UNIVERSE 11
UNIVERSE
11 launches a new decade with a collection of
nine tales that sparkle with the imagination, variety, and excellence that
readers have come to expect from editor Terry Carr. In this volume:
Michael
Bishop's "The Quickening," wherein civilization is totally disrupted
overnight, turning the world's population into refugees with a future to build . . . or to destroy.
"The
Gernsbeck Continuum," by William Gibson, the account of a man recently
returned from a sojourn in the world as it might have been, instead of how it
is.
"In
Reticulum," Carter Scholz's story of an abandoned building in a distant
star system, where the crew of an interstellar spaceship must face themselves . . . and the nature of humankind.
"Mummer
Kiss," by Michael Swanwick, a disturbing adventure into the countryside
around Philadelphia after a nuclear meltdown.
Plus
five more intriguing, extraordinary, and thought-provoking pieces.
MORE FANTASTIC READING FROM ZEBRA!
GONJI ffl: DEATHWIND OF VEDUN (1006, $3.25)
by T.
C. Rypel
Cast out from
his Japanese
homeland, Gonji journeys across barbaric Europe in quest of
Vedun, the distant city in
the loftiest
peaks of the Alps.
Brandishing his swords with fury
and skill,
he is
determined to conquer his
hardships and fulfill his destiny!
GONJI #2:
SAMURAI STEEL (1072, $3.25)
by T.
C. Rypel
His journey to
Vedun is ended, but Gonji's
most treacherous battle ever
is about
to begin.
The invincible
King Klann has occupied Vedun with
his hordes
of murderous
soldiers—and plotted the samurai's
destruction!
CHRYSALIS 9 (1077, $2.50)
Edited by
Roy Torgeson
From astronauts and time travelers, to centaurs and telepaths,
these tales of the
inexplicable and the bizarre promise
to astound
you!
SURVIVORS (1071, $3.25)
by John
Nahmlos
It would take
more than courage and skill,
more than ammo and guns, for
Colonel Jack Dawson to survive
the advancing
nuclear war. It was the ultimate
test—protecting his loved
ones, defending his country, and rebuilding
a civilization
out of
the ashes
of war-ravaged
America!
THE SWORD OF HACHIMAN (1104, $3.50)
by Lynn
Guest
Destiny returned the
powerful sword of Hachiman to
mighty Samurai warrior Yoshitsune
so he
could avenge his father's brutal
death. Only he was
unaware his most perilous enemy
would be his own flesh and
blood!
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EDITED BY
TERRY CARR
ZEBRA BOOKS KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
All
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ZEBRA BOOKS
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e 1981 by Terry Can-Reprinted by arrangement with Doubleday &
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Printed in the United
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CONTENTS
The Quickening 7
michael bishop
The Snake
Who Had
Read Chomsky 41
josephine saxton
Shadows on
the Cave
Wall 65
nancy kress
The Gernsback Continuum 97
william gibson
Venice Drowned 111
kim stanley robinson
In Reticulum 137
carter scholz
Jean Sandwich,
the Sponsor,
and I 163
ian watson
The Start
of the
End of
the World 179
carol emshwiller
Mummer Kiss michael
swanwick
Civilizations
are the products of historical continuity: knowledge, traditions, and
technology develop over many centuries and are strongly influenced by local climates and topology. Today, of
course, we're approaching the reality of the "global village" via
greatly increased ease of travel and communications . . . but we still speak
many different languages, literally and figuratively. What if all the people
in the world woke up one morning and found themselves in a different country?
Would they be able to deal with the situation well enough to continue
civilization as we know it? Would they even want to?
Michael Bishop, whose most recent novel is Transfigurations, has appeared twice before in Universe, with "Old Folks at Home" in §8 and
"Saving Face" in §10.
• THE QUICKENING
Michael Bishop
i.
Lawson came out of his sleep feeling drugged
and disoriented. Instead of the susurrus of traffic on Rivermont and the
early-morning barking of dogs, he heard running feet and an unsettling
orchestration of moans and cries. No curtains screened or softened the sun
that beat down on his face, and an incandescent blueness had replaced their
ceiling. "Marlena," Lawson said doubtfully. He wondered if one of the
children was sick and told himself that he ought to get up to help.
But
when he tried to rise, scraping the back of his hand on a stone set firmly in
mortar, he found that his bed had become a parapet beside a river flowing
through an unfamiliar city. He was wearing, instead of the green
Chinese-peasant pajamas that Marlena had given him for Christmas, a suit of
khaki 1505s from his days in the Air Force and a pair of ragged Converse
sneakers. Clumsily, as if deserting a mortuary slab, Lawson
leapt away from the wall.
In his
sleep, the world had turned over.
The forms
of a
bewildered anarchy had begun to assert
themselves.
The city—and Lawson
knew that it sure as
hell wasn't Lynchburg, that the river
running through it wasn't the
James—was full of people.
A few,
their expressions terrified and
their postures defensive, were padding
past Lawson on the boulevard beside
the parapet.
Many shrieked or babbled as they ran. Other human
shapes dressed not even remotely
alike, were lifting themselves
bemusedly from paving stones, or riverside benches, or the
gutter beyond the sidewalk. Their grogginess and their swiftly
congealing fear, Lawson realized, mirrored his
own: like him, these people
were awakening to nightmare.
Because the terrible
fact of his displacement seemed more important than the
myriad physical details confronting him, it was hard to
take in everything at once—but
Lawson tried to balance and integrate
what he saw.
The city
was foreign.
Its architecture
was a
clash of the Gothic and the
sterile, pseudoadobe Modern, one style
to each side of the river.
On this
side, palm trees waved their
dreamy fronds at precise
intervals along the boulevard, and toward the city's interior
an intricate
cathedral tower defined by its great
height nearly everything beneath it.
Already the sun crackled off the
rose-colored tower with an arid
fierceness that struck Lawson,
who had
never been abroad, as Mediterranean.
. .
. Off
to his
left was a bridge leading
into a more modern quarter of
the city,
where beige and brick-red highrises clustered like tombstones. On both sides of
the bridge buses, taxicabs, and other
sorts of motorized vehicles were stalled or abandoned in
the thoroughfares.
Unfamiliar, Lawson reflected,
but not
unearthly—he recognized things, saw the
imprint of a culture somewhat
akin to his own. And, for
a moment,
he let
the inanimate
bulk of the city and the
languor of its palms and
bougainvillea crowd out of his vision
the human
horror show taking place in
the streets.
A dark woman
in a
sari hurried past. Lawson lifted
his hand to her. Dredging up
a remnant
of a
high-school language course, he shouted,
"¿Habla
Español?" The woman quickened her pace, crossed the
street, recrossed it, crossed it
again; her movements were
random, motivated, it seemed, by panic and the complicated
need to do something.
At a black
man in
a loincloth
farther down the parapet, Lawson shouted, "This is Spain!
We're somewhere in Spain! That's all
I know! Do you speak English? Spanish?
Do you know what's happened to
us?"
The black man,
grimacing so that his skin
went taut across his cheekbones, flattened himself atop the
wall like a lizard. His elbows jutted, his eyes
narrowed to slits. Watching him,
Lawson perceived that the
man was
listening intently to a sound that
had been
steadily rising in volume ever
since Lawson had opened his eyes:
the city
was wailing.
From courtyards, apartment buildings,
taverns, and plazas, an eerie
and discordant
wail was rising into the
bland blue indifference of the
day. It consisted of many
strains. The Negro in the loincloth
seemed determined to separate these
and pick
out the ones that
spoke most directly to him.
He tilted
his head.
"Spain!" Lawson
yelled against the uproar. "¡España!"
The black man
looked at Lawson, but the
hieroglyph of recognition was not among
those that glinted in his
eyes. As if to dislodge the
wailing of the city, he
shook his head. Then, still crouching lizard-fashion
on the
wall, he began methodically banging his head against
its stones.
Lawson, helplessly aghast, watched
him until
he had
knocked himself insensible in a sickening,
repetitive spattering of blood.
But Lawson was
the only
one who
watched. When he approached the man to see
if he
had killed
himself, Lawson's eyes were seduced away
from the African by a
movement in the river. A bundle
of some
sort was floating in the
greasy waters below the wall—an infant,
clad only in a shirt.
The tie-strings on
the shirt
trailed out behind the child
like the severed, wavering legs of
a water-walker.
Lawson wondered if in Spain, they
even had water-walkers. . .
.
Meanwhile, still growing
in volume,
there crooned above the highrises and
Moorish gardens the impotent air-raid
siren of 400,000 human voices.
Lawson cursed the sound. Then he covered his face
and wept.
U.
The city
was Seville.
The river
was the
Guadalquivir. Lynchburg and the
James River, around which Lawson
had grown up as the eldest
child of an itinerant fundamentalist
preacher, were several thousand
miles and one helluva big
ocean away. You couldn't
get there
by swimming,
and if
you imagined that your loved ones
would be waiting for you
when you got back,
you were
probably fantasizing the nature of the
world's changed reality. No one
was where
he or
she belonged anymore, and-Lawson knew himself
lucky even to realize where he
was. Most of the dispossessed,
displaced people inhabiting Seville today didn't know that much; all they knew was
the intolerable
cruelty of their uprooting, the pain of separation from husbands, wives, children,
lovers, friends. These things,
and fear.
The bodies of
infants floated in the Guadalquivir;
and Lawson, from his early reconnoiterings
of the
city on a motor scooter that he had found
near the Jardines de Cristina
park, knew that thousands of adults
already lay dead on streets
and in apartment buildings—victims
of panic-inspired
beatings or their own traumatized hearts. Who knew exactly
what was going on in the
morning's chaos? Babel had come
again and with it, as part
of the
package, the utter dissolution of all family and
societal ties. You couldn't go
around a corner without encountering a child
of some
exotic ethnic caste, her face
snot-glazed, sobbing loudly or
maybe running through a crush of bodies calling out names
in an
alien tongue.
What were you
supposed to do? Wheeling by
on his
motor scooter, Lawson either
ignored these children or searched
their faces to see
how much
they resembled his daughters.
Where was Marlena
now? Where were Karen and
Hannah? Just as he played
deaf to the cries of
the children
in the
boulevards, Lawson had to
harden himself against the implications
of these
questions. As dialects of German,
Chinese, Bantu, Russian, Celtic,
and a
hundred other languages rattled in
his ears,
his scooter
rattled past a host of
cars and buses with uncertain-seeming drivers at their wheels.
Probably he too should have
chosen an enclosed vehicle. If
these frustrated and angry
drivers, raging in poly got
defiance, decided to run over
him, they could do so
with impunity. Who would stop them?
Maybe—in Istanbul,
or La
Paz, or Mangalore, or Jonko-ping,
or Boise
City, or Kaesong—his own wife
and children
had already lost their
lives to people made murderous
by fear
or the absence of helmeted men
with pistols and billy sticks.
Maybe Marlena and his
children were dead. . .
.
I'm in Seville,
Lawson told himself, cruising. He
had determined
the name
of the
city soon after mounting the
motor scooter and going by a
sign that said Plaza de
Toros de Sevilla. A circular
stadium of considerable size near
the river.
The bullring. Lawson's Spanish was just
good enough to decipher the
signs and posters plastered on
its walls.
Corrida a las cinco de
la tarde.
(Garcia Lorca,
he thought,
unsure of where the name had
come from.) Sombray sol. That morning, then, lie took
the scooter
around the stadium three or
four times and then shot
off toward
the center
of the
city.
Lawson wanted nothing
to do
with the nondescript high-rises across the Guadalquivir, but had no real
idea what he was going to
do on
the Moorish
and Gothic
side of the river, cither. All he knew was
that the empty bullring, with
its dormant
potential for death, frightened him. On the other
hand, how did you go about
establishing order in a city
whose population had not willingly
chosen to be there?
Seville's population, Lawson felt sure, had
been redistributed across the face
of the
globe, like chess pieces flung
from a height. The population of every other human
community on Earth had undergone similar
displacements. The result,
as if by malevolent design, was
chaos and suffering. Your ears eventually
tried to shut out the
audible manifestations of this pain, but
your eyes held you accountable
and you
hated yourself for ignoring
the wailing
Arab child, the assaulted Polynesian woman, the
blue-eyed old man bleeding from
the palms as he prayed in
the shadow
of a
department-store awning. Very
nearly, you hated yourself for
surviving.
Early in the
afternoon, at the entrance to
the Calle de
las Sierpes, Lawson got off his
scooter and propped it against
a wall. Then he waded into
the crowd
and lifted
his right
arm above his head.
"I speak English!"
he called.
" Y hablo
un poco
Español! Any who speak
English or Spanish please come
to me!"
A man
who might
have been Vietnamese or Kampuchean,
or even Malaysian, stole Lawson's motor scooter
and rode
it in a wobbling zigzag down
the Street
of the
Serpents. A heavyset blond woman with
red cheeks
glared at Lawson from a doorway,
and a
twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy who
appeared to be Italian
clutched hungrily at Lawson's belt,
seeking purchase of an
adult, hoping for commiseration. Although he did not
try to
brush the boy's hand away,
Lawson avoided his eyes.
"English! English
here! ¡Un poco
Español también!"
Farther down Sierpes, Lawson saw another man with his
hand in the air;
he was
calling aloud in a crisp
but melodic
Slavic dialect, and already
he had
succeeded in attracting two or three
other people to him. In
fact, pockets of like-speaking people seemed to be
forming in the crowded commercial
avenue, causing Lawson to fear
that he had put up
his hand too late
to end
his own
isolation. What if those who
spoke either English or
Spanish had already gathered into
survival-conscious groups? What if
they had already made their way into the countryside,
where the competition for food and
drink might be a little
less predatory? If they had,
he would be a
lost, solitary Virginian in this
Babel. Reduced to sign language and
guttural noises to make his
wants known, he would die a
cipher. . . .
"Signore," the boy
hanging on his belt cried.
"Stgnore."
Lawson let his
eyes drift to the boy's
face. ''Ciao,'' he
said. It was the only word
of Italian
he knew,
or the
only word that came immediately to mind, and he
spoke it much louder than he meant.
The boy shook
his head
vehemently, pulled harder on Lawson's belt. His words tumbled
out like
the contents
of an
unburdened closet into a
darkened room, not a single
one of
them distinct or recognizable.
"English!" Lawson
shouted. "English here!"
"English here, too,
man!" a voice responded from
the milling crush of people at
the mouth
of Sierpes.
"Hang on a minute, I'm coming
to you!"
A small muscular
man with
a large
head and not much chin stepped
daintily through an opening in
the crowd
and put out his hand to
Lawson. His grip was firm.
As he
shook hands, he placed his left
arm over
the shoulder
of the
Italian boy hanging on to Lawson's
belt. The boy stopped talking
and gaped at the
newcomer.
"Dai Secombe," the man said. "I
went to bed in Aberystwyth,
where I teach philosophy, and I wake up
in Spain.
Pleased to meet you,
Mr.—"
"Lawson," Lawson
said.
The boy began
babbling again, his hand shifting
from I.awson's belt to
the Welshman's
flannel shirt facing. Secombe took
the boy's
hands in his own. "I've
got you,
lad. There's a ragged crew of
your compatriots in a pool-hall
pub right down this lane. Come
on, then,
I'll take you." He glanced at Lawson. "Wait for me, sir. I'll
be right
back."
Secombe and
the boy
disappeared, but in less than
five minutes the Welshman had returned.
He introduced
himself all over again. "To go
to bed
in Aberystwyth
and to
wake up in Seville," he said,
"is pretty damn harrowing. I'm glad to be alive,
sir."
"Do you
have a family?"
"Only my
father. He's eighty-four."
"You're lucky. Not
to have
anyone else to worry about,
I mean."
"Perhaps," Dai Secombe said, a sudden
trace of sharpness in his
voice. "Yesterday I would not've
thought so."
The two men
stared at each other as
the wail
of the
city modulated into a
less hysterical but still inhuman
drone. People surged around them, scrutinized
them from foyers and balconies, took their measure. Out
of the
corner of his eye Lawson was
aware of a moonfaced woman
in summer
deerskins slumping abruptly and
probably painfully to the street. An Eskimo woman—the conceit
was almost
comic, but the woman herself was
dying and a child with
a Swedish-steel
switchblade was already freeing a
necklace of teeth and shells from her throat.
Lawson turned
away from Secombe to watch
the plundering
of the
Eskimo woman's body. Enraged, he
took off his wristwatch and threw
it as
the boy's
head, scoring a glancing sort of hit on his
ear.
"You little
jackal, get away from there!"
The red-cheeked woman who had been
glaring at Lawson applied her foot
to the
rump of the boy with
the switchblade
and pushed him over.
Then she retrieved the thrown
watch, hoisted her skirts,
and retreated
into the dim interior of
the café whose door she had been haunting.
"In this climate,
in this
environment," Dai Secombe
told Lawson, "an Eskimo is doomed.
It's as much psychological and emotional as it is
physical. There may be a
few others
who've already died for
similar reasons. Not much we
can do, sir."
Lawson turned
back to the Welshman with
a mixture
of awe and
disdain. How had this curly-haired
lump of a man, in the
space of no more than
three or four hours, come
to respond
so lackadaisically
to the
deaths of his fellows? Was
it merely because the sky was
still blue and the edifices
of another
age still
stood?
Pointedly, Secombe said,
"That was a needless forfeiture
of your watch, Lawson."
"How the hell
did that
poor woman get here?" Lawson demanded, his gesture taking
in the
entire city. "How the hell did
any of
us get
here?" The stench of open
wounds and the first sweet hints
of decomposition
mocked the luxury of his ardor.
"Good questions," the Welshman responded, taking Lawson's arm and leading
him out
of the
Calle de
las Sierpes. "It's a pity I
can't answer 'em."
Ml.
That night they
ate fried
fish and drank beer together
in a
dirty little apartment over
a shop
whose glass display cases were filled with a variety
of latex
contraceptives. They had
obtained the fish from
a pescadería voluntarily tended by men
and women of Greek
and Yugoslavian
citizenship, people who had run similar
shops in their own countries.
The beer
they had taken from
one of
the classier
bars on the Street of
the Serpents. Both the
fish and the beer were
at room
temperature, but tasted none the
worse for that.
With the fall
of evening,
however, the wail that during
the day had subsided into a
whine began to reverberate again with its first full
burden of grief. If the
noise was not quite so
loud as it had
been that morning, Lawson thought,
it was
probably because the city
contained fewer people. Many had
died, and a great
many more, unmindful of the
distances involved, had set out
to return
to their
homelands.
Iyawson chewed
a piece
of adobo and washed this down
with a swig of the vaguely
bitter Cruz del Campo beer.
"Isn't this fine?"
Secombe said, his butt on
the tiles
of the
room's one windowsill. "Dinner over a rubber
shop. And this a"Catholic
country, too."
"I was raised
a Baptist,"
Lawson said, realizing at once
that his confession was a non sequitur.
"Oh," Secombe
put in
immediately. "Then I imagine you could get all the
rubbers you wanted.''
"Sure. For a
quarter. In almost any gas-station
rest-room."
"Sorry," Secombe
said.
They ate for
a while
in silence.
Lawson's back was to a
cool plaster wall; he leaned his
head against it, too, and
released a sharp moan from his
chest. Then, sustaining the sound,
he moaned again, adding his own
strand of grief to the
cacophonous harmonies already afloat over
the city.
