Jharit turned at a sound, rose to his feet and drew his laser again. He stepped away from Snow and looked around. Snow looked beyond him but could see nothing.
“If you leave here now, Marsman, I will not kill you.”
The voice was Hirald’s.
Jharit fired into the rocks and backed towards Snow.
“I have a singun and I am in chameleonwear. I can kill you any time I wish. Drop your weapon.”
Jharit paused for a moment as if indecisive, then he whirled, pointing his laser at Snow. The expression on his face told all. Before he could press the trigger, he collapsed into himself; a central point the size of a pinhead, a plume of sand standing where he stood, then all blasted away in a thunderclap and encore of miniature lightnings across the ground. Snow slowly shoved himself to his feet as he looked in awe at the spot Jharit had occupied. He had heard of such weapons and not believed. He looked across as Hirald flickered back into existence only a few metres away. She smiled at him, just before the first shot ripped the side of her face away.
Snow knew he yelled, he might have screamed. He looked on in impotent horror as the second shot smacked into her back and knocked her to the ground. Then there: Baris and the corporation woman, walking out of the rock field. Baris sighted again as he walked, hit Hirald with another shot that ripped half her side away. Snow felt his legs give way. He went down on his knees. Baris came before him, a self-satisfied smirk on his face. Snow looked up at him, trying to pull the energy together, to throw it all in one attempt. He knew it was what Baris was waiting for. It was all he could do. He glanced aside at the woman, saw she had halted some way back. She was looking past Baris at Hirald, a look of horror on her face. Snow did not want to look. He did not want to know.
“Oh my God. It’s her!”
Snow pulled himself to his feet, dizziness making him lurch. Baris grinned and pointed the rifle at his face, relished his moment for the half a second it lasted. The hand punched through his body, knocked the rifle aside, lifted him and hurled him against a rock with such force he stuck for a moment, then fell leaving a man-shaped corona of blood. Hirald stood there, revealed. Where the synthiflesh had been blown away glittering ceramal was exposed, her white enamel teeth, one blue eye complete in its socket, the ribbed column of her spine. She observed Snow for a moment then turned towards the woman. Snow fainted before the scream.
He was in his bed and memories slowly dragged themselves into his mind. He lay there, his throat dry, and after a moment felt across to his numbed shoulder and the dressing. It was a moment before he dared open his eyes. Hirald sat at the side of the bed and when she saw he was awake she helped him up into a sitting position against his pillows. Snow observed her face. She had repaired the damage somehow, but the scars of that repair-work were still there. She looked just like a human woman who had been disfigured in an accident. She wore a loose shirt and trousers to hide the other repairs. As he looked at her, she reached up and self-consciously touched her face, before reaching for a glass of water to hand to him. Gratefully he drained the glass. That touch of vanity confused him for a moment.
“You’re a Golem android,” he said, in the end, unsure.
Hirald smiled and it did not look so bad.
She said, “Canard Meck thought that.” When she saw his confusion she explained, “The corporation woman. She called me product, which is an understandable mistake. I am nearly indistinguishable from the Golem twenty-two.”
“What are you then?” Snow asked as she poured him another glass of water.
“Cyborg. Underneath this synthiflesh I am ceramal. In the ceramal a human brain, spinal column, and other nerve tissues.”
Snow sipped his drink as he considered that. He was not sure what he was feeling, but it certainly was not the horror he had first felt.
“Will you come to Earth with me?”
Snow turned and looked at her for a long time. He remembered how it had been in the tents as she, he realised, discovered that she was still human.
“You know, I will never grow old and die,” she said.
“I know.”
She tilted her head questioningly and awaited his answer.
A slow smile spread across his face. “I’ll come with you,” he told her. “If you will stay with me.” He put his drink down and reached out to take hold of her hand. What defined humanity? There was blood still under her fingernails and the tear duct in her left eye was not working properly.
It didn’t matter.
THE TALL GRASS
Joe R. Lansdale
I can’t really explain this properly, but I’ll tell it to you, and you can make the best of it. It starts with a train. People don’t travel as readily by train these days as they once did, but in my youthful days they did, and I have to admit that day was some time ago, considering my current, doddering age. It’s hard to believe the century has turned, and I have turned with it, as worn out and rusty as those old coal-powered trains.
I am soon to fall off the edge of the cliff into the great darkness, but there was a time when I was young and the world was light. Then there was something that happened to me on a rail line that showed me something I didn’t know was there, and since that time, I’ve never seen the world in exactly the same way.
What I can tell you is this. I was traveling across country by night in a very nice rail car. I had not just a seat on a train, but a compartment to myself. A quite comfortable compartment, I might add. I was early into my business career then, having just started with a firm that I ended up working at for twenty-five years. To simplify, I had completed a cross-country business trip, and was on my way home. I wasn’t married then, but one of the reasons I was eager to make it back to my home town was a young woman named Ellen. We were quite close, and her company meant everything to me. It was our plan to marry.
I won’t bore you with details, but, that particular plan didn’t work out. And though I still think of that with some disappointment, for she was very beautiful, it has absolutely nothing to do with my story.
Thing is, the train was crossing the western country, in a barren stretch without towns, beneath a wide-open night sky with a high moon and a few crawling clouds. Back then, those kinds of places were far more common than lights and streets and motor cars are now. I had made the same ride several times on business, yet, I always enjoyed looking out the window, even at night. This night, however, for whatever reason, I was up very late, unable to sleep. I had chosen not to eat dinner, and now that it was well passed, I was a bit hungry, but there was nothing to be had.
The lamps inside the train had been extinguished, and out the window there was a moonlit sea of rocks and sand and in the distance beyond, shadowy blue-black mountains.
The train came to an odd stretch that I had somehow missed before on my journeys, as I was probably sleeping at the time. It was a great expanse of prairie grass, and it shifted in the moonlight like waves of gold-green sea water pulled by the tide making forces of the moon.
I was watching all of this, trying to figure it, determining how odd it looked and how often I had to have passed it and had never seen it. Oh, I had seen lots of tall grass, but nothing like this. The grass was not only head high, or higher, it was thick and it had what I can only describe as an unusual look about it, as if I were seeing it with eyes that belonged to someone else. I know how peculiar that sounds, but it’s the only way I know how to explain it.