The Weather in the Underworld

COLIN FREE

This is a slick, disturbing fantasy, very much in the American tradition, and had the distinction of being included in the collection, World’s Best SF for 1966. The approach is nihilistic, the setting and plot macabre, though Free never lets the grisliness take over. His picture of a doomed future earth where human feelings have decayed to unrecognizability is, in fact, one of the most effective of its kind ever published.

Colin Free is well known to Australian audiences as a writer for television and radio, as well as a playwright and author of short stories. His science fiction stories have been few, but all show an instinctive understanding of the genre and a genius for atmosphere.

Source: Squire, June 1965.

* * * *

The clock-voice chanted 37.05, 37.05. Humidity faded to a crisp 53 and the temperature steadied off at 68. It was night time.

“What shall I wear?” she said. “Tetraline or nothing?”

“Nothing,” he said. He was in the cradling arms of the cuddle chair and its soft caressing sensuality was easing him away from the pressures of the hour. He notched the controls into Maximum and the spines undulated all along his body. He sighed; kept sighing.

Then Ilda stabbed her hand through the contact beam and the chair stuttered and went dead.

He jerked his head around. “What did you do that for?”

“I said what shall I wear? You didn’t answer. You never do.”

“I did.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did. I did.” He heaved himself out of the chair and the old tensions throbbed again. “I said nothing, wear nothing. What more do you want?”

Ilda strode into the bedroom.

He walked across to the window and the cells of the U-Vu leaped alive with its impeccable panorama of sand, sea, cliffs and sky. Wind teased the pines and birds flew up. In a moment, a vintage rocket would crackle across the blue silence. In a moment, it did.

He shouted at the bedroom, “You haven’t changed the window.”

“You haven’t told me what you wanted, yet.”

It was true. She was right, always right. The U-Vu catalogue was still in the rack. He tried to control the tension that hammered behind his eyes and clamped his damp fingers across his face, but it was like wings within trying to break free. From habit he walked to the wall console which murmured its consideration, measured his discomfort and slammed out a wafer stimulant. He rejected it. Undaunted, the console offered him a sleep capsule, but he walked away.

It is New Year Seven, he recited, and the best place on earth is UnderEarth. But he could not feel the truth of it or give it the conviction that was presupposed.

The time-tube said 41.03, 41.03.

He swigged down a quick tranquilla and the tension took on a kind of palpitation, a dying fall, he thought.

“How much longer?” he said at the bedroom door.

“Plenty of time.”

“It’s nearly 45.”

“We’ll get there.”

He went in. The dressing closet was stencilling her body with long, sinuous diamonds so that her appearance, he thought, was unpleasantly reptilian.

“But it’s nearly 45,” he repeated.

She snapped on her waist belt and helmet, tossed the silver box into his unready hands. “Here. Plug in and shut up.”

He nursed its warm metal silkiness. “Let’s wait till we get to the Circuit-Way.”

“No. Plug in now.” She sat down, leaned forward, and the closet obediently teased and set her hair, dusting it with gentle phosphorescence. “Sometimes I think you need a visit to the mentalizer,” she said. “Do you?”

He knew but could not tell her. The disintegration of his memory pattern was incomplete; his therapy had failed and he was afraid. At sleep time, rejecting the prescribed capsule, thoughts came back: the familiar annihilation nightmare fuming up into his consciousness, then the moan and mutter of the earth as they burrowed down and down, and finally the long descent into the lull and comfort of the warming air. Or else his unbidden memory provided him with the sounds of air locks sucked vacuum-tight, and he heard again the howling of those outside, until the long cries were clipped short by the suction locks—and he wept again for those who could not come, the exiles, abandoned on the blue and bitter ice.

Yet here in the womb of UnderEarth, he too, was exiled if only by the clamouring chatter of those whose memories began at New Year One.

The tumblers fell and the thin voice rasped 45.00, 45.00.

He looked at Ilda’s bleached and stencilled body and was aggrieved in an ancient way, that he felt nothing. It had been assigned to him, or he to it, and there was no significance. It was merely an implicit fecundity motivated and geared by the mentalariums and change stations of the UnderWorld—but it was a mechanism without purpose, a body-machine of impotent perfection. He did not love her. He was not supposed to.

“You’re thinking,” she said.

“I’m not. What is there to think about?”

She put her hand on him, looked at him bleakly. “There’s something wrong with you. What is it?”

“I’m tired, that’s all.”

Softly she said, “What do you actually think about?”