He was
no different
from all the bereaved others
who shared
his pain
by concentrating on their
own.
"What did you
do in
. .
.in Lynchburg?"
Secombe suddenly asked.
"Campus liaison for
the Veterans
Administration. I traveled
to four
different colleges in the area
straightening out people's problems with the
GI Bill.
I tried
to see
to it
that— Sweet Jesus, Secombe, who cares?
I miss
my wife.
I'm afraid
my girls are dead."
"Karen and
Hannah?"
"They're three and
five. I've taught them to
play chess. Karen's good enough to
beat me occasionally if I
spot her my queen. Hannah knows
the moves,
but she
hasn't got her sister's patience—she's
only three, you know. Yeah.
Sometimes she sweeps the pieces
off the
board and folds her arms,
and we play hell trying to
find them all. There'll be
pawns under the sofa, horsemen upside
dov^n in the shag—" Law-son stopped.
"She levels them,"
Secombe said. "As we've all
been leveled. The knight's no
more than the pawn, the
king no more than the bishop."
Lawson could tell
that the Welshman was trying
to turn
aside the ruinous thrust
of his
grief. But he brushed the
metaphor aside: "I don't think
we've been 'leveled,' Secombe."
"Certainly we have.
Guess who I saw this
morning near the cathedral when I
first woke up."
"God only
knows."
"God and Dai
Secombe, sir. I saw the
Marxist dictator of . . .
oh, you
know, that little African country
where there's just been a coup.
I recognized
the bastard
from the telly broadcasts during the
purge trials there. There he
was, though, in white ducks and
a ribbed
T-shirt—terrified, Law-son, and
as powerless
as you
or I.
He'd been quite decidedly leveled; you'd better believe he
had."
"I'll bet
he's alive tonight, Secombe."
The Welshman's eyes flickered with a
sudden insight. He extended the greasy
cone of newspaper from the
pescadería.
' 'Another
piece of fish, Lawson? Come
on, then,
there's only one more."
"To be leveled,
Secombe, is to be put
on a
par with
everyone else. Your dictator, even
deprived of office, is a
grown man. What about infant children?
Toddlers and preadoles-cents? And what
about people like that Eskimo
woman who haven't got a chance
in an
unfamiliar environment, even if its inhabitants
don't happen to be hostile?
... I
saw a
man knock his brains out on
a stone
wall this morning because he
took a look around and knew
he couldn't
make it here. Maybe he thought
he was
in Hell,
Secombe. I don't know. But his
chance certainly wasn't ours."
"He knew
he couldn't
adjust."
"Of course he
couldn't adjust. Don't give me
that bullshit about leveling!''
Secombe turned the
cone of newspaper around and
withdrew the last piece of
fish. "I'm going to eat
this myself, if you don't mind."
He ate.
As he
was chewing,
he said,
"I didn't think that
Virginia Baptists were so free
with their
tongues, Lawson.
Tsk, tsk. Undercuts my preconceptions."
"I've fallen away." "Haven't we all."
Lawson took a
final swig of warm beer.
Then he hurled the botde across
the room.
Fragments of amber glass went
everywhere. "God!" he cried. "God,
God, God!" Weeping, he was no
different from three quarters of
Seville's new citizens-by-chance.
Why, then, as he sobbed,
did he
shoot such guilty and threatening glances at the Welshman?
"Go ahead," Secombe advised him, waving
the empty
cone of newspaper. "I feel a litde
that way myself."
iv.
In the
morning an oddly blithe woman
of forty-five
or so
accosted them in the
alley outside the contraceptive shop. A military pistol in
a patent-leather
holster was strapped about her skirt.
Her seeming
airiness, Lawson quickly realized, was a function of her
appearance and her movements; her eyes were as grim
and frightened
as everyone
else's. But, as soon as they
came out of the shop
onto the cobblestones, she approached them fearlessly, hailing Secombe
almost as if he were an
old friend.
"You left
us yesterday,
Mr. Secombe.
Why?"
"I saw
everything dissolving into cliques."
"Dissolving? Coming
together, don't you mean?"
Secombe smiled noncommittally,
then introduced the woman to Lawson
as Mrs.
Alexander. "She's one of your
own, Lawson. She's from
Wyoming or some such place.
I met her outside the cathedral
yesterday morning when the first self-appointed
muezzins started calling their language-mates
together. She didn't have a
pistol then."
"I got it
from one of the Guardia
Civil stations," Mrs. Alexander said. "And I feel
lots better just having it,
let me
tell you." She looked
at Lawson.
"Are you in the Air
Force?"
"Not any
more. These are the clothes
I woke
up in."
"My husband's in
the Air
Force. Or was. We were
stationed at Warren in Cheyenne.
I'm originally
from upstate New York. And these
are the
clothes ƒ woke up in."
A riding
skirt, a blouse, low-cut
rubber-soled shoes. "I think they
tried to give us
the most
serviceable clothes we had in
our wardrobes—but they succeeded
better in some cases than
others."
" 'They'
?" Secombe asked.
"Whoever's done
this. It's just a manner
of speaking."
"What do you
want?" Secombe asked Mrs. Alexander.
His brusqueness of tone
surprised Lawson.
Smiling, she replied,
"The word for today is
Exportadora.
We're trying
to get
as many
English-speaking people as
we can to Exportadora. That's where the
commercial center for American servicemen and their families in
Seville is located, and it's just
off one
of the
major boulevards to the south
of here."
On a piece
of paper
sack Mrs. Alexander drew them
a crude map and explained that
her husband
had once
been stationed in Zaragoza in the north of Spain. Yesterday
she had recalled that Seville was
one of
the four
Spanish cities supporting the American military
presence, and with persistence and a little luck
a pair
of carefully
briefed English-speaking DPs (the abbreviation
was Mrs.
Alexander's) had discovered the site of
the American
PX and
commissary just before nightfall. Looting the
place when they arrived had
been an impossibly mixed crew of foreigners,
busily hauling American merchandise
out of
the ancient
buildings. But Mrs. Alexander's DPs had
run off
the looters
by the
simple expedient of revving
the engine
of their
comandeered taxicab and blowing its horn
as if
to announce
Armageddon. In ten minutes the little
American enclave had emptied of
all human
beings but the two men
in the
cab. After that, as English-speaking DPs all over the
city learned of Exporta-dora's existence and sought to
reach it, the place had
begun to fill
up again.
"Is there an
air base
in Seville?"
Lawson asked the woman.
"No, not really.
The base
itself is near Moron de
la Frontera, about thirty miles away,
but Seville
is where
the real action is." After a
brief pause, lifting her eyebrows,
she corrected herself: "Was."
She thrust her
map into
Secombe's hands. "Here. Go on
out to Exportadora. I'm going to
look around for more of
us. You're the first people I've
found this morning. Others are
looking, too, though. Maybe
things'U soon start making some sense."
Secombe shook his
head. "Us. Them. There isn't
anybody now who isn't a
'DP,' you know. This regrouping
on the basis of tired cultural
affiliations is probably a mistake.
I don't like it."
"You took
up with
Mr. Lawson,
didn't you?"
"Out of pity
only, I assure you. He
looked lost. Moreover, you've got to
have companionship of some sort—especially when you're
in a
strange place."
"Sure. That's
why the
word for today is Exportadora."
"It's a mistake, Mrs.
Alexander."
"Why?"
"For the same
reason your mysterious 'they' saw
fit to
displace us to begin with,
I'd venture.
It's a feeling I have."
"Old cultural affiliations
are a
source'of stability," Mrs.
Alexander said earnestly. As she talked, Lawson
took the rumpled map out of
Secombe's fingers. "This chaos around
us won't go away
until people have setded themselves
into units—it's a natural
process, it's beginning already. Why,
walking along the river
this morning, I saw several
groups of like-speaking people
burying yesterday's dead. The city's
churches and chapels have
begun to fill up, too.
You can
still hear the frightened and the
heartbroken keening in solitary rooms, of course—but it can't
go on
forever. They'll either make connection or die. I'm not
one of
those who wish to die,
Mr. Secombe."
"Who wishes that?"
Lawson put in, annoyed by
the shallow
metaphysical drift of this exchange
and by
Secombe's irrationality. Although
Mrs. Alexander was right, she
didn't have to defend her position
at such
length. The map was her
most important contribution to the return of
order in their lives, and Lawson
wanted her to let them
use that
map.
"Come on, Secombe."
He said.
"Let's go out to this Exportadora. It's probably the only
chance we have of making
it home."
"I don't think
there's any chance of our
making it home again, Lawson. Ever."
Perceiving that Mrs.
Alexander was about to ask
the Welshman why, Lawson turned on
his heel
and took
several steps down the alley. ''Come
on, Secombe.
We have
to try.
What the hell are
you going
to do
in this
flip-flopped city all by yourself?"
"Look for
somebody else to talk to,
I suppose."
But in a
moment Secombe was at Lawson's
side helping him decipher the smudged
geometries of Mrs. Alexander's map, and the woman herself,
before heading back to Sierpes to look
for more
of her
own kind,
called out, "It'll only take
you twenty or so
minutes, walking. Good luck. See
you later."
Walking, they passed
a white-skinned
child lying in an alley
doorway opening on to a
courtyard festooned with a two-day-old
washing and populated by a
pack of orphaned dogs. The child's
head was covered by a
coat, but she did appear
to be breathing. Lawson was not
even tempted to examine her
more closely, however. He
kept his eyes resolutely on the map.
v.
The newsstand
in the
small American enclave had not
been looted. On Lawson's
second day at Exportadora it still contained quality paperbacks,
the most
recent American news and entertainment magazines, and a variety
of tabloids,
including the military paper The Stars and Stripes. No one knew
how old
these publications were because no
one knew over what length of
time the redistribution of the
world's population had taken
place. How long had everyone
slept? And what about
the discrepancies
among time zones and the differences
among people's waking hours within
the same time zones? These questions
were academic now, it seemed to
Lawson, because the agency of
transfer had apparently encompassed every single human being
alive on Earth.
Thumbing desultorily through a copy of
Stars and Stripes, he encountered
an article
on the
problems of military hospitals and wondered how many
of the
world's sick had awakened in
the open,
doomed to immediate death because
the care they required was nowhere
at hand.
The smell
of spilled
tobacco and melted Life
Savers made the newsstand a
pleasant place to contemplate these horrors; and, even
as his
conscience nagged and a contingent
of impatient
DPs awaited
him, Lawson perversely continued to flip through
the newspaper.
Secombe's squat form
appeared in the doorway. "I
thought you were looking
for a
local roadmap."
"Found it
already, just skimmin' the news."
"Come on,
if you
would. The folks're ready to
be off."
Reluctantly, Lawson followed
Secombe outside, where the raw Andalusian
sunlight broke like invisible surf
against the pavement and the fragile-seeming
shell of the Air Force
bus. It was of the Bluebird
shuttle variety, and Lawson remembered
summer camp at Eglin Air
Force Base in Florida and bus rides from his
squadron's minimum-maintenance ROTC barracks
to the
survival-training camps near
the swamp. That had been a
long time ago, but this
Bluebird might have hailed
from an even more distant
era. It was as boxy and
sheepish-looking as if
it had
come off a 1954 assembly
line, and it appeared to
be made
out of
warped tin rather than steel. The
people inside the bus had
opened all its windows, and
many of those on the
driver's side were watching Secombe and Lawson approach.
"Move your asses!"
a man
shouted at them. "Let's get some wind blowing through
this thing before we all
suffo-damn-cate."
"Just keep
talking," Secombe advised
him. "That should do fine."
Aboard the bus
was a
modey lot of Americans, Britishers, and Australians,
with two or three English-speaking
Europeans and an Oxford-educated native of India to
lend the group ballast. Lawson took
up a
window seat over the hump
of one
of the bus's rear tires, and
Secombe squeezed in beside him.
A few people introduced themselves; others, lost in fitful
rev-cries, ignored them altogether. The most unsetding thing
about the contingent to Lawson was the
absence of children. Although about equally
divided between men and women,
the group contained no
boys or girls any younger
than their early teens.
Lawson opened the
map of
southern Spain he had found
in the newsstand and traced his
finger along a highway route
leading out of Seville
to two
small American enclaves outside (he city, Santa Clara and
San Pablo.
Farther to the south were Jerez and the port
city of Cadiz. Lawson's heart
misgave him; the names
were all so foreign, so
formidable in what they evoked, and
he felt
this entire enterprise to be
hopeless. . . .
About midway along
the right-hand
side of the bus a
black woman was sobbing into the
hem of
her blouse,
and a
man perched on the Bluebird's long rear seat had
his hands
clasped to his ears
and his
head canted forward to touch
his knees. Lawson folded up the
map and
stuck it into the crevice
between the seat and
the side
of the
bus.
"The bottom-line common denominator here isn't
our all
speaking English," Secombe whispered.
"It's what we're suffering.''
Driven by one
of Mrs.
Alexander's original explorers, a doctor from
Ivanhoe, New South Wales, the
Bluebird shuddered and lurched forward.
In a
moment it had left Exportadora and begun banging along one of
the wide
avenues that would lead it out
of town.
"And our suffering,"
Secombe went on, still whispering,
"unites us with all
those poor souls raving in
the streets
and sleeping facedown in their own
vomit. You felt that the
other night above the condom shop,
Lawson. I know you did,
talking of your daughters. So why are you
so quick
to go
looking for what you aren't likely
to find?
Why are
you so
ready to unite yourself with this
artificial family born out of
catastrophe? Do you really think
you're going to catch a
flight home to Lynchburg? Do you
really think the bird driving
this sardine can—who ought to be
out in
the streets
plying his trade instead of running
a shuttle
service—d'you really think he's ever going
to get
back to Australia?"
"Secombe—"
"Do you,
Lawson?"
Lawson clapped a
hand over the Welshman's knee and wobbled it back
and forth.
"You wouldn't be badgering me
like this if you
had a
family of your own. What
the hell
do you want us to do?
Stay here forever?"
"I don't know,
exactly." He removed
Lawson's hand from his knee. "But
I do
have a father, sir, and
I happen
to be fond of him. .
. .
All I
know for certain is that
things are supposed
to be
different now. We shouldn't be
rushing to restore what we
already had."
"Shit," Lawson murmured.
He leaned
his head
against the bottom edge of the
open window beside him.
From deep within
the city
came the britde noise of
gunshots. The Bluebird's driver, in
response to this sound and
to the vegetable carts and automobiles
that had been moved into the streets as obstacles,
began wheeling and cornering like a stock-car jockey. The
bus clanked
and stuttered
alarmingly. It growled through an
intersection below a stone bridge, leapt over that bridge
like something living, and roared down into a semi-industrial
suburb of Seville where a
Coca-Cola bottling factory and
a local
brewery lifted huge competing signs.
On top of
one of
these buildings Lawson saw a
man with
a rifle taking unhurried potshots at
anyone who came into his
sights. Several people already
lay dead.
And a moment
later the Bluebird's front window
shattered, another bullet ricocheted off its flank, and
everyone in the bus was either
shouting or weeping. The next
time Law-son looked, the bus's
front window appeared to have
woven inside it a large and
exceedingly intricate spider's web.
The Bluebird careened
madly, but the doctor from
Ivan-hoe kept it upright and
turned it with considerable skill onto the highway to
San Pablo.
Here the bus eased into
a quiet
and rhythmic cruising that
made this final incident in
Seville—except for the
evidence of the front windows—seem
only the cottony afterstate
of nightmare.
At last
they were on their way. Maybe.
"Another good reason
for trying
to get
home," Lawson said.
"What makes
you think
it's going to be different
there?"
Irritably Lawson turned
on the
Welshman. "I thought your idea was
that this change was some
kind of improvement."
"Perhaps it
will be. Eventually."
Lawson made a
dismissive noise and looked at
the olive
orchard spinning by on his
left. Who would harvest the
crop? Who would set the aircraft
factories, the distilleries, the chemical and textile plants running
again? Who would see to
it that seed was
sown in the empty fields?
Maybe Secombe
had something.
Maybe, when you ran for home,
you ran
from the new reality at
hand. The effects of this new
reality's advent were not going
to go
away very soon, no matter what
you did—but
seeking to reestablish yesterday's order would probably create an
even nastier entropic pattern than would accepting the present chaos and
working to rein it in. How, though, did you best rein it in? Maybe by trying to
get back home. . . .
Lawson
shook his head and thought of Marlena, Karen, Hannah; of the distant,
mist-softened cradle of the Blue Ridge. Lord. That was country much easier to
get in tune with than the harsh, white-sky bleakness of this Andalusian valley.
If you stay here, Lawson told himself, the pain will never go away.
They
passed Santa Clara, which was a housing area for the officers and senior NCOs
who had been stationed at Moron. With its neatly trimmed hedgerows, tall
aluminum street-lamps, and low-roofed houses with carports and picture windows,
Santa Clara resembled a middle-class exurbia in New Jersey or Ohio. Black smoke
was curling over the area, however, and the people on the streets and lawns
were definitely not Americans—they were transplanted Dutch South Africans,
Amazonian tribesmen, Poles, Ethiopians, God-only-knew-what. All Lawson could
accurately deduce was that a few of these people had moved into the vacant
houses— maybe they had awakened in them—and that others had aimlessly set
bonfires about the area's neighborhoods. These fires, because there was no
wind, burned with a maddening slowness and lack of urgency.
"Litde America,"
Secombe said aloud.
"That's in
Antarctica," Lawson responded sarcastically.
"Right. No matter
where it happens to be."
"Up yours."
Their
destination was now San Pablo, where the Americans had hospital facilities, a
library, a movie theater, a snackbar, a commissary, and, in conjunction with
the Spaniards, a small commercial and military airfield. San Pablo lay only a
few more miles down the road, and Lawson contemplated the idea of a flight to
Portugal. What would be the chances, supposing you actually reached Lisbon, of
crossing the Atlantic, either
by sea
or air,
and reaching
one of
the United States's coastal cities? One
in a
hundred? One in a thousand? Less than that?
A couple
of seats
behind the driver, an Englishman
with a crisp-looking moustache
and an
American woman with a distinct
Southwestern accent were arguing the
merits of bypassing San Pablo
and heading
on to
Gibraltar, a British possession. The Englishman seemed to
feel that Gibraltar would have escaped the upheaval to
which the remainder of the
world had fallen victim,
whereas the American woman thought he was crazy. A
shouting match involving five or
six other passengers ensued. Finally, his
patience at an end, the
Bluebird's driver put his
elbow on the horn and
held it there until everyone had
shut up.
"It's San Pablo,"
he announced.
"Not Gibraltar or anywhere else.
There'll be a plane waitin'
for us
when we get there."
vi.
Two aircraft were waiting, a pair of
patched-up DC-7s that
had once belonged to
the Spanish
airline known as Iberia.
Mrs. Alexander had recruited
one of
her pilots
from the DPs
who had shown up
at Exportadora;
the other,
a retired
TWA
veteran from Riverside, California, had made it
by himself
to the airfield by virtue of
a prior
acquaintance with Seville
and its American military
installations. Both men
were eager
to carry passengers home, one via a
stopover in Lisbon and
the other by using
Madrid as a stepping-stone to the British
Isles. The hope was
that they could transfer their
passengers
to jet aircraft at these cities'
more cosmopolitan airports, but
no one spoke very much about
the real
obstacles to success
that had already begun
stalking them: civil chaos, delay,
in-
adequate communications, fuel shortages,
mechanical hang-
ups, doubt and ignorance,
a thousand
other things.-------------
At twilight,
then, Lawson stood next to
Dai Secombe
at the chain link fence fronting
San Pablo's
pothole-riven runway and watched the
evening light glimmer off the
wings of the DC-7s. Bathed in
a muted
dazzle, the two old airplanes
were almost beautiful. Even though Mrs. Alexander
had informed the DPs that they
must spend the night in
the installation's
movie theater, so that the
Bluebird could make several more shuttle
runs to Exportadora, Lawson truly believed
that he was bound for
home.
