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Authors: Steven Savile

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BOOK: Elemental
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Every now and again,
over the ensuing hundred years or so, Macbeth would gather around him a band of followers—men either in awe of his magic immunity, or else simply prepared to follow any figure in authority if the financial inducements were strong enough. But these groupings never added up to an army, and since none of the people who followed him were gifted with his invulnerability, they tended to get slaughtered in battle. His initial plan—to reclaim the throne of Scotland by war and by the sword—was, he came to realize, unattainable. People feared him, and a few would do his will; but most shunned him, would not follow him. He found himself thoroughly isolated.
Eventually he stopped accumulating bands of followers and struck out by himself.
He roamed about for many years, searching Scotland for the witches in the hope of extracting from them some useful magical fillip that would enhance his fortunes. But they seemed to have departed the land.
His search was fruitless. He returned to Dunsinane castle to find that it had been claimed, in his absence, by the Thane of Aberdeen and his retinue. It didn't take Macbeth long to kill off, or chase away, those interlopers.
For several decades after this, he sat in his castle alone. The people in the local villages established a mode of uneasy coexistence with him: they brought him offerings of food, wine, books, and whatever else he asked for; but they otherwise left him alone and went about their own business. Macbeth grew accustomed to the solitude, and even came rather to relish it. He had learned to despise ordinary humanity, with their ridiculous fleshly vulnerability, their habit of dropping dead at the slightest scratch, the inevitability of their physical aging, decay, and death. He wondered why it was he had ever wanted to rule over such starveling creatures. It seemed to him now as a butcher sitting in a throne and gathering his swine around him as courtiers. Mortal glory was no longer of interest to him.
The castle began to decay around him. He undertook some repairs himself, single-handed; but no amount of rampaging around the local villages like a fairy-story ogre—no amount of railing and yelling—could persuade the villagers to help him. None of them was prepared to come and work as his servant, at even the highest pay. Rather they fled away, took refuge in the hills until he had departed.
Increasingly reclusive, Macbeth devoted himself to gathering together and reading the world's many books. Word spread of this mysterious hermit-laird (though by now most people had forgotten his name) who paid handsomely in gold for any book of curious lore or magical promise. Book traders made their way to the castle, pocketed their fees, and hurried away again, glad to be gone. When Macbeth's gold was exhausted, he strode out into the larger world and ransacked and robbed and extorted until his fortune was restored. He hoped, by accumulating the world's largest library of magical arcana, and by decades of dedicated study, to master the same supernatural skills that the witches themselves had possessed. Why should he track down those wild women
and beg them for favors, when he could command the magic himself?
But no matter how much he studied and practiced, he could not develop magical ability.
More than this, he realized that the charm had changed him. He decided to found a dynasty, reasoning that even if his children grew old and died he could still live as patriarch over his own grandchild, great-grandchildren, more distant descendents yet and on into the abyss of future time. He could persuade no woman willingly to marry him of course, but it was a simple matter to abduct likely looking specimens from the locality. But no matter how long he kept them, and no matter what he did, not one of them became pregnant with his offspring. He realized that whatever it was that was acting upon his body to preserve it from death and harm was also preventing him from fathering children.
At this he fell into a depression for several decades; barely moving from his chamber, letting his hair and beard and nails grow to prodigious lengths. He attempted to kill himself—an honorable, warrior's death, falling on his own sword like Mark Anthony. But he was himself born of woman, and incapable of harming himself.
After that he did various things. He spent much of the thirteenth century traveling the world; first as an anonymous foot soldier of the crusades, and thereafter as a curious tourist walking and riding to Cathay, to Siberia, over the ice to Alaska, and across the great plains of the New World. If I were to detail his adventures, this story would stretch through thousands of pages, and marvelous though the adventures were, they would come to seem tedious to you. He roamed through Central and South America, and finally traveled back to Europe on one of Cortez's ships. Bored of travel, he made his way back to Scotland. Once again his castle had been occupied, but he disposed of the family living there and retook possession.
