She was still conscious, but she was writhing. Cassiday made himself receptive to the outflow. The child, he realized, was not yet dead within her. Perhaps it might not die at all. But it would certainly be crippled in some way. What he drained from Lureen was the awareness that she might bring forth a defective. The fetus would have to be destroyed. She would have to begin again. It was all quite sad.

  “Why?” she muttered, “. . .why?”

  ***

  AMONG THE WATCHERS:

  the equivalent of dismay.

  Somehow it had not developed as the golden ones had anticipated. Even they could miscalculate, it appeared, and they found that a rewarding insight. Still, something had to be done about Cassiday.

  They had given him powers. He could detect and transmit to them the raw emotions of others. That was useful to them, for from the data they could perhaps construct an understanding of human beings. But in rendering him a switching center for the emotions of others they had unavoidably been forced to blank out his own. And that was distorting the data.

  He was too destructive now, in his joyless way. That had to be corrected. For now he partook too deeply of the nature of the golden ones themselves. They might have their sport with Cassiday, for he owed them a life. But he might not have his sport with others.

  They reached down the line of communication to him and gave him his instructions.

  “No,” Cassiday said. “You’re done with me now. There’s no need for me to come back.”

  “`Further adjustments are necessary.”

  “I disagree.”

  “You will not disagree for long.”

  Still disagreeing, Cassiday took ship for Mars, unable to stand aside from their command. On Mars he chartered a vessel that regularly made the Saturn run and persuaded it to come in by way of Iapetus. The golden ones took possession of him once he was within their immediate reach.

  “What will you do to me?” Cassiday asked.

  “Reverse the flow. You will no longer be sensitive to others. You will report to us on your own emotions. We will restore your conscience, Cassiday.”

  He protested. It was useless.

  Within the glowing sphere of golden light they made their adjustments on him. They entered him and altered him and turned his perceptions inward, so that he might feed on his own misery like a vulture tearing at its entrails. That would be informative. Cassiday objected until he no longer had the power to object, and when his awareness returned it was too late to object.

  “No. . . ” he murmured. In the yellow gleam he saw the faces of Beryl and Mirabel and Lureen. “You shouldn’t have done this to me. You’re torturing me . . . like you would a fly . . .”

  There was no response. They sent him away, back to Earth. They returned him to the travertine towers and the rumbling slidewalks, to the house of pleasure on 485th Street, to the islands of light that blazed in the sky, to the eleven billion people. They turned him loose to go among them, and suffer, and report on his sufferings. And a time would come when they would release him, but not yet.

  ***

  HERE IS CASSIDAY:

  nailed to his cross.

  SUNDANCE

  This story was a product of the dark year of 1968, that year of assassinations, riots, political turbulence, and many another ugly event. It was written for Edward L. Ferman, the editor and publisher of that excellent magazine Fantasy & Science Fiction, in late September. I was working at a new level of complexity, then—sure of myself and my technique, willing now to push the boundaries of the short-story form in any direction that seemed worth exploring. I had always been interested, from the beginning of my career, in technical experimentation, when and as the restrictions imposed on me by my pulp-magazine editors allowed any. But now I was in my thirties and approaching the height of my powers as a writer. So I did “Sundance” by way of producing a masterpiece in the medieval sense of the word—that is, a piece of work which is intended to demonstrate to a craftsman’s peers that he has ended his apprenticeship and has fully mastered the intricacies of his trade.

  Apparently I told Ed Ferman something about the story’s nature while I was working on it, and he must have reacted with some degree of apprehensiveness, because the letter I sent him on October 22, 1968, accompanying the submitted manuscript, says, “I quite understand your hesitation to commit yourself in advance to a story when you’ve been warned it’s experimental; but it’s not all that experimental . . . I felt that the only way I could properly convey the turmoil in the protagonist’s mind, the gradual dissolution of his hold on reality, was through the constant changing of persons and tenses; but as I read it through I think everything remains clear despite the frequent derailments of the reader.” And I added, “I don’t mean to say that I intend to disappear over the deep end of experimentalism. I don’t regard myself as a member of any ‘school’ of s-f, and don’t value obscurity for its own sake. Each story is a technical challenge unique unto itself, and I have to go where the spirit moves me. Sometimes it moves me to a relatively conventional strong-narrative item . . . and sometimes to a relatively avant-garde item like this present ‘Sundance;’ I’m just after the best way of telling my story, in each case.”