"Good-bye," Secombe
told him.
"Good-bye? . .
. Oh,
because you'll be on the
other flight?"
"No, I'm telling
you good-bye,
Lawson, because I'm leaving. Right now,
you see.
This very minute." "Where
are you
going?" "Back into the
city." "How? What for?"
"I'll walk, I
suppose. As for why, it
has something
to do
with wanting to appease
Mrs. Alexander's 'they,' also with
finding out what's to
become of us all. Seville's
the place
for that, I think."
"Then why'd
you even
come out here?"
"To say
good-bye, you bloody imbecile." Secombe laughed, grabbed
Lawson's hand, shook it heartily.
"Since I couldn't manage to change
your mind."
With that, he
turned and walked along the
chain link fence until he had
found the roadway past the
installation's commissary. Lawson watched him disappear
behind that building's Complicated system of
loading ramps. After a time
the Welshman reappeared on the other
side, but, against the vast
Spanish sky, his compact
striding form rapidly dwindled to
an imperceptible smudge. A
smudge on the darkness.
"Good-bye," Lawson
said.
That night,
slumped in a lumpy theater
chair, he slept with nearly sixty
other people in San Pablo's
movie house. A teenage boy, over
only a few objections, insisted on showing
all the old
movies still in tins in
the projection
room. As a result, Lawson
awoke once in the middle
of Apocalypse Now
and
another time near
the end
of Kubrick's
The Left
Hand of Darkness. The ice on the screen, dunelike
sastrugi ranged from horizon to horizon,
chilled him, touching a sensitive
spot in his memory.
"Little America," he murmured. Then
he went back to
sleep.
With the
passengers bound for Lisbon, Lawson
stood at the fence where he
had stood
with Secombe, and watched the
silver pinwheeling of propellers
as the
aircraft's engines engaged. The DC-7s
flying to Madrid would not
leave until much later that day,
primarily because it still had
several vacant seats and Mrs.
Alexander felt sure that more
English-speaking DPs could
still be found in the
city.
The people at
the gate
with Lawson shifted uneasily and
whispered among themselves. The engines of their
savior airplane whined deafeningly,
and the
runway seemed to tremble. What woebegone
eyes the women had, Lawson
thought, and the men
were as scraggly as railroad
hoboes. Feeling his jaw,
he understood
that he was no more
handsome or well-groomed than any
of those
he waited
with. And, like them, he was
impatient for the signal to
board, for the thumbs-up sign indicating
that their airplane had passed
its latest rudimentary ground tests.
At least, he
consoled himself, you're not eating
potato chips at ten-thirty in the
morning. Disgustedly, he turned aside from a jut-eared man
who was
doing just that.
"There're more people
here than our plane's supposed
to carry," the potato-chip
cruncher said. "That could be
dangerous."
"But it isn't
really that far to Lisbon,
is it?"
a woman
replied. "And none of us
has any
luggage."
"Yeah, but—"
The man
gagged on a chip, coughed,
tried to speak again. Facing deliberately
away, Lawson felt that the man's
words would acquire eloquence only
if he
suddenly volunteered to ride
in the
DC-7s unpressurized baggage
compartment.
As it was,
the signal
came to board and the
jut-eared man had no chance to
finish his remarks. He threw
his cellophane
sack to the ground,
and Lawson
heard it crackling underfoot as people crowded through the
gate onto the grassy verge
of the runway.
In order to
fix the
anomaly of San Pablo in
his memory,
Lawson turned around and
walked backward across the field. He saw that bringing
up the
rear were four men with
automatic weapons—weapons procured, most
likely, from the installation's
Air Police
station. These men, like Lawson,
were walking backward, but
with their guns as well
as their
eyes trained on the
weirdly constituted band of people
who had just appeared, seemingly out
of nowhere,
along the airfield's fence.
One of these
people wore nothing but a
ragged pair of shorts, another an
ankle-length burnoose, another a pair
of trousers belted with a rope.
One of
their number was a doe-eyed
young woman with an exposed
torso and a circlet of
bright coral on her
wrist. But there were others,
too, and they all seemed to
have been drawn to the
runway by the airplane's engine whine; they moved
along the fence like desperate
ghosts. As the first members
of Lawson's
group mounted into the plane, even
more of these people appeared—an
assembly of nomads, hunters, hodcarriers,
fishers, herdspeople. Apparendy they all
understood what an airplane was for,
and one
of the
swarthiest men among them ventured out onto the runway
with his arms thrown out
imploringly.
"Where you
go?" he shouted. "Where you go?" "There's
no more
room!" responded a blue-jean-clad man with a machine gun.
"Get back! You'll have to
wait for
another flight!"
Oh, sure, Lawson
thought, the one to Madrid.
He was
at the base of the airplane's
mobile stairway. The jut-eared man who had been eating
potato chips nodded brusquely at
him.
"You'd better get
on up
there," he shouted over the
robust hiccoughing of the airplane's
engines, "before we have unwanted company breathing down our
necks!"
"After you."
Lawson stepped aside.
Behind the swarthy
man importuning
the armed
guards for a seat on the
airplane, there clamored thirty or
more insistent people, their only
real resemblance to one another
their longing for a
way out.
"Where you go? Where you
go?" the bravest and
most desperate among them yelled,
but they all wanted to board
the airplane
that Mrs. Alexander's charges
had already
laid claim to; and most
of them
could see that it was too
late to accomplish their purpose
without some kind of risk-taking. The man who had
been shouting in English, along
with four or five others,
broke into an assertive dogtrot toward the plane. Although
their cries continued to be modesdy
beseeching, Lawson could tell that
the passengers'
guards now believed themselves under direct attack.
A burst of
machine-gun fire sounded above the
field and echoed away like rain
drumming on a tin roof.
The man
who had been asking, "Where you go?," pitched forward
on his
lace. Others fell beside
him, including the woman with
the coral bracelet. Panicked or prodded
by this
evidence of their assailants' mortality, one of the guards
raked the chain link fence with his weapon, bringing
down some of those who
had already begun to retreat and
summoning forth both screams and the distressingly incongruous sound of popping wire.
Then, eerily, it was
quiet again.
"Get on that
airplane!" a guard
shouted at Lawson. He was the
only passenger still left on
the ground,
and everyone
wanted him inside the
plane so that the mobile
stairway could be rolled
away.
"I don't think
so," Lawson said to himself.
Hunching
forward like a man under fire, he ran toward the gate and the crude mandala of
bodies partially blocking it. The slaughter he had just witnessed struck him as
abysmally repetitive of a great deal of recent history, and he did not wish to
belong to that history anymore. Further, the airplane behind him was a gross
iron-plated emblem of the burden he no longer cared to bear—even if it also
seemed to represent the promise of passage home.
"Hey, where the hell
you think you're goin'?"
Lawson
did not answer. He stepped gingerly through the corpses on the runway's margin,
halted on the other side of the fence, and, his eyes misted with glare and
poignant bewilderment, turned to watch the 1X3-7 taxi down the scrub-lined length of concrete to the very end of the
field. There the airplane negotiated a turn and started back the way it had
come. Soon it was hurtling along like a colossal metal dragonfly, building
speed. When it lifted from the ground, its tires screaming shrilly with the
last series of bumps before take-off, Lawson held his breath.
Then the airplane's right wing dipped, dipped
again, struck the ground, and broke off like a piece of balsa wood, splintering
brilliandy. After that, the airplane went flipping, cartwheeling, across the
end of the tarmac and into the desolate open field beyond, where its shell and
remaining wing were suddenly engulfed in flames. You could hear people frying
in that inferno; you could smell gasoline and burnt flesh.
"Jesus," Lawson
said.
He
loped away from the airfield's fence, hurried through the short grass behind
the San Pablo library, and joined a group of those who had just fled the
English-speaking guards' automatic-weapon fire. He met them on the highway
going back to Seville and walked among them as merely another of their number.
Although several people viewed his 1505 trousers with suspicion, no one argued
that he did not belong, and no one threatened to cut his throat for him.
As hangdog
and exotically
nondescript as most of his
companions, Lawson watched his tennis
shoes track the pavement like
the feet
of a
mechanical toy. He wondered what
he was going to do back
in Seville.
Successfully dodge bullets and eat fried
fish, if he was lucky.
Talk with Secombe again, if he
could find the man. And,
if he
had any
sense, try to organize his
life around some purpose other
than the insane and hopeless one
of returning
to Lynchburg.
What purpose, though? What purpose beyond
the basic,
animal purpose of staying alive?
"Are any
of you
hungry?" Lawson asked.
He was
regarded with suspicious curiosity.
"Hungry," he
repeated. "(Time hambre?"
English? Spanish? Neither
worked. What languages did they have,
these refugees from an enigma?
It looked
as if
they had all tried to speak
together before and found the
task impossible—because, moving along
the asphalt
under the hot Andalusian sun, they
now relied
on gestures
and easily
interpretable noises to express
themselves.
Perceiving this, Lawson
brought the fingers of his
right hand to his mouth and
clacked his teeth to indicate
chewing.
He was understood.
A thin
barefoot man in a capacious
linen shirt and trousers
led Lawson
off the
highway into an orchard of orange
trees. The fruit was not
yet completely
ripe, and was sour
because of its greenness, but all twelve or
thirteen of Lawson's crew
ate, letting the juice run
down their arms. When they again
took up the trek to
Seville, Law-son's mind was almost
absolutely blank with satiety. The
only thing ratding about
in it
now was
the fear
that he would not know what
to do
once they arrived. He never
did find
out if the day's other scheduled
flight, the one to Madrid,
made it safely to its destination,
but the
matter struck him now as
of little import. He
wiped his sticky mouth and
trudged along numbly.
VIH.
He lived
above the contraceptive shop. In
the mornings
he walked through the alley to
a bakery
that a woman with calm
Mongolian features had taken
over. In return for a
daily allotment of bread and
a percentage
of the
goods brought in for barter, Lawson swept the bakery's
floor, washed the utensils that were dirtied each day,
and kept
the shop's
front counter. His most rewarding skill,
in fact,
was communicating
with those who entered to buy
something. He had an uncanny
grasp of several varieties
of sign
language, and, on occasion, he found himself speaking a
monosyllabic patois whose derivation was a complete mystery
to him.
Sometimes he thought that he had
invented it himself; sometimes he
believed that he had learned
it from
the transplanted
Sevillanos
among whom
he now
lived.
English, on the
other hand, seemed to leak
slowly out of his mind, a
thick, unrecoverable fluid.
The first three
or four
weeks of chaos following The
Change had, by this
time, run their course, a
circumstance that surprised Lawson.
Still, it was true. Now
you could
lie down at night on your
pallet without hearing pistol reports
or fearing that some benighted freak
was going
to set
fire to your staircase. Most of
the city's
essential services—electricity, water,
and sewerage—were
working again, albeit uncertainly, and agricultural goods were
coming in from the countryside. People had gone back
to doing
what they knew best, while those
whose previous jobs had had
little to do with the basics
of day-to-day
survival were now apprenticing as bricklayers, carpenters,
bakers, fishers, water and power
technicians. That men and
women chose to live separately
and that children were
as rare
as sapphires,
no one
seemed to find disturbing or unnatural.
A new
pattern was evolving. You lived among
your fellows without tension or
quarrel, and you formed no dangerously
intimate relationships.
One night,
standing at his window, Lawson's
knee struck a loose tile below
the casement.
He removed
the tile
and set
it on the floor. Every night
for nearly
two months
he pried
away at least one
tile and, careful not to
chip or break it, stacked it near an inner
wall with those he had
already removed.
After completing this task, as he
lay on
his pallet,
he would
often hear a man
or a
woman somewhere in the city
singing a high, sweet song whose
words had no significance for him. Sometimes a pair
of voices
would answer each other, always
in different languages. Then, near the end
of the
summer, as Lawson stood staring at
the lathing
and the
wall beams he had methodically exposed, he was moved
to sing
a melancholy
song of his own. And
he sang
it without
knowing what it meant.
The days grew
cooler. Lawson took to leaving
the bakery
during its midafternoon closing and proceeding by way of the Calle de
las Sierpes
to a bodega across
from the bullring. A crew of
silent laborers, who worked very
purposively in spite of their seeming
to have
no single
boss, was dismantling the Plaza de Toros,
and Lawson
liked to watch as he
drank his wine and ate the
breadsticks he had brought with
him.
Other crews about
the city
were carefully taking down the
government buildings, banks, and
barrio chapels that no one
frequented anymore, preserving the bricks, tiles, and
beams as if in the hope
of some
still unspecified future construction. By this time Lawson himself
had knocked
out the
rear wall of his room over
the contraceptive
shop, and he felt a
strong sense of identification with the
laborers craftily gutting the bullring of its railings and
barricades. Eventually, of course, everything would have to come
down. Everything.
The rainy season
began. The wind and the
cold. Lawson continued to visit the
sidewalk café near the ruins of the stadium;
and because
the bullring's
destruction went forward even in wet
weather, he wore an overcoat
he had
recendy acquired and staked out
a nicely
sheltered table under the bodega's awning. This was where
he customarily
sat.
One particularly
gusty day, rain pouring down,
he shook
out his umbrella and
sat down
at this
table only to Find another
man sitting
across from him. Upon the
table was a wooden game board
of some
kind, divided into squares.
"Hello, Lawson,"
the interloper
said.
Lawson blinked and
licked his lips thoughtfully. Although he had not called
his family
to mind
in some
time, and wondered now if
he had
ever really married and fathered
children, Dai Secombe's face had
occasionally floated up before him in the dark of
his room.
But now
Lawson could not remember the
Welshman's name, or his nationality,
and he
had no notion of what to
say to
him. The first words he
spoke, therefore, came out
sounding like dream babble, or
a voice played backward on the
phonograph. In order to say
hello he was forced
to the
indignity, almost comic, of making
a childlike motion with
his hand.
Secombe, pointing to
the game
board, indicated that they should play. From a carved
wooden box with a velvet
lining he emptied the pieces onto
the table,
then arranged them on both sides
of the
board. Chess, Lawson thought vaguely,
but he really did not recognize
the pieces—they
seemed changed from what he believed
they should look like. And
when it came his turn to
move, Secombe had to demonstrate
the capabilities of all
the major
pieces before he, Lawson, could
essay even the most
timid advance. The piece that
most reminded him of a
knight had to be moved
according to two distinct sets of
criteria, depending on whether it
started from a black square or
a white
one; the "rooks," on the
other hand, were able, at certain
times, to jump
an opponent's
intervening pieces. The game boggled
Lawson's understanding. After ten or
twelve moves he pushed his
chair back and took a long,
bittersweet taste of wine. The
rain continued to pour down like
an endless
curtain of deliquescent beads.
"That's all right,"
Secombe said. "I haven't got
it all
down yet myself, quite.
A Bhutanese
fellow near where I live
made the pieces, you
see, and just recendy taught
me how
to play."
With difficulty Lawson managed to frame
a question:
"What work have you
been doing?"
"I'm in demolition.
As we
all will
be soon.
It's the only really constructive occupation going."
The Welshman
chuckled mildly, finished his
own wine,
and rose.
Lifting his umbrella, he bid Lawson
farewell with a word that,
when Lawson later tried to repeat
and intellectually
encompass it, had no meaning at
all.
Every afternoon of
that dismal, rainy winter Lawson
came back to the same table,
but Secombe
never showed up there again. Nor did Lawson miss
him terribly.
He had
grown accustomed to the strange
richness of his own company.
Besides, if he wanted people
to talk
to, all
he needed
to do
was remain behind the counter at
the bakery.
ix.
Spring came again.
All of
his room's
interior walls were down, and it
amused him to be able
to see
the porcelain
chalice of the commode as
he came
up the
stairs from the contraceptive shop.
The plaster that
he had
sledgehammered down would
never be of use
to anybody
again, of course, but he
had saved
from the debris whatever
was worth
the salvage.
With the return of good
weather, men driving oxcarts were
coming through the city's
backstreets and alleys to collect
these items. You never saw anyone
trying to drive a motorized
vehicle nowadays, probably because, over
the winter,
most of them had been hauled
away. The scarcity of gasoline
and replacement
parts might well have been
a factor,
too—but, in truth, people seemed no
longer to want to mess
with internal-combustion engines.
Ending pollution and noise had
nothing to do with it, either.
A person
with dung on his shoes
or front
stoop was not very
likely to be convinced of
a vast
improvement in the environment, and the clattering of wooden carts—the ringing of
metal-rimmed wheels on cobblestone— could be as ear-wrenching as the hum and
blare of motorized traffic. Still, Lawson
liked to hear the oxcarts
turn into his alley. More
than once, called out by
the noise,
he had
helped their drivers load them with
masonry, doors, window sashes, even ornate carven mantles.
At the bakery
the Mongolian
woman with whom Lawson worked, and had worked for
almost a year, caught the
handle of his broom one day
and told
him her
name. Speaking the odd, quicksilver monosyllables of the dialect
that nearly everyone in Seville had
by now
mastered, she asked him to
call her Tij. Lawson
did not
know whether this was her
name from before The Change or
one she
had recently
invented for herself. Pleased in either
case, he responded by telling
her his
own Christian name. He
stumbled saying it, and when
Tij also had trouble pronouncing the name, they laughed
together about its uncommon awkwardness
on their
tongues.
A week later
he had
moved into the tenement building
where Tij lived. They
slept in the same "room"
three flights up from a courtyard
filled with clambering wisteria. Because
all but the supporting
walls on this floor had
been knocked out, Lawson often felt
that he was living in
an open-bay
barracks. People stepped over his
pallet to get to the
stairwell and dressed in front of
him as
if he
were not even there. Always
a quick
study, he emulated their casual
behavior.
And when the
ice in
his loins
finally began to thaw, he
turned in the darkness
to Tij—without
in the
least worrying about propriety.
Their coupling was invariably silent, and the release Lawson
experienced was always a serene
rather than a shuddering one. Afterward,
in the
wisteria fragrance pervading their
building, Tij and he lay
beside each other like a pair
of larval
bumblebees as the moon rolled
shadows over their naked, sweat-gleaming bodies.
Each day after
they had finished making and
trading away their bread, Tij and
Lawson closed the bakery and
took long walks. Often they strolled
among the hedge-enclosed pathways and
the small
wrought-iron fences at the base
of the
city's cathedral. From these
paths, so overwhelmed were they by buttresses of stones and arcaded balconies,
they could not even see the
bronze weathervane of Faith atop
the Giralda. But, evening after evening,
Lawson insisted on reluming to
that place, and at last
his persistence
and his
sense of expectation were rewarded by
the sound
of jackhammers
biting into marble in
each one of the cathedral's
five tremendous naves. He and
Tij, holding hands, entered.