For a decade or so this reinstallation in his own home provided him with various distractions. Enraged villagers, and later religiously devout armies, came to destroy him—now once again infamous (after many decades of anonymity) far and wide as a devil in human form, a warlock
who had sold his soul to the devil, and many like phrases. They burned his castle around him, but the flames did not bother him. Instead he walked amongst them bringing death with his sword. Eventually they fled. They always fled eventually. It took Macbeth a decade to rebuild Dunsinane, working entirely by himself, but he found he quite enjoyed the work.
In the year 1666 he became intrigued by the idea that the world might be about to end. Traveling preachers assured the world that the apocalypse promised by Saint John was imminent. Would his charm survive the end of the world? He thought about this a great deal and decided it would not. He had come to the conclusion that the operative part of his charm—the “none of woman born shall harm Macbeth”—was the
woman.
Mary, mother of God, had been a virgin. Therefore she was a girl rather than a woman: and Christ was not of woman born. At his second coming, Macbeth decided, there would exist in the world a person capable of destroying him—an end he looked forward to with complete equanimity. But 1666 turned into 1667, and then into 1668, and the end of the world did not come. Macbeth reconciled himself to a genuinely immortal life. He discovered that immortality tasted not of glory, not even especially of life. It was a gray sort of experience, neither markedly happy nor sad. It was the life stones experience. It was the reason they were so silent and unmoved. It was the existence of the ocean itself, changeless though restless, chafing yet moveless. It was Macbeth's existence.
There was a knocking
at the door.
Nobody had knocked at his door for a decade or more. His last visitor had been the census taker, and Macbeth—who had learned this lesson from experience long before—had disposed of him swiftly rather than risk having his precious solitude disturbed. Maps marked Dunsinane as a folly; Macbeth had gone to great lengths to dig out underground
dwellings and knock down much of the upper portion, so as not to be too conspicuous from the air. What with the reforestation of pretty much the whole of Scotland following the European Act of '57 his home was well hidden: off the ramblers trails and not listed in any land tax spreadsheets.
So who was knocking?
He clambered up the stairs to the main hall and pulled open the door. Outside, standing in the rain (Macbeth, sequestered in his underground laboratory, had not even realized it was raining) was a man. He was wearing the latest in bodymorph clothes, a purple plastic cape that rolled into a seam of his shirt as he stepped over the threshold, and dynstripes in his hair.
“May I come in?” he asked, politely enough.
“I don't welcome visitors,” said Macbeth.
“That's as may be, sir,” said the man. “But I have official accreditation.” He held out a laminated badge for Macbeth's perusal; an animated glyph of the man's face smiled and nodded at him repeatedly from the badge. “And the legal right of entry.”
Macbeth thought of killing him there and then, but he held back. He hadn't talked to another human being in two years. He was curious as to what errand had brought this official individual so deep into the woods.
As he shut the door behind him he asked, “So what is it you want?”
“Are you, sir, a relation of the
Macbeth
family?” the man asked.
Now this was a startling thing. The people of this part of Scotland had long, long ago forgotten Macbeth's name and true identity. He lived, where he was not entirely forgotten, as a kind of legend; stories of an ogre who could not be killed, of a wizard with the gift of immortality. “How do you know that name?”
“Databases worldwide have been linked and cross-Web searched,” the man said in a slightly sing-song voice. “Various anomalies have been detected. It is my job—assigned me by my parent company, McDF Inc.—to investigate these. The deeds to this property have not been filed in eleven hundred years. The last listed owner was a Mr. Macbeth. I am
here to discover whether this property is still in the possession of that family, in order to register it for Poll Tax, Land Reclamation Tax, and various other government and EU duties.”
This told Macbeth all he needed to know. This taxman would have to die or Macbeth's life would be disturbed, and he hated disturbance. He reached this conclusion with a heavy heart. The youthful enthusiasm for slaughter had long since passed from his breast. Now, from his immortal perspective, the mayfly humans who were born, grew, and died all around him were objects rather of pity than scorn. Still, necessity overrode his compassion. If it must be done (as, of course, it
must
) it was well it was done quickly.
He pulled a sword from the wall and squared up to the puny individual. “I'm afraid,” he announced, “that I cannot be disturbed by taxes and duties. I value my solitude.”
“I must warn you, sir,” said the taxman, holding up one finger in a slightly prissy gesture, “that I am licensed to defend myself from unprovoked attack. My parent company, having invested thirty-eight million Euros in my development, are legally entitled to preserve their investment from unnecessary harm.”
