Fantastic Stories Presents: Fantasy Super Pack #1. Fritz Leiber

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      The invasion followed close upon her departure. I think she wrote some letters that I never received, and when I was settled again back in Paris in 1951 I wrote to her. She replied at length and though our correspondence was infrequent, it was no less the connection of hearts. I was not surprised when I did not get letters from her for several months at a time, but I was quite shocked to see another envelope from her address but not in her hand.

      This letter was from Diego Rivera. He invited me to a show, Frida’s first major exhibition in Mexico. How dearly she had wanted this, how important it was to her to be recognized in her own country. But my great pleasure at this announcement was changed when I read the rest. Frida, Diego wrote, was very ill. Dying. He asked me, formally, to come to see her one last time. She wanted all of her dearest friends to say goodbye.

      Travel over an ocean is not easy for my kind. But it was Frida, and she was about to die and wake again. I had to be there to receive her, to bring her gently into her new life, to teach her how to survive as one of us. I lived those nights in a frenzy of desire. Every second seemed forever before I was reunited with her, and yet every second was filled with preparation as well.

      My passage was slightly delayed because the airline office was not open late and dark did not fall until after eight in June. I had never traveled by plane before, so it was with some trepidation I climbed into my coffin to be shipped by airfreight in mid July. Three days later I awoke, weak and retching, under a Mexican sky. Even after sundown the heat swam up from the pavement and permeated the air. While my servants carried out the rest of my instructions, I hunted and replenished myself, but the heat was still oppressive and exhausted me. By the fourteenth of July, the day celebrated by all friend of France as the birth of the Republic, I was fit to travel. As I dressed, my man handed me a newspaper.

      There, in large print, was Frida’s name. But it was not the exhibition of her paintings that the article reported, but her death. And her cremation. During the service there had been some mistake and the doors of the crematorium had flown open. Her body had sat upright and her hair had caught fire like a halo of flame. The article reported that witnesses said her body smiled.

      Frida Kahlo would never rise, never wake to eternal life, never laugh with me again or paint or turn her cutting wit against the efforts of some poor, third rate artist manqué. Frida, whom I had made immortal, was beyond my salvation. The knowledge of it went like a stake to my heart. I could feel the children of my blood, the very few I had made, no matter where they were. Frida was well and truly gone, a cauterized wound in the fabric of my making. I crawled back to my coffin and sobbed like a child until dawn.

      From that day until this, I had always believed that it was Diego who had made the choice. He had unwittingly killed her. How could she have known that he would choose such a barbaric rite over burial in the sweet earth? Stupid, ignorant man, to deprive us all of her glorious being.

      And so I believed until today. Her diary has been published, and while I do not approve I could not resist the temptation to read her most private thoughts. I am in Prague now, which is rapidly becoming one of the leading centers of art in Europe. Here her diary has just gone on sale in five languages almost fifty years after her death, and the large bookseller in Wenceslas Square has filled one of the windows with a display. While I fingered the copy and debated which language to purchase, two art students all in black came in and bought theirs.

      If they could read her most private thoughts, I certainly must. I took my copy to a café near the Charles Bridge, where I read her words while ignoring my espresso as it grew cold. I remembered her so vividly, so warmly still, and my anger at her burning had never been blunted by the years. So it was with the greatest horror, the most profound regret, that I read her last entry.

       I hope the leaving is joyful and I hope never to return.

      It had always been her decision. She knew, after all. I had told her everything, and she knew, and she made her own choice. But I do not know how she could do such a thing. I could have made her immortal.

      Another art student flounced by with a large portfolio book with Frida’s face on the cover. The girl wore a bright red flower in her hair and a flash of yellow and pink petticoat under her regulation black skirt.

      The Thing in the Attic

      By James Blish

       It is written that after the Giants came to Tellura from the far stars, they abode a while, and looked upon the surface of the land, and found it wanting, and of evil omen. Therefore did they make men to live always in the air and in the sunlight, and in the light of the stars, that he would be reminded of them. And the Giants abode yet a while, and taught men to speak, and to write, and to weave, and to do many things which are needful to do, of which the writings speak. And thereafter they departed to the far stars, saying, Take this world as your own, and though we shall return, fear not, for it is yours.

       —The Book of Laws

      Honath the Pursemaker was hauled from the nets an hour before the rest of the prisoners, as befitted his role as the arch-doubter of them all. It was not yet dawn, but his captors led him in great bounds through the endless, musky-perfumed orchid gardens, small dark shapes with crooked legs, hunched shoulders, slim hairless tails carried, like his, in concentric spirals wound clockwise. Behind them sprang Honath on the end of a long tether, timing his leaps by theirs, since any slip would hang him summarily.

      He would of course be on his way to the surface, some 250 feet below the orchid gardens, shortly after dawn in any event. But not even the arch-doubter of them all wanted to begin the trip—not even at the merciful snap-spine end of a tether—a moment before the law said, Go.

      The looping, interwoven network of vines beneath them, each cable as thick through as a man’s body, bellied out and down sharply as the leapers reached the edge of the fern-tree forest which surrounded the copse of fan-palms. The whole party stopped before beginning the descent and looked eastward, across the dim bowl. The stars were paling more and more rapidly; only the bright constellation of the Parrot could still be picked out without doubt.

      “A fine day,” one of the guards said, conversationally. “Better to go below on a sunny day than in the rain, pursemaker.”

      Honath shuddered and said nothing. Of course it was always raining down below in Hell, that much could be seen by a child. Even on sunny days, the endless pinpoint rain of transpiration, from the hundred million leaves of the eternal trees, hazed the forest air and soaked the black bog forever.

      He looked around in the brightening, misty morning. The eastern horizon was black against the limb of the great red sun, which had already risen about a third of its diameter; it was almost time for the small, blue-white, furiously hot consort to follow. All the way to that brink, as to every other horizon, the woven ocean of the treetops flowed gently in long, unbreaking waves, featureless as some smooth oil. Only nearby could the eye break that ocean into its details, into the world as it was: a great, many-tiered network, thickly overgrown with small ferns, with air-drinking orchids, with a thousand varieties of fungi sprouting wherever vine crossed vine and collected a little humus for them, with the vivid parasites sucking sap from the vines, the trees, and even each other. In the ponds of rain-water collected by the closely fitting leaves of the bromeliads tree-toads and peepers stopped down their hoarse songs dubiously as the light grew and fell silent one by one. In the trees below the world, the tentative morning screeches of the lizard-birds—the souls of the damned, or the devils who hunted them, no one was quite sure which—took up the concert.

      A small gust of wind whipped out of СКАЧАТЬ