Inside, men and
women were at work removing
the altar
screens, the metalwork grilles,
the oil
paintings, sections of stained-glass
windows, religious relics. Twelve or
more oxcarts were parked beneath the
vault of the cathedral, and the noise of the
jackhammers echoed shatteringly from nave
to nave, from floor
to cavernous
ceiling. The oxen stood so
complacently in their traces
that Lawson wondered if the
drivers of the carts
had somehow
contrived to deafen the animals.
Tij released
Lawson's hand to cover her
ears. He covered his own
ears. It did no good.
You could
remain in the cathedral only if
you accepted
the noise
and resolved
to be
a participant in the building's destruction. Many people had
already made that decision.
They were swarming through its
chambered stone belly like
a spectacularly
efficient variety of stone-eating
termite.
An albino man
of indeterminate
race—a man as pale as
a termite—thrust his pickax
at Lawson.
Lawson uncovered his ears and took
the pickax
by its
handle. Tij, a moment later,
found a crowbar hanging
precariously from the side of
one of
the oxcarts. With these
tools the pair of them
crossed the nave they had entered
and halted
in front
of an
imposing mausoleum. Straining against
the cathedral's
poor light and the strange linguistic
static in his head, Lawson
painstakingly deciphered the plaque near the
tomb.
"Christopher Columbus
is buried
here," he said.
Tij did
not hear
him. He made a motion
indicating that this was the place
where they should start. Tij
nodded her understanding. Together,
Lawson thought, they would dismantle
the mausoleum
of the
discoverer of the New World
and bring his corrupt
remains out into the street.
After all these centuries they would
free the man.
Then the bronze
statue of Faith atop the
belltower would come down, followed by
the lovely
belltower itself. After that, the flying
buttresses, the balconies, the walls;
every beautiful, tainted stone.
It would hurt
like hell to destroy the
cathedral, and it would take a
long, long time—but, considering everything, it was the only
meaningful option they had. Lawson
raised his pickax.
Here
is a very odd, sedately lunatic story about a project to experiment in
manipulation of animal behavior . . . and, inevitably, human behavior too. Set
in a future society whose social hierarchy is so rigidly stratified that it
has an almost Victorian aura, "The Snake Who Had Read Chomsky'' makes its
satirical points in a series of decidedly peculiar developments. Are they the
result of changes in behavior? You may decide for yourself .
Josephine Saxton is an English author who
writes much too seldom for her many fans. Her novels include Vector for Seven and The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith.
THE
SNAKE WHO HAD READ CHOMSKY
Josephine Saxton
They spent
almost all their nonofficial working time, and their spare
time, in that part of
the lab
which had been requisitioned for them. Although it
was not
large, it sufficed; to unravel nucleic acid chains does
not require
a dance
hall plus arcades. They were very
satisfied with the robot assistance
that Selly had allowed
them, plus computer time, subelec-tron
microscope, chemical analyzer, and all
the animals
they needed.
"Yes, certainly, Marvene and Janos, if
you wish
to research
into some aspects of the
genetic part of animal behavior
then I shall be pleased
to encourage
you, just so long as
your work here for
me does
not suffer,
of course."
Their work had not suffered, they
saw to
that. Their private work was not
exactly what they stated, but
it was
near enough to deceive an observer
who would
be scrupulous
and not
snoop extensively. There was
a litde
more to it than the
behavior of the cat, but even
to themselves
they maintained a neutral attitude
to their
information, knowing only what they
hoped.
There were
mice being used, and a
boa constrictor
called
Lupus the Loop
who had
a sole
right to mice as food, and who possibly resented
the fact
that Marvene used a large proportion of them
for her
work instead of feeding them
to him.
"Getting the information
to link
itself to all
the cell
types is the final
key," said Janos, taking a
look at some mice who were hibernating in a
lowered temperature even though they
were a nonhibernating variety.
"These mice are hibernating, but they will never
shed their skin." Janos very
much wanted to have a coup
with this research. He stood
to be what he wanted for the rest
of his
life if all went well.
Marvene glanced at
him with
concealed contempt. "The
skin-shedding isn't important at
this stage, surely? If we
stick to the line we are
on, we
shall have the final tests
ready in weeks," she told him
evenly and not without effort.
Working in such close confines with
one person
for so
long was not good for personal
regard, but worse, it almost
inclined one to show that bad
feeling. She was taking extra
pains with her good manners. She
too wanted
to be
rewarded by the world for this
work, and she had no
intention of allowing Janos to
take the whole accolade,
as she
righdy suspected he would like to do. They had
not discussed
this aspect of the project,
it would have been quite rude
to do
so, but
instead maintained an implicit agreement that
like all scientists they would
share honors. It was certain that
they had both been equally
dedicated and both worked hard
and with
concentration. Not a
moment was wasted in
idle chatter. They had sufficient
incentive not to waste their
opportunity, for they could also
be revenged upon Selly, whom they
hated. That greasy, plump, celibate person was not to
be allowed
to share
any reflected
glory from their work.
He had
irritated and disgusted them for so
long with his unaesthetic presence, and they meant
to be revenged upon him. It
was worth
the risk
of discovery,
they had decided; the
plan was irresistible. When they
thought of this they
would laugh together, but when
they thought of their separate plans,
they laughed apart, and si-lendy.
Selly rarely
visited them in their area;
he went
home at night to who knew
what, alone in his bachelor
apartment. Sour as old
socks, Selly, white as suet
but softer,
secretive, and full of
bile. But very clever, and
this they respected. It was one
of the
reasons they were at this
lab, Selly's notorious cleverness.
They had hoped to learn
from him and in many
ways they had. He
was already
near the top of the
social list, even though he socialized
so little.
He was
known for being something of a
recluse, and for his genius
and originality
in demonstrating his ideas.
Selly had wished
to demonstrate
that light-obedient hormones
were involved in flight patterns
in birds,
and he
had caused a skylark to dive
into the depths of illuminated
water, singing. The audience
had considered
this very amusing. What had made
it unpleasant
was the
way Selly
laughed at the sight of the
little creature trying to warble
until it was drowned in watery
light.
He had done
some useful things, also, in
the business
of providing food for the world's
surplus people. He had produced
a runner
bean which was 50 percent
first-class animal protein. These could be
fed on
petroleum by-products, having the ability
to make
the chemical
changes within their own metabolism and, also, the useful
ability to cleanse the soil
by exuding a solvent which was
biodegradable. It was
true, Selly was no slouch in
his work.
As for Marvene
and Janos'
part in Selly's work, they
were assisting him in
breeding a two-kilo mouse which
would at first be used in
factory soupmeat and later, after
sufficient publicity, as a
roast. So far the creatures
had died
before slaughtering could take
place, so there was still
work to do on strengthening the heart muscles of
these little giants. These animals were fed on processed
petroleum by-products. There was a vast
store of fossil fuels since
the melting
of the
polar ice caps had made it
available. The lab in which
they worked was part of a
redundant atomic power station, ideal
because of its isolation coupled with
easy access by underground train to the living complexes:
it took
them only five minutes to
return to the other world.
In one
of the
larger central areas of the building
they had constructed a reproduction
of a
typical deserted domestic setdement
of the
lower classes. The actual work of course had been
done by a workgang from
the lower
classes. If such settlements
could be shown to be
suitable for breeding mice, then some
of them
could be used, for there
were many such ghost
towns since the suicide epidemics.
There was no question
of experimenting
with a real one; they
were all too far
away from civilization. Their main
problem had been getting the right
light and darkness periods, because
even though there was so
little difference between them since the canopy came over
the ancient
skies, the animals all had residual
circadian rhythms. All the upper-class
human beings had artificial moonlight and
sunlight in regulated phases because it
had been
shown to have an important
psychological effect on
brain chemistry, but the lower
classes, for whom such things did
not matter,
lived in a dim limbo,
monotonous and drear.
As a companion
work on food they were
breeding a potato containing every known
nutritional element in correct proportion
for maintaining
human life. This was proving
harder than anticipated, because some vitamins
destroyed others when existing in the
same plant. But they would
succeed, with Selly's guidance. It was
going to make the lower-class
menu very dull, but
that did not matter. Selly
could have existed on such fodder,
for he
was a
very poor aesthete in the matter
of food
as in
other things. This disgusted them.
Selly did not enjoy life; he
enjoyed ideas about life. He
once confided in a rare
moment of intimacy: "There is a life of
the mind which I have hardly
touched upon yet." They could
have expanded on that
comment but chose not.
In some ways,
Selly was downright immature, a
state not at all to be
admired. She did not'think him
fit to
live in the wonderful architectural fantasy of their upper-class
setdement; he was an eyesore.
They all had very small
apartmerits, but it was one
of the
best specialist settlements in existence.
The upper
classes needed the stimulus of
interesting surroundings, and interest
had been
taken well toward the limits both visually and kinetically.
Their settlement was famous for
its dissolving
architecture; at any moment a
balcony might disappear and drop
people to their deaths. This
did not happen so
often that it was monotonous,
but often
enough to make living
there exciting. In historical times, those people living on
fault lines must have been
exhilarated in much the
same way, Marvene reflected. How ghasdy it must be
to live
in the
utilitarian warrens of the lower
classes! Would society never
find a humane way of
ridding itself of all those surplus
people left over since human
labor had become almost redundant? Marvene profoundly hoped so:
they were an anchor to a
civilization that needed to sail
ahead.
If Selly
were successful even with the
potatoes, he would become a very
high-ranking upper-class person. They considered
him a
totally unsuitable candidate for this
because of his vulgarity. But whatever
they thought, it was necessary
to apply the art of flattery.
He was
always susceptible.
"Selly, I feel
constrained to voice my admiration
for your
working method today. You
are so
stylish in your approach to what must feel like
mundane tasks to one so
advanced as yourself. I wish very
much to cultivate your self-control."
Marvene smiled sweedy at
him through
her diamante-effect
contact lenses. The twinkling
was a
stunning effect, and hid real feeling.
Selly was not susceptible to female charm, but
in his genetic makeup somewhere there
must surely have been a
response to beauty, for
once, just once, he had
reached out to touch Marvene's hair,
which had been trained to
move con-standy in shining coils,
always changing its shape like
a mass
of slowly dancing snakes.
Strictly speaking she was reaching
above her present level
of society
with such styles, but sometimes
beauty was forgiven social errors.
Because she made such a beautiful
model she had managed to
get it
done free, but she had been
obliged to have all the
actichips inserted in her skull with
only local anaesthetic.
"Thank you, Marvene.
I'm glad
you appreciate
the difference between
mere routine work well done
and a truly aesthetic approach to the mundane. I may
be able to give you
some instruction
on that."
"Selly, I would
be so grateful if you could. If I
could only emulate you . .
. ."
"Marvene, it is all inner work.
One has
to control
the entire self
in order
to properly
control things like grace and care." He
didn't really have grace, she
thought, he was just lethargic.
"If you talk
to yourself,
Marvene, daily, and draw all your energies in toward
your working self every morning,
you will be able
to bring
more presence to your work."
This wholly patronizing speech
was typical
and it
made her angry. She already did
this rather commonplace exercise every
morning. She had presence and style,
and knew
it, and
she practiced
attitudes toward the day
when she meant to grace
the highest
levels of society. When
Marvene had completed her research
she would not only
have put horrible Selly down,
but have
a weapon which could forever quell
invaders, preventing war, and could possibly
be used
to keep
the lower
classes perma-nendy occupied, if not
eliminated. She would be remembered.
They already had
the means
of fixing
Selly and of testing out their work at the
same time, but for mass
use they
needed a foolproof method of dissemination
which would disperse itself in a
population per body-weight and type
equally everywhere. If they
could only have had a
few humans
to experiment
upon, the job would by
now have
been done; but there was still
too much
opposition to human experimentation to make it popular,
and it
was certainly
illegal to use human beings
without their recorded consent, and
this applied even to the lower
classes, a very atavistic area
of the
law. With this work they hoped
to justify
human experimentation and thus
earn the gratitude of scientists
everywhere whose work was held up
for lack
of suitable
material.
Selly was an
ideal subject, being so predictable
and stable
in his habits, and in having
no close
friends. Selly could not be bothered
with friends. He occasionally arranged some social life,
of course,
buying a dinner party for
himself in some exotic building, but
these occasions were only meant
to keep
his name in circulation
and to
impress the influential. It was
always necessary to keep
in favor
in order
to get
financial patronage. He was ideal
because any noticeable effects must
be observed only by themselves until such time as
they wished it otherwise.
"You know, Marvene,"
said Janos, showing his small
and boringly ordinary teeth
in a
slow smile of what in
a stronger personality would have been
consummate awful-ness, "I have to
admire Selly for his independence
of other
people, especially women."
"And what's so
good about that?" she demanded
icily, fire flashing off her eyeballs.
"I don't see where the
style is, in being by yourself.
There's nobody to appreciate a lone person. One needs
other opinions."
Janos chose to
overlook her anger, regarding it
as one
might a bit of
flatus. "If you're good enough
and know
it, then nobody is going to
think better of you than
yourself," he replied. He had that relentless
argumentative tone in his voice that
she had
once found very attractive, believing it to be self-assurance.
It was
certain that nobody was going
to think better of Marvene and
Janos than themselves. Marvene still
required that the whole of
society admire her, as soon as
possible. So did Janos, of
course; he was indulging in
conceit with his words.
He did
not know
it but
he had
managed without her good opinion
for years.
"I have to
disagree. An isolated opinion is
not valid,
especially when the subject cannot
see the
self from outside, which is a
rare achievement. How can you
ever really know what impression you are making?"
"I have
practiced projecting myself, metaphorically
speaking, and using my
imagination to know what impression
I am
making. Doesn't everyone do that,
Marvene?"
' 'Of course,
but it
is a
matter of degree and skill.
It will
still be a heavily subjective result."
He did not
like that idea, clearly. "If
you persist
in making
destructive statements against me,
I shall
be obliged
to be
rude to you."
This formal
warning was rather extreme, so
she knew
she had gone too far. He
didn't have good style and
tended to think that all negative
statements reflected upon him. He
must be guilty about
something, she thought.
"I apologize. I had not meant
the statement
to be
destructive, merely in opposition."
He gave her
a conciliatory
nod, the kind meant to
conceal the atmosphere, but his gestures
always had a patronizing tone that ruined the effect.
She must
find stylish ways of dealing
with him, and was indeed
working upon that.
Another problem was
the question
of reversibility
in the
chromosome interference. Perhaps the
answer lay where she thought it did, in electronic
control, but that posed problems
for the masses. Not
difficult for one subject, and
things would go a stage at
a time.
She was
determined not to rush. After a while, Janos seemed
to have
recovered from their litde contretemps, for he suddenly suggested
that they buy a dinner party
for themselves
for the
following night, and he suggested that with luck it
might be possible to get
somewhere in a fashionable building, perhaps the Cairns
or the
Herberg Suite? Here was
proof that he required the
admiration of a crowd, but
she let
it pass
and instead
complimented him on his
wonderful idea. They set about
compiling a guest list, an unusual
thing for them to do
during working hours.
They already had
a few
well-thought-of people on
their social list, and several
who might
demean themselves for an evening. All their acquaintances were bioengineers: it was
rare to meet anyone
outside one's own discipline; there was not enough time.
This was a price all
talented people had to pay, but
the rewards
were greater than the penalties.
They had been awarded knowledge implants
as well
as memory
reinforcement grafts in
their youth, which enhanced their
natural brilliance and capacity for
application. Everyone preferred a hard
life to the appalling possibility
of being
in the
lower classes, who had
little in their lives except
prescribed entertainment. The had
very little spare time, so
she should
feel privileged that he
proposed using some of his
time with her, but as it
was not
done to give a party
without a member of the opposite
sex as
cohost, she did not make
too much
of the situation. She liked playing
hostess and knew herself excellent
at the
task. When the overworked upper classes relaxed, they
tried always to make the
occasion rare without always being
monotonously outrageous. So what theme
had he
thought of?
"Animals. Fancy
dress." She smiled with glittering
delight, her hair seemirig to
express a rise in her
spirits. But it would be impossible
for everyone
to obtain
a costume
in time
for the following night.
He looked
annoyed and downcast; he did not
want to postpone the occasion.
"Why not have
animals but not costumes—ask everyone to mime?"
After a few
tense moments his face showed
reluctant" pleasure. Fun, but not too
spectacular. They must never be
accused of self-aggrandizement.
They got out all the
invitations and replies of
acceptance and ordered the Herberg
Suite to be done out to
have the appearance of a
twenty-second-century zoological garden at a time
when animals had not been so
rare. The food would be
in feeding
trays and the drink in gravity
feeders.
They were especially
pleased to have Selly's acceptance.
To have Selly behaving
like an animal in public
at their
expense would afford them some
glee. What animal would he
mime? They were sure
they could guess. In order
to have
plenty of energy for
the party,
they retired early and did
not return later for more work.
The lab
was at
rest, and Lupus the Loop
lay coiled
on his
simulated branch in the
simulated moonlight, smiling to himself, for had he not
been eavesdropping on them every
night for months?
The party
was a
great success. Within the general
benevolent atmosphere there were memorable
moments. The sight of two well-known
agriculturalists, who had
made their name as the team
that caused real animal fur
to grow
on sheets
of plastic, behaving like a couple
of Nubian
goats was worth remembering. It seemed that they
could cheerfully mime mating for
hours without being vulgar, and
very convincingly in spite of their
very creative human appearance. They were both quite hairless
and had
gold eyeballs and teeth and
nails, but their acting was so
convincing that few had to
ask what
they were.
Janos made a
wonderful mouse. He nibbled his
way through his food, delightfully twitching some imaginary whiskers. His very ordinary appearance
seemed to fit the mouse image.
He had
never indulged in even so
much as a tattoo to decorate
his person,
just like the lower classes
who were obliged by law to
wear uniforms and were prohibited
from any form of
distinguishing mark. Janos,
the little
gray mouse, nibbling away at fame
with determination.
And Selly, the
great scientist, being what she
had hoped
he would be, a cat. He
rubbed round people's legs in
a feline
manner, getting tidbits dropped
for him,
and being
stroked and fondled although someone made
the joke
of treating
him like a lab cat, miming
the drilling
of holes
into the skull. He went so
far as
to jump
onto someone's lap and attempt
to curl
up, his great bulk
hanging down on all sides,
making the catness of cat seem
very droll indeed. Fat, satisfied,
smug, comfort-loving, lethargic Selly.
It suited
him. He could make a purring
noise and wash his face
with the back of his
wrist, where his watch lay embedded
in his
wristbone. This instrument gave not
only astronomical information,
longitude and latitude, time and date,
but the
state of his brainwaves, blood sugar, and noradrenalin. Few people still had
these things embedded, for they had
proved to be painful to
many people in later years. Marvene
stroked Selly cat and told
him what
a lovely pussy, he was.
"This is a
lovely party, Marvene. I shall
remember this for a long time,"
purred the monster feline.
"And I also,"
said the man beneath Selly
in a
breathy manner. "This is a wonderful idea;
I shall
tell everyone about this."
Marvene glowed witn pleasure then,
thinking that it had been worth
the trouble
if they
were to be favorably talked about. Even the most
brilliant upper-class people did not get
funds if they were not
in circulation.
Marvene felt she
should do a little more
about acting a snake. She began
to hypnotize
a female
frog who had hopped over to her and sat
crouched at her feet blowing
a pouch
and staring vacantly. Marvene slowly wound
herself around the creature, who put
hands over eyes as frogs
in danger
will, a clever touch. Marvene's extreme
yoga lessons had kept her
supple enough to coil
backward around another human being and to mime squeezing
the life
out of
the frog,
the proportion
of the
creatures not detracting from their
dual performance. Everyone seemed suitably
amused.