Macbeth only shook his head. He swung the sword. The blade crashed against the man's shoulder; instead of severing it as Macbeth expected, the collision resulted in a series of sparks and fizzes, and a scattering of gray smoke into the air.
“You have caused several thousand Euros damage,” said the strange man, “to my right arm. I must inform you that my manufacturers, McDF Inc., are legally entitled to recover that sum from your bank account.”
Puzzling, Macbeth wrenched the sword free and lifted it for another sweep, aiming this time at the taxman's head.
“I do apologize for this, sir,” the taxman said, with a mournful expression on his face. He pointed a finger at Macbeth. The end of the finger clicked out and swiveled to the side. With a loud
thwup
sound a projectile launched itself from the hollow digit and smashed into Macbeth's
chest. More astonished than in pain, he dropped his sword and collapsed backward onto the stone flags.
The strange taxman, leaning over him now, was speaking into a communicator of some kind. “Please send a medical team at once. Unmarked and unnamed property, located near the center of Greater Birnam Wood. Lock onto my signal. Please hurry; subject is badly wounded.” He peered down at Macbeth, who was already losing focus in his eyes, with the sheer oddness of this feeling—these smashed ribs—this blood (which had stayed safely in his veins through all these centuries) spilling onto the floor. It was, he had to admit, and despite the pain involved, a feeling something like—release.
“I do apologize for doing that, sir,” the taxman was saying. “I have called an air ambulance to assist. I do hope, sir, that they arrive here before you die.”
“Oh I do hope,” said Macbeth, in a gaspy voice, “not.”
BY ESTHER M. FRIESNER
 
Esther M. Friesner is an author, poet, short story writer, editor, and self-proclaimed Queen of the Hamsters. Perhaps best known for editing the ever-popular Chicks in Chainmail series of anthologies (
Chicks in Chainmail
,
Chicks N' Chained Males
,
Did You Say Chicks?
,
The Chick Is in the Mail
, and
Turn the Other Chick
), Friesner most recently teamed up with fellow funnyman Robert Asprin for the novel
E. Godz
. She has won the Nebula Award twice, for her short stories “Death and the Librarian” and “A Birth Day.”
According to Friesner, “Abductio ad Absurdum” was written as the result of one too many TV programs and/or tabloid stories about alien abductions. “I had reached my saturation point when it came to media coverage of the ongoing set-to between Evolutionists and Creationists,” she says. “And so, in an effort to forget that there was nothing good on TV I began to wonder: How long
has
this alien abduction thing been going on? Besides aliens, what other beings have been known to snatch up earthlings? Even those humans who share a common cause seem unable to set aside competition in favor of cooperation. How would beings that are supposed to be superior to humans deal with such a situation? What if
everyone
was right about what happened Way Back When? Am I going to have fun writing about this?” The answer to the last question being affirmative, the rest is history.
Esther Friesner lives in Connecticut with her husband, two children, two rambunctious cats, and a fluctuating population of hamsters.
 
 
“I beg your pardon,”
said the alien. “There appears to have been some mistake.”
“I should say so,” his unwilling guest replied with an indignant snort. He made a great business of shaking the rumples out of his robes and brushing invisible specks of dust from his person. “And you've made it.”
The alien's luminous blue skin went watery green, a sure sign of embarrassment. Probing himself sheepishly with one barbed tentacle, he sidled over to the viewing panel of the little scout ship, his slime trail
minty with dismay. “I can't for the lives of me understand what went wrong,” he bubbled, all five eyes sliding wildly over the surface of his head, searching the banks of screens and telltales for the elusive answer. “I was aiming for the brown, hairy one. You're neither, if you don't mind my saying so.”
“Bah,” was all the answer the visitor deigned to return. One toss of his head and his long, golden curls took on a life of their own, filling the control pod with the radiance of a thousand dawns.
“Oh my. You can do—you're certainly not—What else might you be able to—? Dear me.” The calculated display of celestial splendor threw the alien for more of a loop than the one he was already riding. At a complete loss, he sucked a tentacle nervously, forgetting about the barbs, and cut his rubbery lip badly.