“Nothing. I told you—nothing.”

He clipped the silver box at the base of his throat and the antennae activated immediately and pierced him through the implanted nodes and made prefrontal contact. For a moment there was a great throbbing zero, the profound nothing until his brain responded and he began to think the way a man ought to think.

The box throbbed warm against his skin, bleating out its approval and the knowledge that a night out with one’s woman was the best thing, the finest thing a man could hope for. He tingled with happiness. He laughed.

“Come on,” he said. “Come on, we’ll miss the CircuitWay.”

As the civic clocks piped 53, there were 12 points of prearranged golden rain which fell in lazy drifts across the crowded forum. It was enjoyed by all.

Ilda sat close to him on the chair float and they caressed each other. The whole audience was effervescent, simmering with lightly suppressed laughter for they were geared to Unit 5. Each box pulsed with irresistible titillations. The best place on earth was UnderEarth. It was good to be alive.

“Great to be alive!” she said.

His silver box bleated its response. “Absolutely!” he said.

She laughed hysterically, groping for her controls. It was the funniest thing she had ever heard.

His box dredged up the notion: why don’t you do this more often?

“We should do this more often,” he said.

She shrieked with laughter.

His box piped: as often as possible.

“We should do it all the time,” he said.

She flung her arms around him.

His box triggered off the prime edict and he began immediately, “The best place on earth . . .”

“Don’t. Don’t,” she gasped. “It hurts when I laugh all the…”

“... is the UnderEarth!” He finished on a chuckling exclamation. But even as his mood expanded and blossomed, the time-play began and he was caught midway in his reactions, seeing himself suddenly naked in his exile, imprisoned less by stone than by his own submission.

All at once, traumatically, he wrenched the antennae out of his head. Sweat glistened on him; fear dragged his eyes to the silver box which he clawed from his throat. He thought: my brain’s in there! it’s a murder box—and he recognized his own irrationality and rejoiced in it.

The box had a hot dampness in his hand; the metal was obscenely alive. It shuddered but he couldn’t let it go.

Ilda cried out between laughter, “Where . . . where are you going?”

He dropped down from the chair and stumbled back to the conditioning room, fell on to the suspension couch, fingers plucking at the studs, grinding his head into yielding foam. The box lay on the floor confused, unused to paradox.

He closed his eyes and sighed himself steadily towards the edge of sleep.

Then someone’s cool hand touched his shoulder and he looked up.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “No.”

“You look ill.”

He ignored the remark. “I came back for conditioning,” he said.

“So did I,” she said.

He sat up to study her, for there was an unfamiliar fire in her voice. She was some years younger than Ilda; her hair was not yet synthetic and she still affected briefs.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Vena.”

“Married?”

“Assigned. I have three circuits to wait.”

“I see.” He stood up and reached out and touched her, touched her arm and the cold dome of her shoulder, and her hair and her lips he touched them, as though from a hunger of blindness. His hand fell and the box at his feet rolled away, afraid.

She was gazing at him now, as though in recognition. “It would be safer to accept conditioning,” she said, “for both of us.”

He noted now that her own box was disconnected. “Come with me,” he said.

“No.”

“Come with me.”

“I don’t know, without the box, without ...”

He leaned down and picked up the silver-cased brain at his feet. For a moment it resisted in his hand, then died. He looked at Vena and she followed him out of the forum into the main-way and the autodoor said, “Thank you, call again.”

The civic clocks said 58.12, 58.12 and some silver rain fell at the appointed time.

They sat on the rim of the canal on the nightside of the UnderWorld. He took her hand, but did not speak.

The vertical leaves of the metalwork trees scissored above their heads, and the long blades of artificial grass made a sound in the false wind like fracturing glass.

“No one has ever held my hand before,” she said.

“Do you mind?”

“It seems pointless.”

He laid her hand gently and sadly to one side as though it were expiring, then threw himself backwards into the grass which shattered beneath him.

“What shall we do now?” she said.

“Nothing, I suppose.”

“Then what are we doing here?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you sure you don’t need a mentalizer?”

There was silence. He could feel the grass renewing itself under his body.

“I know,” she said, “let’s put our boxes on again.”

“I only use mine at public functions.”

“They’d like you to use them all the time.”

“Who’s ‘they’? Have you ever seen them?”

The question was unfair, for he knew that the omnipotent Controllers had been erased from her memory. But he knew that the idea was disconcerting.

“Let’s put our boxes on.”