  Ferman responded on Nov 19 with: “You should do more of this sort of thing. ‘Sundance’ . . . not only works; it works beautifully. The ending—with the trapdoor image and that last line—is perfectly consistent, and just fine.” He had only one suggestion: that I simplify the story’s structure a little, perhaps by eliminating the occasional use of second-person narrative. But I wasn’t about to do that. I replied with an explanation of why the story kept switching about between first person narrative, second person, third person present tense, and third person past tense. Each mode had its particular narrative significance in conveying the various reality-levels of the story, I told him: the first-person material was the protagonist’s interior monologue, progressively more incoherent and untrustworthy; the second-person passages provided objective description of his actions, showing his breakdown from the outside, but not so far outside as third person would be—and so forth. Ferman was convinced, and ran the story as is.

  And it became something of a classic almost immediately after Ed ran it in his June 1969 issue. Though it was certainly a kind of circus stunt, it was a stunt that worked, and it attracted widespread attention, including a place on the ballot for the Nebula award the following year. (But I had “Passengers” on the same ballot, and had no wish to compete with myself. Shrewdly, if somewhat cynically, I calculated that the more accessible “Passengers” had a better chance of winning the award, and had “Sundance” removed from the ballot. And that was how I came to win a Nebula with my second-best story of 1969.) “Sundance” has since been reprinted dozens of times, both in science fiction anthologies and in textbooks of literature. Here it is once more, a tale of the collision of humans and aliens, with the customary catastrophic results for everybody concerned.

  TODAY YOU LIQUIDATED ABOUT 50,000 Eaters in Sector A, and now you are spending an uneasy night. You and Herndon flew east at dawn, with the green-gold sunrise at your backs, and sprayed the neural pellets over a thousand hectares along the Forked River. You flew on into the prairie beyond the river, where the Eaters have already been wiped out, and had lunch sprawled on that thick, soft carpet of grass where the first settlement is expected to rise. Herndon picked some juiceflowers, and you enjoyed half an hour of mild hallucinations. Then, as you headed toward the copter to begin an afternoon of further pellet spraying, he said suddenly, “Tom, how would you feel about this if it turned out that the Eaters weren’t just animal pests? That they were people, say, with a language and rites and a history and all?”

  You thought of how it had been for your own people.

  “They aren’t,” you said.

  “Suppose they were. Suppose the Eaters—”

  “They aren’t. Drop it.”

  Herndon has this streak of cruelty in him that leads him to ask such questions. He goes for the vulnerabilities; it amuses him. All night now his casual remark has echoed in your mind. Suppose the Eaters . . . suppose the Eaters . . . suppose . . . suppose . . .

  You sleep for a while, and dream, and in your dreams you swim through rivers of blood.

  Foolishness. A feverish fantasy. You know how important it is to exterminate the Eaters fast, before the settlers get here. They’re just animals, and not even harmless animals at that; ecology-wreckers is what they are, devourers of oxygen-liberating plants, and they have to go. A few have been saved for zoological study. The rest must be destroyed. Ritual extirpation of undesirable beings, the old, old story. But let’s not complicate our job with moral qualms, you tell yourself. Let’s not dream of rivers of blood.

  The Eaters don’t even have blood, none that could flow in rivers, anyway. What they have is, well, a kind of lymph that permeates every tissue and transmits nourishment along the interfaces. Waste products go out the same way, osmotically. In terms of process, it’s structurally analogous to your own kind of circulatory system, except there’s no network of blood vessels hooked to a master pump. The life-stuff just oozes through their bodies as though they were amoebas or sponges or some other low-phylum form. Yet they’re definitely high-phylum in nervous system, digestive setup, limb-and-organ template, etc. Odd, you think. The thing about aliens is that they’re alien, you tell yourself, not for the first time.