His abrupt cry of pain wrought a radical change in his conscripted guest. Light flared from the visitor's hand, a spout of flame that congealed into the dimensions of a sword, but when the fire dimmed, the object showed itself to be no more than an olive branch. Waving the lithe bit of greenery in a no-nonsense-now manner, the alien's abductee seized his captor's oozing face and declared, “Let me see that. I'm a trained professional. Healing's my specialty, not these ridiculous reconnaissance assignments.”
The alien eyed his captive charily, three of them firmly fixed on the visitor, a pair left over to mind the ship's controls. The olive branch whisked across his lips, leaving a pleasant tingling sensation in its wake and filling his scent receptors with the rich perfume of the homeworld jungles. He gave a little shudder of ecstacy and molted in spite of himself.
The visitor jumped back, his disgust plain to see. “What was
that
all about?” he demanded, toeing the alien's sloughed skin with one golden-sandaled foot.
The alien went positively emerald out of sheer mortification. As with many species, he immediately sought to counteract his discomfiture by going on the offensive. (
It Is Better to Bluff Than to Squirm
is a dictum embroidered on samplers all across the universe and outnumbers
Home
Sweet Home
by a factor of a trillion and three.) His whole attitude toward his peculiar guest turned crisp and curt. “Look, I don't have time for this,” he said. “I've got a job to do; a job
you're
delaying.”
“And what do you think
I'm
supposed to be doing with
my
time?” came the testy reply. “Planting fig trees? I was just about to Reveal myself to the chosen creatoid when
zap
!—I'm jerked right off the earth to
this
Himforsaken place. Not that He isn't everywhere, of course, but you get my meaning,” he added quickly.
“Uh … sure I do,” said the alien, who didn't. “But what's a … creatoid?”
The visitor sighed, and the smaller plumes edging his mighty wings riffled delicately in the breeze. “A creatoid is something that
He
created, naturally. Only it's something that—well—something that's not
exactly
like the rest of His creations. You see, most of His work's got a fairly straightforward purpose, a clear-cut and obvious use or function. It's there for a
reason.
Trees give fruit and shade and a nice place for cats to sharpen their claws. Mosquitoes give frogs something to eat, frogs feed storks, storks bring babies. Otters and dolphins and larks make joy more than just a word, even if the Word
did
get here before the otter. Platypuses are comic relief and Tyrannosaurs keep the rest of them on their toes—those of them that have toes. But
these
things, these creatoids—” He sighed again.
“Which ones?” The alien glided back to the viewing panel. It was filled with a glowing, golden vista of the wide African savannah. Vast herds of herbivores meandered lazily across the plain. Steel-muscled packs of predators crouched in the tall grass, awaiting developments. In the foreground, a lone, brown, hairy being huddled in the branches of the only tree to be seen for a hundred yards around. Her tiny, bright eyes scanned the horizon anxiously. At the foot of the tree lay a number of bones, including a skull showing the same aggressively overdeveloped brow-ridges as her own. All bore the marks of a big cat's busy jaws and all were proof of how right she was to be vigilant, terrified, and arboreal.
“
That's
the one!” the alien's guest exclaimed, delighted. “That's my assigned creatoid right there!”
“That one's
your
target too?” asked the alien.
“Too?” This was not the sort of Revelation to which the visitor was accustomed. “You don't mean it. What business could you possibly have with something like
that?
”
“Hey, I just get my orders from the group-supes and if I know what's good for me I follow them, no questions asked. What I was told to do was come to this planet and check out certain designated life-forms for any signs of potential higher intelligence that might prove worthwhile for us to nurture, develop, and encourage.”
“Why?”
“I told you, I don't ask questions. What were
you
supposed to do with that—
creatoid
—before you got in my way?”
“It's like I was saying: Where I come from, at the moment we're none of us too sure why He bothered creating something like that, so my superiors commanded me to descend and investigate. I've got to find out what
use
it is. Not that we're questioning His grand design or anything, perish the thought, but we
would
like to have a clue as to whether we should ignore it, sustain it, or accidentally-on-purpose smite it out of existence before things get
too
far out of hand. And so, if you'll excuse me—” There was a burst of light and the alien felt momentarily trapped within the heart of a C-major chord before regaining full use of his senses. When most of his eyes could once more focus, he found himself alone in the scout ship.