A rhinoceros, more usually an invertebrate
engineer, came over to
congratulate her.
"You have a
gift as an actress as
well as a scientist," he grunted, swinging his invisible
horn about on a great
head, peering with little eyes full
of stupid
malevolence which was really a gaze
of intellectual
penetration. She liked the rhino-man;
she was
dazzled by his achievements and creations. His most famous
work was the culturing of
a hybrid
toxicaría
which could
be absorbed
in spore
form through human skin and, when
mature, grow to twenty feet
long with the ability to bore through bone, disposing
rather definitely of any enemy
unlucky enough to pick up
its invisible
spores. He had also, of course,
developed an immunity for the
aggressor.
And this was
not all
he had
done to improve the world.
He had written whole series of
papers on parasites of the
universe, and presented one of
the most
controversial theories of the millennium. He was an authority
on evolution
and had
shown, conclusively for many,
that Homo sapiens far from
being the highest product
of a
chain of events was intended
to be the lowest in another
chain of events, but when
the Sol
system had been cut
off in
a crucial
period in its development in order to quarantine it, that destiny had
not been
fulfilled. The Aldebaran Apple
People had not wanted parasites,
and indeed, not everyone on Earth
relished the idea that humanity's
true end was as a
kind of maggot, burrowing through
giant fruit.
The party was
made complete with a tragic
ending. A serious accident or
fatality always lent interest to
the story
of a
party. For some, the
main game of an evening
was to
walk home, the building being more
active at night. There was
a far higher risk of a
step collapsing beneath the foot
or a
balcony disappearing leaving a person
teetering on the edge of
death with no choice
but to
jump—there was no rescue system;
that would have taken the
element of chance out of
the game. A few people did
not care
for this
entertainment, but they became
impossible to socialize with, cowardice
being so disgusting, and they were
often relegated to live in
the safe
lower-class architecture. So a
courageous woman who had mimed a
dove all evening plummeted to
her death
on the
deep glass floor below,
showing that her miming did
not extend
to real
flight. Exhilarated, Marvene and Janos
walked home in amicable silence. Next
day, everything was back to
normal and both Selly's
work and their own proceeded
stead-
ay-
They had made
excellent progress, and Marvene knew
that it was her
insight which had made possible
the step
in personally controlling the subject. Selly
needed a few more "doses" to give
them conclusive proof. But it
was to
be admitted
that they had taken this
line from original ideas of
Selly's. He had connections with espionage and had
thought that if a human being
could be made temporarily to behave as an alien
in all
respects, including instinctive behavior, there would be no chance
of discovery
when spying in other star systems. This of course
applied only to those aliens
whose outward physiology closely resembled the human.
There were several important
"human" cultures having
totally different metabolism to Homo
sapiens and who behaved differendy in many respects. For
example, the Wilkins Planet race, who
were of shining intelligence and naturally extremely
advanced (more than humanity in
some things) but who loped around
at high
speed on all fours and
who had
a mating season once
every four of their years.
Selly had been
held up by lack of
subjects because, although he had
applied for volunteers, he did
not trust
the authorities
to keep
his research
secret if he explained exactly
why he required people, and this
was requisite.
But Marvene
and Janos were ahead
of Selly.
Everything had depended upon what Selly
had not
quite seen, which was B/B
serotonin pathways through the
subelectronic RNA polymerase. They had the
potion which had made Bottom
the Weaver
behave like an ass, though they
had never
heard of him. Selly was
to become the cat which he
had so
obligingly played at the party. She had given him
a gift
of sweets
containing more necessary doses and had
the minute
control constructed which she could activate
whenever she cared to do
so.
She had come
up with
all these
ideas while talking to Lupus
the Loop.
She often
wandered in there to have
a chat
with him; it was
an aid
to projecting
her thoughts.
This was her secret; the other
two would
have thought her slighdy deranged
but she
trusted her instincts, when controlled
with careful thought. Lupus the Loop
seemed to tell her things
she needed to know.
"Tell me, Lupus,
have you any idea how
I can
control the newly altered instincts of
Selly so that he will
not always
behave under the new influence?"
she had
asked the great snake as he
lay coiled
and smugly
full of food.
"It's perfectly simple,"
the snake
had seemed
to say.
"You will construct a
monitor which you will keep
in your
possession, transmitting impulses that
will inhibit or release the metabolic pathways you have
interfered with."
And it had
been that simple in essence,
although difficult to effect. An extremely
sophisticated form of radio control.
Beautiful! She had hugged
him in
thanks, knowing that of course the
idea had come from her
own mind.
Snakes do not have minds. But
even plants sometimes spoke to
Marvene, when she was alone with
them. She had discovered as a child that you can talk to
anything and get a reply,
and learned
later about the projection
of the
mind, and had then kept
it all secret for such things
were despised by intelligent persons.
Janos was straightening
his papers,
which were all handwritten—very unusual. There was only
one copy
of each;
he kept them in an insulated
box for
safety. Marvene was observing the mice. They were
reprogrammed as dogs, and as
she watched, one little
male cocked its leg up
and put
a marker on an upright post.
Another one was burying a
fragment of bone, and two
of the
females were playing together in an unmouselike manner. Most
amusing!
She supposed that
Janos' ideas had an ecological
beauty about them, for if he
succeeded in ridding the world
of excess
people and making animals
able to do the few
tasks left requiring human labor,
then they could be cannibalized,
whereas human beings could
not, at least aesthetically.
That evening when
they arrived for their session,
Selly was in their part of
the lab.
They detested his intrusion but
could say nothing.
"I came
to find
out why
our mice
were so noisy," he explained,
grinning. He was obviously embarrassed.
He offered
each of them a conciliatory
smoke and they accepted even though they were his
last; he said he had
another pack. They smoked together in
silence, then Selly said he
was going and did so. Janos
immediately checked his papers but
nothing seemed to have
been touched. Was Selly snooping?
There was no evidence.
Marvene decided that she felt
tired and left early, and soon
after that Janos wandered into
the snake house.
The great constrictor
was coiled
rather torpidly except for his eyes,
which seemed to follow every
movement. Janos did not like taking
samples from this beast; he
was secretly
afraid of it but would have died rather
than admit as much. He
sprayed the skin thoroughly
with a penetrating local anaesthetic
and took
a syringeful
of spinal
fluid from behind the head. His
hands shook and he imagined
that the snake knew lie was
frightened.
"There you are,
Lupus the Loop, that didn't
bother you did it?" he cooed
insincerely. The snake ignored this
transparent mollification. It was a
very large specimen that had
been reared in Nature,
having all the instincts and
qualities of the wild creature, which
lab specimens
did not
show so strongly after a few
generations. Someday Janos would like
to visit Nature, that
large zoological garden that had
once been called Australia. The snake
moved, sliding like oil along the
branch toward him. He watched
spellbound, noticing how it could
move without disturbing its surroundings.
What intensity. What grace.
Collecting himself he suddenly ran, closing the door securely.
How primitive
those creatures were, how far removed
from himself. Shuddering, he thrust
the samples away and
then suddenly noticed that Selly
was standing watching him, and he'
almost collapsed with fright.
Selly was holding
a mouse,
stroking it, although he was
no animal lover. The unmoving moonlight
illuminated the plump face making a
mirror image of artificial Selene herself, smiling full
at the
trembling Janos who was in
no social
position to lose his
temper and managed not to
do so.
"I forgot something;
I returned
for a
moment," said Selly. "I'm sorry if
I startled
you."
"That's quite all
right. I respect your attention
to detail,
you know that."
Selly replaced
the mouse
in the
vivarium, where it had been trying
to build
a bridge
from the little island upon
which it had been
placed, to a happy land
at the
edge of the world where nuts
and other
choice scraps tempted. Together they watched the mouse in
its occupation
without comment. Selly nodded in
benevolent approval, absentmindedly
scratching his ear and
shaking his head. Janos was
very offended at this utterly
disgusting behavior until he realized
with a thrill that Selly was
behaving like a cat. Of
course, the nasty man sometimes scratched
himself anyway. He looked for the control which Marvene
had been
constructing and it had gone. Had
she finished
it; had
she gone
ahead without him? How long had
she been
secretly experimenting with Selly
without his knowledge? Janos looked
at Selly
looking at the mouse. The fellow
was drooling.
Shaking with fury,
he took
his leave
and went
to find
Marvene. She was there, outside
the lab,
and had
been observing both of them through
the glass
door. She told him that
she had been looking for him;
she had
a surprise
for him.
Confused, he told her he
thought'he knew what it was.
"But watch this,"
she said,
waving the tiny box between
a thumb and finger. She indicated
Selly. They were fascinated to observe Selly slowly take
off all
his clothes
and prowl
round slowly; and then,
fat though
he was,
crouch down on his haunches and
with much puffing and heaving
somehow manage to get
his leg
up around
the back
of his
neck where it stuck up pointing
at the
ceiling, his foot extended like
that of a dancer. He slowly
reached forward with tongue extended
and made a bold
attempt to wash his own
genitals, pausing to nibble at something
bothering him on his thigh.
Janos thought: I shall
remember this moment all my
life. It is one of the
great moments of science that
we are
privileged to witness.
They were
all invited
to another
party, and this was very
exciting, the host being
the renowned
Roald, who had made breakthroughs in bringing back seals
to land
and breeding
them as household pets.
Miniature seals were a favorite
in many homes, lolling around on
sofas and balancing things on
their noses. To have
reversed evolution in this way
was a
considerable feat and might
lead to a further breed
of useful
seal. Selly wobbled with
anticipation.
"It is to
be a
swimming party. What a sense
of humor
the man has!" Janos laughed aloud,
a thing
he seldom
did, usually expressing amusement with
breathy exhalations. He was delighted because he swam very
well indeed and would be
able to exhibit this
talent. Marvene was less happy
because she had never swum well
and had
no confidence
in water.
The pool contained dolphins
and she
disliked them, fearing that they might
bite and imagining that they
would read her mind. She knew
that they did not bite
but still
the fear
was there, secreted behind her immaculate
eyes.
"I may go
in aquatic
costume," Janos said,
"if costume is allowed."
Marvene dreaded that there might
only be seafood, which she
could not bear.
"I hope they
have seafood," said Selly. "If
there's one thing I like, it
is a
nice bit offish." But the
main thing to be glad about
was that
they were privileged to be
visiting Roald, for he had a
very high position and, following
so soon
on their own party, they could
make a continued good impression.
Each would have preferred to
have a reputation alone, but together was better than
nothing.
Work continued without
further discussion, and Janos locked away all his notes
when he was done, and
hid the
key.
The party was
going well when they arrived
and they
were well received and introduced to important people. They
were feeling confident of themselves, and Marvene had resigned
herself to not making
much of a showing in
the water;
she draped herself at the edge
of the
pool, bravely throwing her supper to the dolphin, which
did seem
to be
reading her mind because it always
leapt a split second before
she threw
a morsel. Janos was posing nearby
eating prawns and clams with evident enjoyment. He planned
to dive
into the pool, when there were
not many
swimming, and execute a graceful
water dance. If he
had not
been a scientist, he could
have been a great water athlete.
Selly was chatting easily with
Roald himself, and several
important people stood near them
waiting to have a
word with the great man.
Suddenly Mar-vene saw her chance:
if Selly
misbehaved here, he would be
forever out of countenance.
She activated
his new
behavior.
Selly abruptly crouched
on the
floor on his haunches and
got himself into a
complicated position whereby he could
lick the backs of his own
thighs. The effect was immediate
then— good! Had he done that
at their
animal mime party he would
have received applause, but
one never repeated a performance or did anything out
of tune
with the prescribed atmosphere. Roald stared unbelieving at this
awful display, seeming at a
loss, and other important
people tried to ignore Selly,
everyone suffering from acute embarrassment.
Janos was horrified.
Why had
she done
this here? Did she not realize
that it would bring bad
attention to all three of
them? What lack of
tact! He decided to try
to divert
attention from the scene
and ran
up the
steps to the diving board,
sparing a look of hatred
for Marvene,
who was
actually displaying her glee at
Selly's display. He prepared to
dive, calming himself for an especially
elegant performance.
Selly, while engaged
in cat
behavior which did not seem
at all unusual to him, noticed
his wrist
monitor because his tortured position
brought it right in front
of his
eyes. His brainwave readings and noradrenalin
were abnormal. They would be normal
for a
cat, though, and of course
all manner
of other realizations came with this knowledge—these
made him snarl and begin a
howling growl which made the
blood run chill. He could take
his revenge
immediately without a show of power,
without explanation. He would bring
them both down—if he was to
be ruined,
then it would not happen
in solitude. It must
be Janos who had done this thing
to him,
he believed, for he
had read
Janos' notes fairly extensively in his spying. But his
discoveries had enabled him to
do something
very similar. He had not
believed that they would dare
attempt this on him,
but he
had been
waiting his chance to experiment with Janos.
His hands felt
very clumsy because his thumb
did not
want to oppose itself and his
claws wanted to retract in
a most
uncomfortable way, because
he did
not have
claws. With a triumph of
control, considering that everyone was
staring at him as if he
had gone
mad, he activated a control
directed at Janos.
Janos was posied
for action.
He looked
down to judge the height and was overcome with
waves of prickling terror at
the sight of the water. Water!
He had
come the wrong way. He
turned to retreat, wobbling
wildly between diving skills which he knew he had
and the
total unfamiliarity with water that belongs to mice. He
clutched himself with his little
front paws, balancing on his hind
legs by an act of
will, and people turned to see
a man
hesitating to dive because of
lack of nerve. He was creating
a totally
unfavorable diversion, but his rodent instincts
made him tremble and stay.
There was derisive laughter from one
or two
impolite guests and Roald glared at them, then at
Janos. This spurred him to
action and he fell into the
water with a disgraceful splash, squeaking with fear he
could not master. He floundered
around trying to swim but a
lab mouse
had no
inkling of such motion. He
panicked.
Marvene collected herself
and without
thinking slid into the water to
rescue him. She swam well.
Janos had activated her snake instincts,
thus ensuring her increased confidence
in water, although it was certainly
still not her favorite element.
The onlookers were impressed
with Marvene in spite of
themselves, and she was
obscurely aware that she had
done something amazing and
unaccustomed. While the disgraced Janos was being taken away
to dress
and the
impossible Selly escorted to another room
to hide
himself, she enjoyed a certain
amount of qualified glory. It
was while
she was
experiencing a strange desire to
slither away underneath a piece
of furniture that she guessed what
was happening
to her.
Her jaws drew open with reptilian
fury. There was something so
obviously wrong with her
now that
people left her alone. The
three of them were
in disgrace;
it was
demonstrated that they were no longer
desirable. Marvene knew then that
all the
work would come to
an end.
It would
be impossible
to find
another good place in
upper-class society. She burned with
hatred of her two
colleagues. They had stolen the
work and used it against her!
The very
thought filled her with the
will to kill them both. She
felt that she could strangle
them slowly while telling them why
she was
doing so, and then swallow
them whole to eliminate
them from her ruined world.
It was discreetly
suggested to her in a
message from Roald that she leave
the party
with Selly and Janos. They
were ruining his party. She acquiesced
with graceful dignity and as she
glided away she looked her
host in the eye in
such a way that he felt
threatened. Everything was over now;
what did it matter? Then the
three of them were out
in the
night. None of them spoke; there
was too
much suppressed anger beneath
the tough
veneer of politeness for any
to dare.
Janos' upper lip twitched dangerously and Selly's mouth was
ajar in a silent snarl as
he regarded
Janos with malice. He had
hunger in his face and
Janos felt threatened; a paralysis
seemed to have overcome him. Marvene
slid away from them, which
broke the gaze and
the two
men followed.
Selly loped along
silendy on the balls of
his feet,
going ahead and returning, quickly but
without fuss, circling them and then
trotting off like a shadow.
Marvene glided quickly then, head held
erect, fixing Janos with a
gaze, and he trotted agitatedly, head down in his
shoulders. Around them the fantasy of
the city
glowed, the illuminated towers and
balconies and flights of
stairs and terraces were beautiful,
everywhere glass, every aspect
designed to astonish and amuse. Marvene spoke first.
"Janos, I am going
to kill
you. I am going to
punish you for spoiling my life.
There is nothing you can
do; you
are going to die.'' He kept
his nervous
eyes upon her and tripped
over the bottom step
of a
winding flight that led to
a broad
esplanade, a favorite nightwalk
because of its elevation over
an abyss and the
astounding view. The banisters of
the stairway
were hollow and filled with
small alien lifeforms from other planets. Janos had always
loved this walk; he always
stopped to take a
look at the lizard people
or the
gloriously beautiful butterfly people
in their
simulated environment. Now, he would have
given a lot to be
a prisoner
in a
bottle like these highly intelligent specimens; anything would have
been better than to
have only space between Marvene
and himself.
Suddenly she reached
out to
grab him and he jumped;
he ran up the stairway at
speed but saw Selly ahead,
crouched on all fours. The grotesque
image of fat Selly crouching
to spring almost made him squeak
with hysterical laughter, out of control.
In a
blind panic he whimpered and
ran down
again. Marvene reached him
and almost
had hold
of him
by the neck when Selly leapt
with a screech. The stairway
beneath them all disappeared instantly and all Marvene
could hear was her own ghasdy
hissing shriek as she clung
to a
balustrade, winding herself around it
clinging, watching the litde butterfly people
escape as their prison dissolved.
They would not live long. And
Janos had lost the night
game; he fell to his death
among a cloud of exquisite
wings.
Selly had changed
direction in midleap and somersaulted
out into space in
a wonderful
arc to
land with ease upon his
feet on an impossible
balcony two flights below. He
crouched there moaning with
the physical
shock, looking down to see
Janos land on solid
glass. And then he looked
up at
Marvene, her hair coiling wildly.
"We shall all
die. I shall kill you
myself. None of us has
a life now."
"And we
have come such a long
way together."
"Not together."
"I'll switch
off the
control if you will. Do
we want
to be
like this?" It was
self and not-self, this snake
that she felt to
be. '
"No. You are
a snake.
It suits
your nature. And it must
have been Janos who
did that
to you."
Probably true; it
didn't matter now. She ran
then, bitter and wild, not home
but making
for the
lab in
the underground,
down to it through the
glittering arcades aware that Selly followed. Kill herself? Where
was the
courage for that? How did snakes
kill themselves? She was drawn
to her
most familiar surroundings and stood among
the cages,
uncertain. She reached in
and picked
up a
mouse by its tail. It
kicked as she dangled it over
her open
mouth. Selly got there, howling
eerily with laughter and
reached out a paw to
get the
mouse for himself. The little creature
was dashed
away and ran to trembling safety in a heap
of mouse
bedding, heaps of paper shredded but still showing that
it was
covered with Janos' handwriting.
Then she laughed too, for
he had
been careless; now there would be
nothing left to show what
the research
had been. The two
humans engaged in a clumsy
struggle— Marvene lacked weight
and Selly
was too
fat to
get her
arms around to squeeze and he
was hitting
her with
the flat
of his
hand.
Behind him
on the
bench were the dissecting knives, and she reached out
and grasped
one. She pushed the instrument
into the side of
his throat
and cut,
and cut.
