, and edited more than twenty anthologies, including fifteen mosaic novels in the Wild Cards series.
SIMON KRESS LIVED alone in a sprawling manor house among the dry, rocky hills fifty kilometers from the city. So, when he was called away unexpectedly on business, he had no neighbors he could conveniently impose on to take his pets. The carrion hawk was no problem; it roosted in the unused belfry and customarily fed itself anyway. The shambler Kress simply shooed outside and left to fend for itself; the little monster would gorge on slugs and birds and rockjocks. But the fish tank, stocked with genuine Earth piranha, posed a difficulty. Kress finally just threw a haunch of beef into the huge tank. The piranha could always eat each other if he were detained longer than expected. They’d done it before. It amused him.
Unfortunately, he was detained much longer than expected this time. When he finally returned, all the fish were dead. So was the carrion hawk. The shambler had climbed up to the belfry and eaten it. Simon Kress was vexed.
The next day he flew his skimmer to Asgard, a journey of some two hundred kilometers. Asgard was Baldur’s largest city and boasted the oldest and largest starport as well. Kress liked to impress his friends with animals that were unusual, entertaining, and expensive; Asgard was the place to buy them.
This time, though, he had poor luck. Xenopets had closed its doors, t’Etherane the Petseller tried to foist another carrion hawk off on him, and Strange Waters offered nothing more exotic than piranha, glowsharks, and spider-squids. Kress had had all those; he wanted something new.
Near dusk, he found himself walking down the Rainbow Boulevard, looking for places he had not patronized before. So close to the starport, the street was lined by importers’ marts. The big corporate emporiums had impressive long windows, where rare and costly alien artifacts reposed on felt cushions against dark drapes that made the interiors of the stores a mystery. Between them were the junk shops—narrow, nasty little places whose display areas were crammed with all manner of offworld bric-a-brac. Kress tried both kinds of shop, with equal dissatisfaction.
Then he came across a store that was different.
It was quite close to the port. Kress had never been there before. The shop occupied a small, single-story building of moderate size, set between a euphoria bar and a temple-brothel of the Secret Sisterhood. Down this far, the Rainbow Boulevard grew tacky. The shop itself was unusual. Arresting.
The windows were full of mist; now a pale red, now the gray of true fog, now sparkling and golden. The mist swirled and eddied and glowed faintly from within. Kress glimpsed objects in the window—machines, pieces of art, other things he could not recognize—but he could not get a good look at any of them. The mists flowed sensuously around them, displaying a bit of first one thing and then another, then cloaking all. It was intriguing.
As he watched, the mist began to form letters. One word at a time. Kress stood and read:
WO. AND. SHADE. IMPORTERS. ARTIFACTS. ART. LIFE-FORMS. AND. MISC.
The letters stopped. Through the fog, Kress saw something moving. That was enough for him, that and the word “Life-forms” in their advertisement. He swept his walking cloak over his shoulder and entered the store.
Inside, Kress felt disoriented. The interior seemed vast, much larger than he would have guessed from the relatively modest frontage. It was dimly lit, peaceful. The ceiling was a starscape, complete with spiral nebulae, very dark and realistic, very nice. The counters all shone faintly, the better to display the merchandise within. The aisles were carpeted with ground fog. In places, it came almost to his knees and swirled about his feet as he walked.