He laughed. It was as humourless a sound as the scissoring leaves.

“I should get back to the forum,” she said.

“Why?”

“Let me go,” she said. But he was not holding her. “I’m...” she searched for the word that was almost beyond memory —”. . . frightened.”

“Of what?”

“Everything.”

He kissed her and she writhed under him and the grass broke with a wild chattering. She broke away.

“Why did you do that?” she said.

“It was just something I remembered.”

“It’s nothing I remember.”

“From another time,” he explained.

“When? When? Who are you?”

A sea breeze blew across them at the scheduled time, but there was no sea.

“I’m going to put my box on,” she said, “and find out what I really think of you.”

He had no argument with her, only the box. He grabbed an antenna at the point of insertion.

“You’re hurting her,” she pleaded. The box began to sing with a high thin note of alarm. She took it off.

He dropped his head and gazed into the mercury stillness of the canal. “I thought you might have understood,” he said. “I made a mistake.”

“Understood what?”

His fingers splintered the grass. “You don’t recall New Year One?”

“The beginning of the world?”

“The end of the world.”

“But in the first year...”

“The long shuffle and murmur of the queues at the selection depot, their anguished eyes, their hidden faces, and all the sobbing farewells that echoed across the ice. In the north, remember? the last rocket burned out and smeared the endless night ...”

“I don’t know.” She was shivering.

But he thought that she did know.

“Right through it all the moan of the people and the whine of the wind. Their eyes like chips of dead ice.” He held her fiercely now. “Why did we have to leave them behind?” He shook her. “What right did we have to leave them? All the aged, the lame and the blind. And the stunted children standing stiff with death on the ice?”

“Don’t,” she said.

“Did you hear them at the air locks? They pulped their hands trying to beat their way in. Remember? While we—yes!— huddled mother-tight in the dark of earth’s insides. And submitted ourselves to them. Remember?”

“What’s remember?” she asked.

“How could you forget?”

She tried to get up but he held her, and suddenly she rocked in his arms, but whether from despair or defeat he could not tell. Then suddenly he knew he wanted to fall in love, he knew at once what love was, the simplicity and the therapy of it, and the word itself floated into his mind like a crystal, he thought, like a heartbeat. Love. He said it to her: “Love.”

“What?” she said.

But his tongue could not yield the phrasing that he sought, the delicacies and seductions of another time, another age. “Love.” He uttered the sound of the word again as though it might generate some magic of its own, but all it did was bring a sting of tears to his eyes. He remembered love, its sensations and exhilarations, remembered that one might live, breathe, regenerate—but there was no one to show him the way. All that was left was the dull metal of a badly minted word, like lead on his tongue, impure and unliving.

She struggled and stood, adjusting the box. The antennae homed, quivering. Suddenly, she was one of them again. “You ought to be neutralized,” she said.

His hand grabbed her ankle with crippling force and she fell and the grass powdered. He grabbed the box at her throat and tightened his grip until the circuits shrieked. The sweating metal writhed in his hand and issued a dying discharge that jolted the length of his arm until he fell to his knees. He gave a sudden whimper. The wind stopped. The girl was dead.

The box sobbed and withdrew its antennae that glinted blood-wet in the light of the musk-coloured moon.

They applied the usual mentalizers, conditioners and even attempted total circuiting, but he was beyond repair. So, during sleep-time, they took him quietly to the air shaft, put him in a pellet and let him drift up to the world above. The air lock received him, passed him into the discharge chamber, and expelled him.

For a moment he thought the atmosphere had altered, for it was painful to breathe, but he soon adjusted and forced himself to walk. It was as dark as he remembered it, but the long-bedded ice glowed chill white, enough for him to see the pallor of his freezing hands.

The wind lamented the wasteland. Ice screeched with an endless shifting.

He fell down.

A drift of snow washed over him and burned his eyes. He knew without doubt that he was going to die. He got up and walked again. He fell again. He crawled for a few yards and then he could no longer feel his legs. He was without thought.

Then suddenly he looked up and saw them coming; he saw the three of them coming towards him.

He got up and tried to run. Seeing them pause, he waved again; he croaked out a cry to the three old men, the exiled men, bearded white and robed in the skin of animals. He shouted to them and they looked in his direction, shading their eyes against starlight. He tottered towards them, feet dancing on the crackling ground.

“Brother!” he shouted. “Brother!”

He fell at their feet and they took out short clubs and bludgeoned him to death.

They were so famished that they could not wait and the feasting began without further delay.