He was
thick and tough and she could
hardly believe that he was
dead when his weight went slack
and slid
to the
floor in a great pool
of his
blood. She found the
control in his belt pack
and deactivated
it, examining it with
a detached
curiosity to see if it
was a
good copy. She felt
different now, active and tense
but more
like herself. She felt
disgusted that she had almost
eaten a mouse. What a powerful
discovery they had made. She
turned over in her
mind ways in which she
could use this to make a
new life
for herself.
It was
a powerful
control weapon. Perhaps she could still
be famous
if she
completed the research alone. She
had nobody
holding her back now, crippling
her sense
of style.
She turned
from the mess and wandered
into the snake house.
"Marvene, I have
waited for you," said Lupus
the Loop,
smiling with pleasure. The
hallucination of his actually speaking to her was very
strong. All the disturbances she had endured had upset
her mental
balance. "Chomsky was right,
Marvene. That ancient debate is
at an
end. Language is innate, you know."
She stared
at him,
knowing perfectly well that the vocal
cords of snakes were so.
. .
.
"Selly very kindly
gave me his powers of
verbal communication when he gave
me his
own instincts.
You didn't
know he was trying that, did
you?"
"You cannot speak,"
she said,
obviously expecting it to interpret.
"Did you hear
a voice,
my dear?
I am
transmitting to you telepathically, my usual
method of communication with other snakes, of course."
Marvene laughed thinly.
"What an imagination I have
sometimes. Dear Lupus, come
to me
then, tell me more. Give me answers out of
my own
brain." But she had not
read Chomsky. He glided to her
and swiftly
wound himself around her, head down
and gripping
tightly.
"Marvene, I want
us to
mate. I have needed a
female for some time, but my
cruel imprisonment here did not
allow that. Snakes are more passionate
than humans realize, and Selly too
had his
passions. Secretly, he much desired
you, my dear." She screamed again
and again,
begging him to let her go.
He was
embracing her desperately, frustrated and in anguish. He gripped
her tighter
and her
bones slowly snapped and the breath
went out of her so
that she could not scream any more. Finally, possessing
her in
the only
way he
could, he swallowed her
whole, taking his time, covering
her broken body over
with his own beautiful elastic
skin.
* * *
The little
mouse who had escaped was
busy. It was releasing its fellow prisoners, who were not only
grateful to be released, but said so.
The advance of
technology affects everything in our
culture . . . yes,
even art. For decades,
science fiction writers have warned
us that
fallible human authors may one
day be
replaced by robots or computers
programmed to produce stories that
will be without flaws (and
usually without surprises). But Nancy Kress suggests,
in this
very human story, that perfection in writing may be
developed sooner using human authors aided by precise physiological
monitoring. This would certainly be an improvement; still, "perfection"
always raises questions, some very basic.
"Shadows on the
Cave Wall" is the fifth
short story Nancy Kress has sold;
her earlier
ones were published in Omni, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and Galaxy. Her first novel,
Prince of Morning Bells, appeared recently
from Pocket Books. A teacher
of English at the college level,
she lives
in Brockport,
New York,
with her husband and two sons.
SHADOWS
ON THE CAVE WALL
Nancy Kress
"Our music, our
poetry, our language itself, are
not satisfactions,
but suggestions."
Ralph
Waldo Emerson
On Tuesday it was préadolescent
girls for Matthew
Mc-Gratty, a free-lancer we'd just put under contract. McGratty always chooses
the obvious, so naturally it was a horse story. Garber said he wasn't crazy
about having his studio used for a horse story, the same studio where two
months ago Gar-ber's great undiscovered protégé
Johannsen had final-auded Greta. But McGratty had a decent if uninspired
composing record, we had him under contract, and Garber had no real choice
except to grumble a little about the perversion of art and the
debasement of public taste and
so forth,
and then
give the go-ahead. Garber
has fits
like that, delusions that G-M Press
is more
than just a third-rate c-aud shop for freelancers;
we on
the staff
humor him. And every so
often we do come up with
a Greta, although we're no Harper and Simon,
and for us it's
a windfall,
a lucky
lightning, a comet's tail we
don't even try to
grab but just sparkle in
the light
of before
it whizzes past. Last week Johannsen
signed a contract with Harper and Simon.
Still, Greta is supposed to be
really good. We only had
it for
the last, twenty-fifth taping; Johannsen must have
been running out of money,
to come
to us
at all.
Garber burst into my office, all excited, because he
heard that someone on the Times might review it.
"What do you
think, Mary? Jameson? Maybe Jameson
might review it? Jameson
would do it a lot
of good.
I have
a feeling about this one, Mary!"
"Jameson isn't
going to review it."
He glared at
me from
under lowered eyebrows. They're nearly white now, and in
his rumpled
jumpsuit, Garber looks like a seedy
Santa Glaus reduced to dealing
in hot
toys. God, I love him. If
I ever
forgive that bitch Mummy-sweet at all, it will be
because she somehow tangled Garber
in her
long string of husbands.
"He might review it!"
"He won't. You
know that. Think. It's a
book for children. ''
"Young adults!"
"All right, young
adults. But he's not going
to review
it in
the Times. We'll probably
do all
right on it financially— although that was
a pretty
selective c-aud index Johannsen showed me. At least we
shouldn't lose money on it.
Setde for that."
"You haven't
even read it!"
I hadn't, although
I'd had
the manuscript
for nearly
a month. Press of work, busy
time of year, I just
hadn't had the time. Oh, hell,
yes I'd
had. That wasn't the reason.
"I know I
haven't read it. Maybe it's
terrific. Maybe it's an instant classic.
Maybe it's Hamlel
for the
acne set. But Jameson won't review
it. Let
it go,
Garber."
"I think
you're wrong."
I sighed. Garber
was a
walking lesson on how to
achieve
business failure:
enthusiasm without judgment. That we
had gotten even this far was
due only
to the
hefty alimony Garber had pried out
of Mummy-sweet,
and that
he had
gotten so much alimony in a
retroactive setdement was due only
to the
lawyer I'd hired for
him. She isn't ever going
to forgive
me, either.
"You're wrong,
Mary. This time I know
it."
"Garber, if you
were a critic, and in
the exact
same week publishers brought
out the
original appearances of Hamlet, Don Quixote, Anna Karenina, Song of Myself, and The Little
Engine that Could, what would
you not
review?"
"Greta isn't . . ."
"I have to
go. McGratty's
waiting for me in the
studio." "To compare it
to The Little ..."
"Garber, he's waiting
with forty-seven kids. I have to
go." I put my arms around
him and
kissed him on the top
of his
head. It was going
bald; in another year he
would have a tonsure. I
found that I liked the
idea. When I was eleven
years old, Garber found out from
the upstairs
maid that I vomited uncontrollably after each
visit from Mummy-sweet, and he
took me himself to
boarding school, holding my hand
on the
train and talking in
a low,
confidential voice about baseball, and caterpillars, and the marvelous
way really
high-quality peppermints melted first
around the edges of one's
mouth.
"Mary," he said,
his arms
still around me, "do me
a favor?"
"Of course."
"Promise?"
"Of course, Garber.
Anything. You know that. Just
ask.'' "When you're home
tonight, read Greta."
"Oh, Garber, I'm
really sorry but tonight I
have to . . ."
"No. You don't."
I didn't. He
tilted back his head and
looked at me steadily out of blue eyes that
look a litde more sunken
every month. Five years more, the
doctors say. Even virotherapy doesn't arrest it forever, any
of it
. .
. not
the cancer,
and not
the pain. It had been Garber
who'd brought me my first
copy of Alice
in Wonderland.
"Read it,
Mary."
My daughter, Susan,
calls Garber "Grandpa."
I've never let her meet a
single other one of her
relations. Or even told her about
them. When that fool of
a teacher
Susan is so stuck on gave
them the assignment to trace
their family trees, I lied
and gave her Garber's.
"I'll read
it, Garber."
"Promise?"
"Promise. But,
look, McGratty's waiting."
He unwrapped his
arms and winked. "Have fun!" His point won, Jameson
and the
nonexistent review forgotten, equanimity
restored. Garber is a big
child. I hurried out of
the office; he stayed
to study
the cover
painting for a preschool picture book on space,
smiling at the teddy bear
in the
cockpit and whisding to
himself. Both hands rubbed his
plump belly: a right
jolly old elf. And now
I was
committed to reading Greta.
Hell.
McGratty had
lined the kids up against
the studio
wall, three deep, well away from
the computer
and the
aud-units. He was talking to them
in that
charming drawl that convinced each and every litde
heart that she was an
utterly fascinating almost-woman,
and the
whole gaggle of ten- and
eleven-year olds was giggling
and twitching
and popping
moonies. The popping punctuated
languishing sidelong glances at McGratty that
ended in even louder explosions
of moonies. He gestured with one
hand, and forty-seven pairs of eyes
followed the hand's arc through
the air.
Under all this attention, McGratty expanded,
the girls
expanded. The studio threatened to explode outward from
all the
hot air.
"All right,
kids, line up over here.
Tallest first. Let's go!"
They stared
at me
like poison. A few scowled.
"Come on, let's
get started
here. You, with the red
pigtails . . . come
here, honey, and we'll get
you strapped
into a unit."
She came
forward slowly, standing in front
of me
with scrawny feet planted apart, arms
akimbo. "Not pigtails." "What?"
"They're not pigtails.
They're called 'fashion braids.' That's what they're called."
I couldn't suppress
my smile
in time.
"Sorry. 'Fashion braids.' "
She looked
me up
and down.
"And I'm not 'honey.' "
My smile vanished.
There's always one. Behind the
pig-tailed redhead, someone tittered.
"My name is
Nellie Kay Armbruster, not 'honey'!"
I caught the quaver in her
voice under the skinny bravado,
but it only increased my irritation.
Ms. Nellie
Kay Armbruster
didn't know what it
meant to have
something for her voice to
quaver over. Looking at
her bleakly,
I saw
another eleven-year-old, howling
and thrashing
in a
room with walls padded in a
fashionable pale yellow. Mummy-sweet had excellent taste, don't you
know.
"All right, then,
Ms. Armbruster,
if you'll
just consent to step this way.
. ."
The child
flushed, and I knew I'd
missed it again, the tone of
companionable bantering that was supposed
to make
it all
right. Girls this age .
. .
McGratty was looking at me with
narrowed eyes. He didn't want
me upsetting
his c-aud,
and I
didn't blame him. Well, if
he were
good enough, it wouldn't matter.
I strapped Nellie
Kay Armbruster
into her unit. She winced a litde when I
fitted on the scalp wires
and then
clamped her head immobile,
but she
didn't even deign to notice
when I pricked the needle
into her arm or adjusted
the screen the right distance from
her pupils.
Our units
are about
five years old, and
we've missed out on some
of the
new, subtle indices, but those are
more useful for adult c-auds
anyway. We only do children
and young
adults, so only the frontal
lobe cortex and amino acid
indices really count, although we monitor the rest of
the basic
stuff, too: pupil dilation, thoracic
respiration, blood flow, galvanic skin
response.
When all the
kids had been strapped in—the
others wouldn't look directly
at me,
either—I took my place at
the computer and McGratty, at the
author's console, began typing.
suddenly. that was how the
wild palomino came back into carianna's life, leaping over the white picket
fence into her aunt's vegetable garden, tossing his magnificent white mane. he
must have come from the desert, carianna thought in confusion— but she didn't
care where he had come from; she was transfixed with delight, just watching
him.
Rapid, low-voltage,
irregular waves appeared on my
synthesis screen: McGratty's narrative hook
had engaged
their attention. I scanned
the individuals.
Only two showed latencies. One was so uninvolved
she was
practically in alpha waves, and I
pressed for an IQ_: 72.
McGratty wasn't aiming at that audience;
how the
hell had her card slipped
in? I
punched the keys that
canceled her responses from the
synthesis, though I kept her
individuals.
The word-by-word looked good, except for
a slight
flag on "transfixed." McGratty
might consider changing it; it
was possible some of them didn't
know what it meant. High
response to the name "Carianna."
A few
subliminal-stimulus lights even flickered,
and I
wondered yet again why little
girls always went for such flashy
names. The emotional-involvemerit
index wasn't pronounced, but that
didn't matter much at the beginning.
The attention
patterns were the important thing.
the palomino snorted, then
arched his long neck forward to pull at aunt maud's carrot tops. sunlight
poured over his golden coat. then, all at once, carianna saw the notch on the
horse's ear. "rocket," she whispered, stunned. "it's
rocket!"
The attention
curves were still rising, with
a slight
dip at
the sentence about the
sunlight. But that's inevitable with description, even when
you keep
it short.
The individuals
showed the beginning of
emotional involvement in four girls.
I checked the running
evals to see if there
was a
conscious critical reaction to
that awkward "all at once,
Carianna saw" (how else would she see
except all at once?) but
the evals
were all flat. Preadolescent
girls are not a very
critical audience. I've never monitored
an adult-level
composing session, although I've seen tapes
with myself as subject. Even
interpreting those made me dizzy.
How complex
are your reactions when
you read
Macbeth?
slowly, trying not to
startle the beautiful palomino, carianna moved sideways toward the fence,
where her lariat hung. she still couldn't believe it was rocket. she had been
so sure he was lost to her forever, that terrible day two years ago when he
took to the desert. two steps more, one more, and her fingers closed on the
lariat.
I would
bet my
job that
not one
of these
New York
kids has even seen a lariat,
except on video. Nor a
desert, nor a wild horse, nor a carrot still
in the
ground—probably not even
a goddam picket fence.
And as
a work
of art,
McGratty's story was . . .
straight from the horse. But
engagement derives from subjective
significance, the unconscious effect of
personal, social,
and subliminal
factors. It looked like McGratty
was in.
carianna raised the lariat,
as uncle bob had taught her. rocket looked up, his nostrils flaring. outlined
by the blazing sun, he was so beautiful that carianna felt her throat tighten.
but her hand was steady as she twirled the rope and sent it flying toward the
palomino's neck. rocket reared and plunged, tearing up the carrots. carianna
cried out, despite herself. had she missed? or did she—could she—have rocket
again for herself?
The synthesis
of evoked
potentials was so thick it
looked like a Rorschach smear. Good
readings on the glutanic and
aspartic acids that go
with prolonged attentiveness,
nice curves on emotional engagement and subliminal stimuli, even the start of a
negative cortical variation, and it
was early
for that. I glanced
at the
evals: flat. But, then, McGratty's
preselects had included no
IO_'s over sigma one. He
knew his limits. Within those limits,
it looked
promising, unless he stumbled badly later
in the
story, and even if he
did, we could probably fix it.
Three or four more c-auds,
and the
story would evoke exacdy
the response
patterns that sold the best. Another
triumph for American fiction.
No, that wasn't
fair. After all, Nellie Kay
Armbruster had as much right to
have her cortical attention engaged
by whatever
happened to engage it as
did the
readers of Shakespeare or Joyce. And
McGratty's opus might even make
us a
little money, while the preselects for something like Greta were always incredibly
restricted: bright, intense "young adults" with a lit-passion of 11 or better.
I didn't
want to read Greta.
Rocket plunged over
the edge
of a
convenient mesa, and one of the
girls gasped loudly. Quickly I
checked the distraction-wave index: nothing.
The others
were so absorbed they hadn't heard her. McGratty was in.
"Look at this, Mary," Garber said.
The printouts from McGratty's c-aud spread over his desk, looping in tangled
coils and trailing gracefully to the floor. A coffee mug sat on top, spreading
a leisurely brown stain over an aspartic acid curve. Garber ignored all of it,
squinting through his sunken blue eyes at a piece of green paper.
"Look at what?" I
said, removing the coffee mug.
"That's the third one
this week. I think they're growing."
He
handed me the paper. It was a leaflet printed in blurry block letters on cheap
poison-green newsprint.
THE UNSUSPECTED DANGER
What is the most dangerous enemy presently in
the United States? What force poses the most long-term threat to you, your
children, and their children? Do YOU know?
It's not what you may think! This is a hidden
danger, a danger to the MIND. It's the so-called "composing-audience' '
writing of the books you read, the books your children read, and YES! even the
textbooks they use in their schools! Do you want your children guided by
teachings and so-called art composed by machines? Haven't we lost enough of our
humanity to the computer? Aren't enough of our decisions already removed from
our own human hands to cold and inhuman machines? How brainwashed and helpless
do YOU want to be before the all-powerful computer?
YOU CAN HELP! Just detach and return the
attached coupon with a 50$ donation to help the crusade against dehumanization
and brainwashing!
□YES! I want to cry out against control
of my mind by a machine! Enlist me as a crusader! 50* donation enclosed.
□ Send me more information on computer
control of school textbooks!
I laughed.
"It's nothing but a con
for suckers,
Garber." "With what fifty
cents buys now? I doubt
they're even covering their printing costs."
"A bunch of splitbrains,
then."
"Maybe." He drummed his fingers on
McGratty's printout, a muffled noise
like the falling of fat,
cushiony rocks. A loop of the
printout creased in erratic folds.
"But there's a lot of them
out there,
then. Practically every time I
leave the building I get one
of these
shoved at me."
"Garber, why are
you even
concerned? Of course there's a lot
of splitbrains
out there.
There's supposed to be
a lot
of them; the tourists wouldn't feel
they were getting their money's
worth out of New York
if it
weren't swarming with splitbrains.
And you
know what this garbage is
as well
as I
do—it's just the inevitable
fussing about any move to
automation. People fussed when babies
were conceived in tubes. People fussed when electric looms
wrecked handweaving. People even
fussed when eating with forks
replaced fingers, for chrissake—did
you know
that?" Garber didn't answer. One of his most endearing
traits is his acceptance of other people's melodrama. Specifically mine.
"It's true. Forks. They yelled 'lifeless' and 'inhuman' and 'foul' until, after a while,
they saw that it was
just another tool, and the yelling
died down and everybody went
home. This is just the same.
Another tool. So why are
you upset?"
"I don't know."
He gave
me a
little, indulgent half smile for my
performance, but kept on drumming
his fingers.
I slid
McGratty's now-wrinkled printout from
under them and began rolling
it up.
"Mary, I talked to
Jameson today."
"He's not
going to review Greta?"
"No."
"Well, I expected that."
"He sounded .
. .
strange. Evasive. Something had upset
him. A lot."
I shrugged
and kept
on rolling.
"So he's being sued for
libel. Or divorce. Or bankruptcy."
"No, it didn't
. .
. feel like anything personal. Just
something big."
I stopped
rolling and looked at Garber.
He may
have no business judgment whatever, but
he can
have a shrewdness, an intuition, about people that I've
learned to think twice about. Even if it did
fail him spectacularly in the
case of Mummy-sweet.
"What sort
of a
something big?"
"I don't
know."
"You don't think
it's connected with that nonsense?"
I nodded toward the poison-green leaflet.
Garber frowned, Santa
Claus with a wayward reindeer.
"No. Not directly, anyway.
But something's
up, somewhere.
And of
all the
big-league critics, Jameson's been the
one singing loudest hosannas
for c-auds.''
This wasn't strictly
accurate, but I allowed Garber
his hyperbole,
although the picture of a
wizened little Times
literary
critic as a
hosanna-singing archangel was
pretty funny. "New Century
Renaissance"—Jameson had been
the first
to come up with
the term,
but now
they all used it, all
sounded equally enthusiastic hosannas. And why not?