  The beauty of their biology for you and your companions is that it lets you exterminate them so neatly.

  You fly over the grazing grounds and drop the neural pellets. The Eaters find and ingest them. Within an hour the poison has reached all sectors of the body. Life ceases; a rapid breakdown of cellular matter follows, the Eater literally falling apart molecule by molecule the instant that nutrition is cut off; the lymph-like stuff works like acid; a universal lysis occurs; flesh and even the bones, which are cartilaginous, dissolve. In two hours, a puddle on the ground. In four, nothing at all left. Considering how many millions of Eaters you’ve scheduled for extermination here, it’s sweet of the bodies to be self-disposing. Otherwise what a charnel house this world would become!

  Suppose the Eaters . . .

  Damn Herndon. You almost feel like getting a memory-editing in the morning. Scrape his stupid speculations out of your head. If you dared. If you dared.

  ***

  IN THE MORNING HE DOES not dare. Memory-editing frightens him; he will try to shake free of his newfound guilt without it. The Eaters, he explains to himself, are mindless herbivores, the unfortunate victims of human expansionism, but not really deserving of passionate defense. Their extermination is not tragic; it’s just too bad. If Earthmen are to have this world, the Eaters must relinquish it. There’s a difference, he tells himself, between the elimination of the Plains Indians from the American prairie in the nineteenth-century and the destruction of the bison on that same prairie. One feels a little wistful about the slaughter of the thundering herds; one regrets the butchering of millions of the noble brown woolly beasts, yes. But one feels outrage, not mere wistful regret, at what was done to the Sioux. There’s a difference. Reserve your passions for the proper cause.

  He walks from his bubble at the edge of the camp toward the center of things. The flagstone path is moist and glistening. The morning fog has not yet lifted, and every tree is bowed, the long, notched leaves heavy with droplets of water. He pauses, crouching, to observe a spider-analog spinning its asymmetrical web. As he watches, a small amphibian, delicately shaded turquoise, glides as inconspicuously as possible over the mossy ground. Not inconspicuously enough; he gently lifts the little creature and puts it on the back of his hand. The gills flutter in anguish, and the amphibian’s sides quiver. Slowly, cunningly, its color changes until it matches the coppery tone of the hand. The camouflage is excellent. He lowers his hand and the amphibian scurries into a puddle. He walks on.

  He is forty years old, shorter than most of the other members of the expedition, with wide shoulders, a heavy chest, dark glossy hair, a blunt, spreading nose. He is a biologist. This is his third career, for he has failed as an anthropologist and as a developer of real estate. His name is Tom Two Ribbons. He has been married twice but has had no children. His great-grandfather died of alcoholism; his grandfather was addicted to hallucinogens; his father had compulsively visited cheap memory-editing parlors. Tom Two Ribbons is conscious that he is failing a family tradition, but he has not found his own mode of self-destruction.

  In the main building he discovers Herndon, Julia, Ellen, Schwartz, Chang, Michaelson, and Nichols. They are eating breakfast; the others are already at work. Ellen rises and comes to him and kisses him. Her short soft yellow hair tickles his cheeks. “I love you,” she whispers. She has spent the night in Michaelson’s bubble. “I love you,” he tells her, and draws a quick vertical line of affection between her small pale breasts. He winks at Michaelson, who nods, touches the tops of two fingers to his lips, and blows them a kiss. We are all good friends here, Tom Two Ribbons thinks.

  “Who drops pellets today?” he asks.

  “Mike and Chang,” says Julia. “Sector C.”

  Schwartz says, “Eleven more days and we ought to have the whole peninsula clear. Then we can move inland.”

  “If our pellet supply holds up,” Chang points out.

  Herndon says, “Did you sleep well, Tom?”