The alien was rather miffed. Usually the beings he brought aboard were powerless to leave until he was through studying them. This was the first time that one of his subjects had left of its own will, under its own figurative steam. He checked the view panel. Yes, there it was, wings and all, back on the savannah, standing among the bones at the foot of the solitary tree. It seemed smaller than it had been on board ship,
much
smaller, shrewmouse-small, so small that the brown, hairy thing up the tree didn't even notice its presence below.
“Clever,” the alien muttered. “Less likely to scare off your target, that way. And you're a nimble little bugger, aren't you? Flashing here,
there, and everywhere like that, getting right in the way of my snag-beam when I was trying to lay hold of that—that—creatoid-thingy. Well, young teleporter-me-lad, you may be fast and you may be clever, but you're not going to muck up
my
service record. I saw her first.”
The alien hunted up a portable, tentacle-held model of the aforementioned snag-beam, checked it out and strapped it on. “
This
way I won't miss,” he told himself, his newly healed lip taut with a grim smile. “There's nothing like the up-close-and-personal touch.”
He slid over to another part of the ship's controls, flickered his barbs over buttons, switches, sensors and knobbly things, then stepped into the center of the glowing disc that materialized in the middle of the deck. The light was cool and smelled of vanillaworms, a superfluous sensory input that allowed the traveler to relax and forget about the fact that his disassembled particles were being spewed through space. It was also mildly hallucinogenic.
The alien enjoyed a good snort of vanillaworm as much as the next entity. He was always sad when the light of the translocator beam faded and the trip was over, but work awaited. Thick grass cushioned his bulk until his gravitation adjusters kicked in, making his atmospheriskin crackle loudly. He was right under the tree and ready for business.
It was just then that his former visitor chose to rear up to a magnificent height, bringing him eye-level with the creature in the branches. “Be not afraid!” the alien's erstwhile guest declared cheerily, extending an olive branch that became the biggest banana the young world had ever seen.
It was history's worst case of bad timing since the last comet strike. The creature in the tree looked from winged messenger to blue blob, from titanic banana to bells-and-whistles ray gun, bared her fangs, let out a screech that got the attention of every pack of giant hyenas on the plains, and launched herself from the branches. She hit the ground running on all fours, but soon picked up speed and was skimming along on her hind limbs until she was no more than a speck in the distance.
The alien and his former guest exchanged a significant look. “That does it. I quit,” the alien said at last. “I'm going home and I'm going to
tell them that the creatures were all extinct when I got here.”
“But that's a lie,” the visitor chided.
“The truth is as much a matter of
when
as it is of
what
,” the alien countered. “I live a long way away from here. Who's to say what the truth will be by the time I get home? I mean, come on, honestly, do you think something
that
weak and scrawny's got what it takes to survive much longer?” He picked up a chewed-over legbone and used it to point in the direction his elusive target had bolted. “No claws, no horns, and did you get a look at those sorry excuses for fangs? Pitiful.”
The visitor shrugged his mighty wings and absently took a bite of the banana. “I suppose you're right. But still,
I
can't lie about this to my superiors. We've got all sorts of administrative policies in place against stuff like that. They're going to insist I come back and do something about that critter, Who knows what. Maybe I'll get lucky. Maybe by the time they do decide what to do about it, it
will
be extinct.”
“You can always hope,” the alien suggested amiably.
“And pray.” The visitor stopped chewing a mouthful of banana long enough to notice that he'd been snacking on his symbol of office. “Want some?” he asked, blushing.
It was a slip that never should have happened. It was an action forbidden by every basic regulation in the alien's training, but the higgledy-piggledy state of his mission made him forgetful and careless. He took the fruit and ate of it, relishing its sweetness. Only then did the full knowledge of what he'd done hit him.
“Oh, my God!” he cried.
“Your what?” asked the visitor.
The alien wasn't listening. “What have I done? I'm contaminated! Doomed! I consumed extraplanetary nourishment! Who knows what sort of microbes it's carrying? Even if it doesn't kill me, I can't go home again and risk introducing potentially fatal organisms to my people. I'm an exile, an outcast forever!” He began to leak copiously.
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