Critics may distrust authors, but
they love and delight in
truly good writing. "Renaissance"
is even
too pale
a word
for the
works that have come
out of
the last
twenty years, since c-auds. To know
for sure when your vision as a writer
has gone beyond the peculiarities of the singular "I."
To be
able to hammer at that vision
until it reaches and moves
readers at the subliminal, universal level
of involuntary
body responses, not merely the
tangled and ego-guarded one of
verbalized "criticism." To
move that hammering from a
lonely, locked-room struggle to
a shared struggle, a cooperative act between creator
and a
selected, involved audience who also became
creators, participatory gods. Is it
any wonder
that the New Century Renaissance
has given
us The Golden Grasses, Cranston's Mountain, All
the Winning Numbers, A
Sheep of Mantua?
Critics like
Jameson don't care if Bacon
wrote Shakespeare's plays or
c-aud "wrote" The Golden Grasses. The play's the thing.
So what
was wrong?
"So what's wrong, Garber?"
"I keep telling
you, I don't know!" He frowned again, then shook his head vigorously
from side to side like
some mangy, whitened bear, and smiled.
It's Garber favorite trick for erasing
trouble, for reorienting himself to
some inner, serene world. The
anxieties just shake out of
his ears
or something,
and poof!
they're gone. It's what he
did when
the doctors
told him about the cancer;
it's what he does after
each virotherapy session; it's
what he did after he
told me all those years ago that he was
divorcing my mother. Shake, shake.
God, I envy him.
"Have dinner
with me, Mary. I'll take
you to
Cellini's."
"I can't,
Garber. Susan'11 be home."
"I thought
Tuesday she had Star Scouts."
"She quit.
'Too babyish.' "
"Then bring
her along.
She'll like Cellini's."
I was tempted.
Discreet service, good wine, the
illusion of space and leisure in
the midst
of New
York's steel caves. Cellini's incomparable beef Wellington. The relaxed
luxury of inconsequential shop talk away
from the pressing decisions of an actual shop. Garber
was wonderful
at that;
in the
pampered atmosphere of a good
restaurant he seemed to expand
and glow, like the
rosy potbellied candles on each
table, into a genial incandescence that shone benignly on
all. The quality of mercy.
But Susan would
object when Garber and I
talked shop; I would object when
she insisted
on having
a cocktail;
Garber would object, with genuine if
genial distress, that Susan and
I were battling yet again. He
would remind us how well
we used to get along when
Susan was a baby. Susan
would say that she was not a baby and
would thank everyone to remember
that. I would reply, with
some heat, that Garber hadn't
said she was, and Garber would look
from Susan to me and
back again with pained,
puzzled incomprehension and ask Susan how
her teacher
was. Then we'd listen for
forty minutes to the wonders
of the
handsome Mr. Blake, who understood
young women perfectly
even if
he didn't
try to
publish babyish books for
them.
"I can't,
Garber. Really."
"Well, next
week then. We'll do it
next week."
"Love to."
"Anyway, you
promised to read Greta tonight." Damn.
"You will
read it, Mary?" "I'll
read it."
He kissed me
good-bye, giving me one of
those measuring glances that always seem
out of
character. I just missed the
subway. While I was
waiting for the next one,
a thin
anemic-looking kid pushed
another one of the poison-green
leaflets into my hand. C-AUD: A
DEAD END FOR HUMANITY. I tore it into litde
pieces, threw it on the
subway tracks, and got slapped with
a fine
for malicious
littering.
"I got
a D,"
Susan announced over the spaghetti.
She widened her eyes at me
and held
her fork
upright, like a spear. "Ms. Lugo
gave me a D."
"Ms. Lugo?
What happened to Mr. Blake?"
Susan rolled her
eyes heavenward. "I told you, he's been out because his mother
died. Ms. Lugo is the
sub. And she gave me a
D on
my family-tree
assignment!"
"Why?"
"You should
know! It's your fault!" "My fault?"
"You know it is. And when Mr. Blake
comes back on Friday, he'll
see that
D and
ask me
about it, and I just
can't bear it!"
I twirled spaghetti
on my
fork with great, calm deliberation.
"And just
how is
this D my fault, Susan?"
''We're supposed
to have
all this
oral history to go with
the family tree we had to
do. I
told you. And
all I
had to
put on
my cassette was those
few things
you told
me about
Grandpa Garber, because you
were so busy writing or
whatever that you wouldn't hardly even
talk to me.
So Ms.
Lugo marked "skimpy content"
and "lack
of effort"
on the
checklist and gave me a D."
"Honey, it
wasn't because I was too
busy writing!"
"Don't call me
'honey'! I hate it when
you call
me 'honey'!"
Twice in one
day. I put down my
fork and forced myself to
speak calmly to the
hysterical, overgrown prosecutor sitting in my daughter's chair. J'accuse.
"Susan, it wasn't
because I was too busy
writing. It wasn't that at all.
It was
because ..." Because what? Because
the family
tree I gave her was
Garber's, and I don't know any more about it.
Because I don't know what
her father,
that anonymous doner of sperm,
might have had for his
oral history. Because I
don't want to give her
mine, don't want her to look
at herself
as the
cast-off granddaughter of a rich bitch
whose notorious cruelties revolted even
the mostly
unrevoltable set that spawned
her. Because I don't want
Susan to look at
me in
the lurid
and violent
light that any recitation of my own childhood
would have to, in Susan's
eyes, set me in now and
forever, world without end.
"Because of what?"
Susan demanded. "Because
of what
didn't you tell me
more for the project?"
I couldn't
answer her.
Two large
tears rolled out of the
corners of her eyes. She
jumped up, dashed them
away, and screamed at me
across the spaghetti. "You don't have
a reason!
You know
you don't! You just don't care
if I
get a
D on
my project,
you just
don't have time to talk to me about it,
you just
have time to lock yourself in
your room and scribble your
own things!
You don't understand me at all!"
She ran
from the room. A second
later I heard the door
slam, catch on something
in the
way, then slam again, this
time successfully enough to
shake the pictures on the
wall. Victoria Falls shuddered
and slid
to the
floor.
I pushed away
the plate
of congealing
spaghetti. All right, I told myself
yet again,
it's just normal preadolescent mother-daughter wangling. Her
body's under a lot of
stress, it's changing too fast, this
is all
normal, it will all pass.
The constant lashing out at me,
the moods,
the tears,
the lightning
highs and lows—all would pass.
I understood.
Didn't I? I did. I had been that age once; I
knew what it felt like
to be
Susan with her "D"
or Nellie
Kay Armbruster
with her fashion braids; I
knew what—
No. I didn't
know what it felt like.
Not from
where Susan was standing. I only
knew what it had looked
like from where / had been,
such a vastly different and
splintered place that I'd been an
emotional mutant, adapted to fit
an alien
landscape, and thus alone. I
couldn't reach my daughter 'that
way, through the tunnel
of a
common experience. There wasn't
one. My childhood was useless
for that.
But I could do something else
with that childhood, and had
been doing it, for
months now. I could transform
the whole
abusive nightmare into something
that made sense, perhaps even beauty. Dickens had done
it for
his childhood
of grinding
poverty, in Oliver
Twist. Rashi had
done it for hers, in
Gremlin. If the
private past could be transcended,
transformed into the public vision
. .
.
I left the
spaghetti on the table. I
left the unread copy of Greta on the floor, next to Victoria
Falls. I left the fine
for malicious
littering of the poison-green pamphlet in my coat
pocket. I left Garber's
mysterious worry about Jameson's mysterious worry, and
Susan's worry about her D,
and my
worry about Susan, and
I went
into my bedroom and scribbled
some more on the secret
manuscript I had been scribbling
on every
night. The manuscript that I
knew would make it all hang together, turn
it all
into some kind of integrated
sense, make it all worthwhile.
I wrote
until I fell asleep, sometime
after two, still slumped at my desk. When I
woke a few hours later,
the light
cube had burned out. My shoulders
and arms
felt stiff, circulation had stopped in
one leg,
and my
mouth tasted foul. It was
nearly dawn. In the
half-light from the window my
writing lay lighdy on the crumpled
pages, a lacy pattern of
dim shadows.
and so little agnes came
home again, much the wiser for her adventure. and her mother met her at the
door, and her loving brothers, and, best of all, tags. he barked and romped,
and little agnes knew she could never, ever leave him again!
I stared
at the
monitor screen in disbelief. Alpha waves— four of the individual curves showed alpha
waves! Leaning around the edge of
the computer,
I searched
for the
four kids. All of them had
their eyes closed. Kids still
staring at their screens were slumped
in their
seats, and a slump is
hard to do when your head
is held
immobile. The evoked potentials were low and monotonous, the acid curves flat,
the subliminal
stimuli not even registering. Only the evals showed
activity, a high curve that
didn't need my training to
be interpreted:
they hated it.
At the
master console the proud author
typed the last period and
beamed through her bifocals.
Garber,
I thought.
Let Garber
handle it. Garber would tell
her better than I.
I released
the helmets
and the
kids scrambled out gratefully. The author busded up,
patting lavender curls squashed by a net so carefully
arranged that I fought a
sudden urge to play tic-tac-toe in its symmetrical squares.
"Well, it went
splendidly, didn't it, my dear?
Just splendidly. My, I find
a c-aud
studio so interesting!"
I stared at
the printout
as if
it were
the Rosetta
stone, and hoped she couldn't read
graphs.
"Why don't
you just
go on
ahead to Mr. Garber's office,
Ms. Tidwell, and I'll
be along
as soon
as I
sort these out."
"Oh, I don't mind
waiting for you, dear. Not
at all."
"Well, it's
just that it might take
a while."
She laughed brightly,
a kind
laugh around big horse teeth.
"Oh, I guess I
can wait,
all right.
I've waited twenty-two years,
you know.
That's how long I've been
working on Little
Agnes' Adventure. On and off,
of course.
You can't
rush inspiration, you know—what's that, dear?"
"Nothing. Nothing.
I just
. .
. cleared
my throat."
"Would you like
a cough
drop? No? You have to
take care of yourself, dear, a
young woman like you. I
learned that, I should hope, in all my years
of teaching—did
I tell
you I
was a schoolteacher, dear? Retired, now,
as of
last year. Taught forty-four
years. And then I said
to myself,
I said,
Ida Tidwell, if you're ever going
to take
that book and publish it,
now's the time. So
I just
pulled my savings out of
the bank—
you sure you don't
want a cough drop? That
does sound bad!"
"No . . .
no."
"Well, you know
best, of course. So I
just pulled my savings out
and came
to Mr.
Garber with my manuscript, and here I am, a
real live author! My, I
can't wait to see Little Agnes in print."
Garber. Yes.
Let Garber do
it.
"Can I help you
roll those up, dear?"
"No. No, thank
you. Ms. Tidwell, May I
ask you
something?"
"Certainly, dear. About
Agnes? Was some part not
clear?"
"Not about Agnes.
Ms. Tidwell,
what was it all those
years?"
"I beg
your pardon?"
"What did
you teach?
Was it
English?"
"Oh, my,
no, dear!"
"Not literature?"
"I taught
algebra."
I smiled gratitude
on behalf
of forty-four
years of literature classes. "Tell you what, Ms. Tidwell,
I know
you must
be tired from this long session.
If you'll
just run along"—oh hell,
I never say things like "just
run along"—"to
Mr. Gar-ber's
office ..."
"Oh, I don't
mind waiting, dear." She smiled
at me
with baby-blue eyes, serene
and flat
as an
empty sky. "This is all
so very exciting for
me. It's
always been my dream, you
know, to write a
book. And I knew I could do it. I knew
it would make everything all worthwhile."
"What?"
"What . . .
why, dear, what's the matter?"
"What did you just
say?"
"I said I
knew the book would make
it all
worthwhile. All those years of teaching
algebra. Why, dear, you look
so—"
"I've finished
here. Let's see Mr. Garber
now, shall we?"
I ushered her
into Garber's office, put the
printouts on his desk, and pleaded
my bladder.
When I returned from the
toilet, twenty-five minutes later, she
was gone,
but the
office still held the unmistakable feel of disaster. There's
a theory
that any monitor's repeated
experiences of seeing brain waves related to graphic interpretation
leads to a slight rise
in natural sensing of electromagnetic auras. Nobody's ever proved it. But Garber's office
was soggy
with ineffectual disillusionment,
wadding up the air like
damp tissues.
"Was it
very bad?"
"If you'd
stayed, you'd know."
"I'm sorry, Garber,
really I am. But I
couldn't. I just couldn't."
He swept the
rolls of printout off the
side of his desk and
toward the wastebasket. They missed.
"Garber, I don't
know exactly how to say
this, but about her contract .
. .
her life
savings—"
"I already
refunded it."
I walked
over and kissed him. "I
should have known you would. Then there's no real
harm done, is there? She'll
get over it. Don't look like
that—people have to learn every
day that they don't have talents
they'd hoped for."
He looked
at me
with a sudden intensity.
"After all," I said, too loudly,
"the city is swarming with
would-be writers, everyone knows
that. Scratch a schoolteacher and you find a
c-aud applicant, right?"
"Right," Garber
said. "Yes. Well." He reached
for my
hand and began playing
with the fingers, crossing and
uncrossing them. A silence
stretched itself too long, then
went on even longer.
"Mary . . ."
"What?"
"Nothing."
"No, what
were you going to say?"
"Nothing." With the hearty air of
a man
skillfully changing the subject, he
added, "Hey—did you look out
the window
yet? Look down there. They've
been at it all morning."
Ten stories below,
pickets marched. I could just
make out the block lettering on
the poison-green
signs.
C AUD-ARTIST FRAUD
GIVE BOOKS BACK TO HUMANS!
CHILDREN DESERVE
MORE THAN MECHANICAL MINDS
"They had
a bunch
of children
marching with them earlier,"
Garber said. "Tots about six
or seven."
"Are they all nonviolent?"
"So far."
I shrugged.
' 'Then
let them
march. What does it matter?"
Garber swiveled his
chair back toward his desk
and said,
as though it were
an answer,
"Jameson videoed me this morning.''
"He
called you?" G-M Press is
definitely not accustomed to getting videos
from famous critics.
"He's sending
me a
manuscript to read."
I sat
on Garber's
desk. "What kind of manuscript?"
"I don't know.
He wouldn't
say. But he made me
promise to drop everything else and
read it instantly. He looked
disturbed, rumpled, and upset, but
in an
odd sort
of way."
"What sort
of odd
sort of way?"
"Like a journalist with an exclusive on
the Titanic. Mary, what do
you think
art is
for?"
I blinked.
Abstractions are not Garber's style.
No one
at G-M Press asks what art
is for, unless he's being high-camp humorous;
Garber was not. It was
a question
I hadn't
even heard spoken aloud since lecture
classes at college. Garber was looking at me with
the rumpled
half embarrassment of a man who
knows he's just said something
faintly impractical and ridiculous,
and I
looked away and fumbled.
"Garber, I couldn't—"
"No, forget it.
Stupid question." He shook his
head from side to side, the
old mind-cleaning
bounce, and came up smiling.
"Dinner at
Cellini's?"
Susan's oral-history project hung in the
air, joining Ida TidweU's tears and
Garber's abashed rhetoric.
"No, you can't,
I know,"
Garber said. "But next week?
For sure?"
"For sure."
As I left,
he went
back to the window, watching
the picketers with mild geniality. Ms. Tidwell's printouts unrolled
a litde
more on the carpeted floor.
It had
started to rain. I put
down the last page of
Greta, leaned over
the desk,
and opened
my tiny
bedroom's one window. Outside it was
dark, with smeared blurs of
light shining through the rain, and
soft splats as the drops
hit the
screen. Drifting in were
those summer-night smells that even
New York can't totally
obliterate: damp earth, wet dust
from the screen, and, improbably, roses.
Were there
roses in the minipark across
the street?
Suddenly it seemed very important
to remember.
I leaned
my forehead against the dark wet
screen, its slippery wire squares reminding me of Ms.
TidwelPs hairnet, and tried to
picture the park. One
chipped bench, one maple tree
protected by a ten-foot whitewashed
cage, one litter basket overflowing
with objects not bearing close
examination, and one flower bed. Were
there roses in the flower
bed? And if so, were they
red or
pink or white or yellow?
Long-stemmed or clustered on low bushes?
Straggly or well pruned? Buds
or already
blowsy, their ripeness turning messy,
dropping silky petals like specks of
blood?
I couldn't see
the roses.
All I
could see was the child
protagonist of Greta.
It was a
fabulous book. Literally: a book
fabled, beyond human expectations,
removed from the mundane not
because of what happened in
it, but
because of what it made
of what happened. Huckleberry Finn without the leaky
ending. A female Holden Caulfield brought
with power and poignancy into the 1990's. Oliver Twist
without bathos. Johannsen had painted Greta's rite of passage
with the uncompromising harshness
of a
Faulkner, the detail of a
Colette, the controlled compassion of a Steinbeck.
So many literary
allusions. But they weren't quite
right, after all. It wasn't those
other masters Johannsen had echoed, it was me, my own deepest resonances in the
subconscious, or wherever
the hell
they're supposed to be kept
now, so that as I read,
litde shocks of recognition and discovery flashed between me
and the
badly typed pages. More: Greta was the universal childhood experience, being a stranger in
a harsh and unfamiliar adult land,
lifted to a peak so
lucid and sharp that it might
have been the prototype for
Twain, Dickens, et al, instead of their
culmination.
I saw that
I had
set the
last page crookedly on top
of the
rest. I straightened it carefully, taking a
long time to get it
ex-acdy right, all four corners
perfectly aligned to slide the
manuscript into its cardboard
box. There was a stain
on one
corner of the box;
it looked
like jelly. Meticulously I rubbed
it with a tissue,
then an eraser, until the
smear was gone and the rubbed
nap all
lay in
the same
direction.
Then there
was nothing
else to do.
Greta had done
it all.
I undressed,
hanging my jumpsuit with mathematical
care. Shoulders equidistant on the hanger, boots
lined up at right angles, toothbrush
plumb-line vertical in its holder.
The hairbrush free of
all pulled
strands. Everything necessary attended to.
The key
to the
locked drawer holding my manuscript made a tinny, gurgling
sound as I flushed it
down the toilet, but
it didn't
clog the pipe.
I went
to bed.
At a third-rate c-aud publisher, art is
for making
money. But now I thought about
McGratty and the little girls
he had
entertained so well. I
thought about Garber dying, and
Ida Tidwell smiling so much over
so little.
I thought
about Susan and about Nellie Kay
Armbruster, both glaring at me
as if
we belonged to different
species, with no possible hope
of first
contact. I thought about
Johannsen, composing Greta out of whatever universal vision blazed from
him through
G-M's aging equipment to his c-aud,
and back
again. And again. And I thought
about Mummy-sweet. All that pain,
then: wasted. Never used; never transformed;
never, dammit, justified.
Not by
me.
The rain
stopped. The sliding sounds of
traffic on wet pavement drifted in
the dark
window. A dog barked.