  “No,” says Tom. He sits down and taps out his breakfast requisition. In the west, the fog is beginning to burn off the mountains. Something throbs in the back of his neck. He has been on this world nine weeks now, and in that time it has undergone its only change of season, shading from dry weather to foggy. The mists will remain for many months. Before the plains parch again, the Eaters will be gone and the settlers will begin to arrive. His food slides down the chute and he seizes it. Ellen sits beside him. She is a little more than half his age; this is her first voyage; she is their keeper of records, but she is also skilled at editing. “You look troubled,” Ellen tells him. “Can I help you?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  “I hate it when you get gloomy.”

  “°It’s a racial trait,” says Tom Two Ribbons.

  “I doubt that very much.”

  “The truth is that maybe my personality reconstruct is wearing thin. The trauma level was so close to the surface. I’m just a walking veneer, you know.”

  Ellen laughs prettily. She wears only a sprayon half-wrap. Her skin looks damp; she and Michaelson have had a swim at dawn. Tom Two Ribbons is thinking of asking her to marry him, when this job is over. He has not been married since the collapse of the real estate business. The therapist suggested divorce as part of the reconstruct. He sometimes wonders where Terry has gone and whom she lives with now. Ellen says, “You seem pretty stable to me, Tom.”

  “Thank you,” he says. She is young. She does not know.

  “If it’s just a passing gloom I can edit it out in one quick snip.”

  “Thank you,” he says. “No.”

  “I forgot. You don’t like editing.”

  “My father—”

  “Yes?”

  “In fifty years he pared himself down to a thread,” Tom Two Ribbons says. “He had his ancestors edited away, his whole heritage, his religion, his wife, his sons, finally his name. Then he sat and smiled all day. Thank you, no editing.”

  “Where are you working today?” Ellen asks.

  “In the compound, running tests.”

  “Want company? I’m off all morning.”

  “Thank you, no,” he says, too quickly. She looks hurt. He tries to remedy his unintended cruelty by touching her arm lightly and saying, “Maybe this afternoon, all right? I need to commune a while. Yes?”

  “Yes,” she says, and smiles, and shapes a kiss with her lips.

  After breakfast he goes to the compound. It covers a thousand hectares east of the base; they have bordered it with neutral-field projectors at intervals of eighty meters, and this is a sufficient fence to keep the captive population of two hundred Eaters from straying. When all the others have been exterminated, this study group will remain. At the southwest corner of the compound stands a lab bubble from which the experiments are run: metabolic, psychological, physiological, ecological. A stream crosses the compound diagonally. There is a low ridge of grassy hills at its eastern edge. Five distinct copses of tightly clustered knifeblade trees are separated by patches of dense savanna. Sheltered beneath the glass are the oxygen-plants, almost completely hidden except for the photosynthetic spikes that jut to heights of three or four meters at regular intervals, and the lemon-colored respiratory bodies, chest high, that make the grassland sweet and dizzying with exhaled gases. Through the fields move the Eaters in a straggling herd, nibbling delicately at the respiratory bodies.

  Tom Two Ribbons spies the herd beside the stream and goes toward it. He stumbles over an oxygen-plant hidden in the grass but deftly recovers his balance and, seizing the puckered orifice of the respiratory body, inhales deeply. His despair lifts. He approaches the Eaters. They are spherical, bulky, slow-moving creatures, covered by masses of coarse orange fur. Saucer-like eyes protrude above narrow rubbery lips. Their legs are thin and scaly, like a chicken’s, and their arms are short and held close to their bodies. They regard him with bland lack of curiosity. “Good morning, brothers!” is the way he greets them this time, and he wonders why.

  ***

  I NOTICED SOMETHING STRANGE TODAY. Perhaps I simply sniffed too much oxygen in the fields; maybe I was succumbing to a suggestion Herndon planted; or possibly it’s the family masochism cropping out. But while I was observing the Eaters in the compound, it seemed to me, for the first time, that they were behaving intelligently, that they were functioning in a ritualized way.