So what do
you do,
when somebody else builds the
pyramids where you needed to
put up
your bark hut? First you
think, a
dead dream and then you
tell yourself that the least
you can do is avoid thinking
in those
damn tired cliches. Then you realize
that even telling
yourself that
is a
cliche, and so is the realization
that it is. Then you
plod round and round the same
tired track, trying not to
see what's
there—or, rather, trying to
see what's
not there,
the unique
deep contribution that all
of a
sudden is now neither unique
nor necessary, nor even,
by comparison,
very deep. You listen to
traffic. You listen to your
own heartbeat,
and to
those weird New York night sounds
that are never identifiable but always familiar: thumps and
hoots and blurred, distant wails from God-knows-what. You pick
apart into bloody shreds everything that ever happened to
you, everything you've ever done, and
finally you make yourself stop
that because soggy self-pity
won't help, only survival-oriented tough-minded hard-nosed
gut will
help, kid, so stop ya blubberin'
and strap
on that
there gun. And then you tell
yourself to avoid thinking in
those damn tired cliches.
Finally you roll
over and sleep, because even
the pyramids
don't change having to
get up
early to go to work,
and fix
your daughter's breakfast, and stop at the
bank to pay the utility. And sometime in the
night the rain starts again,
smelling of phantom roses.
In the
morning the pickets were back,
treading an oval on the sidewalk.
Seen up close, they were
an odd
lot: two kids with the single
scalp-strip of curled hair that
is the
current fashion in parent-annoyance,
an intense
academic type wearing middle-age
badly, a woman dressed in
nurse uniform, cap, and stethoscope,
and an
old spoonhead
I had
seen last week carrying a sandwich
board for Harvey's Eats. They
carried a new collection
of signs:
HUMAN BOOKS
FOR HUMAN
HEARTS
SAVE OUR
CHILDREN'S MINDS
A C-AUD
IS A
COMPUTER'S BAWD
(That was the
academic.)
IS NOTHING SACRID?
NO SEA TO
SHINING C-AUD
" 'Sacred'
is misspelled,"
I said,
to no
one in
particular. One of the
kids squinted at me. "It should be s-a-c-r-«-d."
He scanned the
signs until he saw the
one I
meant, carried by the spoonhead. I ducked into the
building. No one tried to
stop me, although the
nurse gave me the pitying
look of the elect for the
damned.
Garber wasn't in
his office.
My desk
was cluttered
with the usual jetsam, all claiming
to be
important.
The computer tech
wanted payment for the last
set of
equipment repairs.
The utility
company regretted to inform us
of a
rate hike.
Ms. Ida Tidwell
had submitted
another application for a free-lance c-aud. This one was
for a
book called Tiny
Tina's Lesson. Check enclosed, drawn
on a
savings bank.
Matthew McGratty wanted
to explore
the possibility
of renegotiating our contract.
He had
received this offer from a
well-known publisher he didn't
feel at liberty to name.
. .
.
I was staring
at it
all with
profound disinterest when Garber came
in. He
entered quiedy, gendy, almost as
if he
were apologizing for something,
or afraid
of intruding
on mourning.
He looked
terrible. His suit was even
more rumpled than usual, his sunken
blue eyes rimmed with purple
shadows. I tensed, knowing he
would discuss Greta,
and bracing
myself for—what? We had
never talked direcdy about my
writing. For unspoken pity,
then. For penetrating looks and
restrained curiosity. But instead
Garber just laid a package
on my desk.
"Read this,
Mary. Now. Please." He didn't
look at me.
"Garber, what—"
"Please."
He turned
and left,
closing the door behind him.
Gently.
I opened the
package. It was a manuscript,
a photocopy,
marked "To C. Jameson.
Molloy Press. C-AUD 22, final taping." The
tide was Floor
of Heaven. I thought a
moment, then located the title in
The Merchant of Venice. The author
was a name instantly recognizable, a Pulitzer Prize winner,
a brilliant writer with the sort
of reputation
that even high school sophomores have heard of. I
had reread
her last
book twice. What was she doing sending a manuscript
to Garber,
via Jameson? It made
no sense.
I began to
read. Twenty pages in, I
realized that, in the essentials
that truly count, the characters
and meaning
and nuances
of emotional
and intellectual
theme that make a book
what it is, I
knew the book already.
I had
read it last night.
Garber was
sitting in his office, with
the lights
off. He'd pulled his chair over
to the
window and looped back the
curtain, and he sat in
the half-light
with his hands folded on
his belly, gazing out. It had
started to drizzle. Far below,
the corners of the pickets' cardboard
signs curled over on themselves
like sea waves.
I laid
Floor of Heaven on his
desk.
"Collusion . .
."I said, the word trailing
off into
nothing. The author of Floor of Heaven was neither unscrupulous
nor insane. No motive.
More loudly I said, "A
bad practical
joke." Garber didn't answer,
but I
rushed on.
"Of course, Garber.
That's all it is. Some
arrested-development who's willing
to go
to elaborate
lengths to . . . to
scare Jameson!" Only, of course,
Jameson wasn't scared. "To
make him look foolish, then.
Utterly, ridiculously foolish, in print."
Garber smiled.
"It happens all
the time.
Literary hoaxes. So much a
part of publishing history that it's
. .
. practically
obligatory, every once in
a while.
Patriotic, even. That's all it
is."
Garber gestured out
the window.
"They'll be ecstatic,"
he said, smiling, still smiling, and
I exploded.
"Come on,
Garber, one duplication doesn't prove
anything! Even random chance allows
for some
total improbabilities! If all the
monkeys in the British Museum
began typing—no, that's not
right, if all the monkeys
in the
world—"
"No," Garber
said, his voice quiet against
my shrillness.
"No, one duplication doesn't prove anything."
"—began typing
all the
books in—all the books in
the British ... oh, hell, Garber."
"Yes," Garber
said. He was still smiling,
a remote
smile that made me uneasy. I
looked away.
"So what
happens next?"
The smile
widened. "Jameson showed me his
article. To be published next week.
Quite a privilege, actually, considering
who he
is, and
that when all this came
up he
thought my name was 'Farber.' It's
quite a story. About Plato."
•'Plato?"
"Plato."
"The ancient
Greek Plato?" "That's the
one."
"How . .
."I almost had it, but
it slipped
my mind.
A long time since college.
"Jameson gave me
a copy."
Garber opened his desk drawer, drew out a pile
of paper,
and pulled
the third
and fourth sheets. Sections were circled
with thick, waxy red, and
I knew that Garber must have
marked it, not Jameson. Garber
is probably
the only
company president in New York
who keeps PreSchool Crayolas
in his
desk.
"Just read that,"
he said,
still with the same casual,
remote smile. "Go ahead, read
it, skip
the rest
and start
there."
Jameson was given
to parenthetical
clauses. His dense, twisty sentences snaked
themselves at me from the
page:
But all these
esoteric theories, fascinating sport though
their intellectual gymnastics may provide, reduce in
the end
to a
theory so old that
it is
embarrassing to realize by how
many centuries we may
have been anticipated. Two books,
inde-pendendy written, yet identical in
character and incident and theme and, above all, in emotional impact, in the images evoked in that older brain that lies below the one usually
concerned with words. Identical, and both brilliant, with the brilliance of a perfect object
illuminated in firelight. And here it all comes together.
We
have always assumed human experience to be too varied for meaningful, exact
duplication. We have always supposed that how an artist "handled" a
theme—as though love, death, and whatever were so many unbroken colts— was more
important than the theme itself. We have always supposed that a talented writer
need give only a "fresh reworking" to an archetypal experience, and
the result was a new and separate work of art.
But
what if we were wrong? What if the number of real, deep experiences open to man
is actually small? Or, more accurately put, what if the number of resonances,
of ways that seemingly varied experiences strike the human subconscious and set
up answering echoes so that experience becomes meaningful, is small? And,
furthermore, what if the multiplicity of presentations of these experiences,
the endless boy-meets-then-loses-girl books and plays and poems from Romeo and Juliet
to True Romances,
were valued only because
the isolated individual writer had no way to come closer to a complete
rendering of what that complete archetypal ideal would feel like within the
human brain?
It
was Plato who wrote that man stares eternally at a cave wall, with his back to
reality. What we see, what we call reality,
is only shadows cast on that wall, fire-lit shadows from the actual reality
behind us. The shadows dance and nod and flit, some much sharper than others,
as some books and plays and poems are sharper, closer to the bone. And
sometimes these authors' made-up lies about the same experience seem to cancel
each other out—as shadows must if we view them from different angles.
Romanticism. Naturalism. Realism. Epic
heroism. Escapism. All our literature has, until now, been cast from a
flickering fire—the imperfect glow of one artist's mind, one artist's
fragmented perceptions of those archetypal experiences that make up human
reality within the brain. The resuits have been fitfuUy
brilliant, fitfully dim. Even Shakespeare is conceded to have shadowy, murky
patches, though the very gloom may cast the comforting shades of ambiguity around
his harsher truths and thus render them the more acceptable. But if a way
could be found to build that fire higher, to build it to a steady brilliant
heat that casts ever more steady and brilliant shadows, eventually those
shadows will merge and overlap until they stand as sharply etched as the
original, a virtual copy of the reality, unmistakable and complete. What has
done so, of course, is the technology of the composing-audience, that bringing
together of many minds to cast light from all angles on an experience, until
the fragmented shadows from each overlap and are again whole, and all the
racial and archetypal responses are cast cleanly on that cave wall, in their
one universal form.
How many such forms exist buried in the human
mind? We don't yet know, but if the virtual congruence of Greta and Floor of Heaven
is any indication, the
number may be more sharply limited than we formerly thought. Or wished.
What this posits about the definitive
pinnacles of art is . . .
" 'Fragmented
shadows' is lousy," I said,
too loudly.
"What?" Garber said.
" 'Fragmented shadows.' On the fourth
page. It's a lousy image. You can't fragment a
shadow. It's a mixed metaphor.
Or something."
"I'll tell him you said so."
I knelt on
the floor
next to his chair and
put my
arms around him. "We've got lots
of time,
though, Garber. It's not as though
G-M Press
will be obsolete tomorrow. Finding
these archetypal works, or whatever,
will take time. Years."
"Yes."
"Any anyway, now
that I think about it,
Jameson's talking about the masterpieces,
the heights
of experience.
All this
probably won't even apply
to us
at all!
We'll just keep on as
we always
have, turning out entertainment for children!"
"Yes."
"We won't really
be that
affected at all. Kids will
always need variety, even if it's
'fragmented.' They don't care. It's
not as though G-M ever expected to produce
a masterpiece,
for chrissake."
Garber didn't
answer.
"But maybe
we just
will, anyway!" I said, and
heard my own desperate brightness, and tried not to
wonder what Gar-ber's private dreams
as a
publisher had been. "And, in any case, there's lots
of time!"
He looked at
me steadily.
The jolly
elf was
gone, the scatterbrained enthusiast was gone, the casual
smiling fatalist was gone. He was
the Garber
who had
come to see me in
the sanitarium, the Garber
who'd taken me to boarding
school on the train, the Garber
who'd stripped me of all
my old
destructive defenses, and so also
stripped himself.
"I don't
have lots of time, Mary."
I didn't say
anything to that. There wasn't
anything to say.
The shoulder of
his jumpsuit
felt rough against my cheek.
I kept my arms around him,
and we
watched the pickets walking below in
the rain.
A bus
went by, and three prohibitively
expensive taxis, and pair of
kids who probably should have been in school. They
wore yellow rainsuits and walked
through every puddle, splashing
and stamping.
From what I could see at
this distance, they never looked
at the
pickets at all. But from this
distance, I couldn't see much.
Garber stood up,
shook his head vigorously from side to side, and
grinned.
"So what's this
about more deathless prose from
the pen
of IdaTidwell?"
I got to
my feet.
"You won't believe it, Garber;
you just
won't believe it. It's
for this
incredibly sappy proposal—"
I managed to
remove the manuscripts of both
Greta and Floor of Heaven from the
desk without actually looking at sither of
them. Then those of us
who were
not scaling
the definitive
pinnacles of art went back
to work.
"Well, I hope you're
satisfied," Susan said,
before I had closed the apartment
door. "I just hope you're
satisfied. " "And it's
nice to see you, too,"
I said
wearily. "Mother—"
"Look, do you
think I could at least
get my
coat off before you start in,
Susan? At least?"
She folded her
arms and waited, boulder silence
under downy brows. Her shoulders were
trembling. The sofa overflowed with crumpled paper, her
recorder, cassettes, books, and tissues. I
hung up my coat very
slowly.
"All right,
Susan. What is it?"
"Mr. Blake is
back. He's back,
and he
saw my
D that
substitute gave me on my
oral history project, and he
said I could do it over
to raise
my grade.
Only my grade won't raise, because I know it
won't be any different this
time; I still don't know enough
stuff to do it right,
and I'll
just end up with two D's,
and it'll
junk my whole quarter's grade!
I hope you're satisfied!"
She scowled horribly,
and I
saw the
insane effort not to cry
in front of me,
the enemy.
Had grades
mattered so much to me, at
ten? Had the handsome Mr.
Blakes? No, of course not; both had been lost
in bigger
nightmares. But Susan was not me.
"You don't care.
You just
don't care," she said.
"Lya's mother told her
heaps. Cassettes and
cassettes worth!"
Not me, and
not in
my version
of pain.
But she
was in
pain, however trivial it
might look to me. What is artfor? Gar-ber had asked,
and I
had thought
I'd known
the answer:
to transform and justify pain. If
we can.
But not
all of
us can.
What if the alchemy
is missing?
"Mr. Blake looked
at me
like he was so surprised,
and so
disappointed in me. And
he asked
me what
happened because I never get
D's, and I started to
cry. ..."
What is
art for?
To order
human experience, to reach toward
some ultimate expression of what
we are.
And if
that ultimate expression has already
been reached?
". . .all
the other
kids looking at me bawling,
and Mr.
Blake just standing .
. ."
So it's been
reached. What then? Or, rather,
what before—long
before, when
pain was the daily expectation,
and language too crude for the
transformation to beauty.
The base of Jameson's pinnacle, before
the long
climb to the dizzying top.
When shadows on cave walls
was not
a metaphor,
but the real thing,
flickering with hidden menace all
night long. All the way back.
". . .so
embarrassed I wanted to die,
and you
just treat me like a child
anyway, and—"
All the
way back.
"Susan, honey—no,
I know
you don't
like to be called 'honey'—Susan, then—Susan, come here. Sit down.
No, there on the sofa—sit next
to me.
Listen. I know you're not
a child anymore, even if you
... I
know it. You're old enough
to ... I know. I'll help
you with
your history project. Sit down."
Susan glared at
me, eyes
mutinous through a sheen of
tears, but she sat.
"Wait right here,
Susan. I have to get
something, something I want you
to see,
want you to read. I
have to get—"
I remembered the key flushed down
the toilet.
What I would have to get
was a
crowbar. Pry open the desk
drawer, or see if I could
break the lock—but that part
could wait, after all. The
written manuscript could come later,
had always
come later. Susan would
have to read it, yes,
it would
make it easier for her to
understand if she read it,
easier to see where I had
changed things, reaching for .
. .
But later.
All the
way back.
I drew
a deep
breath.
"Listen, Susan. I'm
going to tell you something
that happened to me, when
I was
your age. It's a part
of our
family.
It happened.
Listen.
"Let me
tell you a story. .
. ."
Science fiction has
a long
tradition offascinating stories about "alternative
time-streams, " or worlds in
which events small or large
changed the course of history. Methods
of visiting
or perceiving
these worlds have varied greatly. In
"The Gemsback Continuum, " William
Gibson suggests that it
might be accomplished by the
increased concentration of psychological
fixation. His alternative world is
a peculiar
one, but one that you're likely
to find
oddly familiar.
This story
if William
Gibson's second sale, the first
having been to the semiprofessional magazine UnEarth;
subsequently he's
sold stories to New Worlds, Omni, and (in collaboration with John Shirley)
Shadows.
Born in
the United
States, he now lives in
Canada with his wife and one
child.
THE GERNSBACK CONTINUUM
William Gibson
Mercifully,
the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode. When I do still
catch the odd glimpse, it's peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome,
confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was that flying-wing
liner over San Francisco last week, but it was almost translucent. And the
shark-fin roadsters have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreedy avoid unfolding
themselves into the gleaming eighty-lane monsters I was forced to drive last
month in my rented Toyota. And I know that none of it will follow me to New
York; my vision is narrowing to a single wavelength of probability. I've worked
hard for that. Television helped a lot.
I
suppose it started in London, in that bogus Greek taverna in Battersea Park
Road, with lunch on Cohen's corporate tab. Dead steam-table food and it took
them thirty minutes to find an ice bucket for the retsina. Cohen works for
Barris-Watford, who publish big, trendy "trade" paperbacks: illustrated
histories of the neon sign, the pinball machine, the
windup toys of Occupied Japan.
I'd gone
over to shoot a series of
shoe ads; California girls with
tanned legs and frisky day-glow jogging
shoes had capered for me
down the escalators of St. John's
Wood and across the platforms
of Tooting Bee. A lean and
hungry young agency had decided
that the mystery of
London Transport would sell waffle-tread
nylon runners. They decide;
I shoot.
And Cohen,
whom I knew vaguely from the
old days
in New
York, had invited me to lunch
the day
before I was due out
of Heathrow.
He brought along a very fashionably
dressed young woman named Dialta Downes,
who was
virtually chinless and evi-dendy a
noted pop art historian. In retrospect, I see
her walking
in beside
Cohen under a floating neon
sign that flashes THIS WAY LIES
MADNESS in huge sans-serif capitals.
Cohen introduced us and explained that
Dialta was the prime mover behind
the latest
Barris-Watford project, an
illustrated history of what she
called "American Streamlined
Modern." Cohen called it
"raygun Gothic." Their working tide was The
Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was.
There's a British
obsession with the more baroque
elements of American pop culture,
something like the weird cowboys-and-Indians fetish of
the West
Germans or the aberrant French
hunger for old Jerry Lewis
films. In Dialta Downes this manifested
itself in a mania for
a uniquely
American form of architecture
that most Americans are scarcely aware of. At first
I wasn't
sure what she was talking
about, but gradually it
began to dawn on me.
I found
myself remembering Sunday morning
television in the fifties.
Sometimes they'd run
old eroded
newsreels as filler on the
local station. You'd sit
there with a peanut butter
sandwich and a glass of milk,
and a
static-ridden Hollywood baritone would
tell you that there was
A Flying
Car in
Your Future. And three Detroit engineers
would putter around with this
big old Nash with
wings, and you'd see it
rumbling furiously down some deserted Michigan
runway. You never actually saw it
take off, but if flew
away to Dialta Downes's never-never
land, true home of a
generation of completely uninhibited technophiles. She was talking
about those odds and ends
of "futuristic" thirties and
forties architecture you pass daily
in American cities without
noticing: the movie marquees ribbed to radiate some mysterious
energy, the dime stores faced with fluted aluminum, the
chrome-tube chairs gathering dust in
the lobbies
of transient
hotels. She saw these things as segments of a
dream world, abandoned in the
uncaring present; she wanted
me to
photograph them for her.
The thirties had
seen the first generation of American industrial designers; until the thirties,
all pencil
sharpeners had looked like pencil sharpeners—your
basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with
a curlicue
of decorative
trim. After the advent of the
designers, some pencil sharpeners looked as though they'd been
put together
in wind
tunnels. For the most part, the
change was only skin deep;
under the streamlined chrome shell,
you'd find the same Victorian
mechanism. Which made a certain
kind of sense, because the
most successful American designers
had been
recruited from the ranks of Broadway
theatre designers. It was all
a stage
set, a series of elaborate props
for playing
at living
in the
future.
Over coffee, Cohen
produced a fat manila envelope
full of glossies. I saw the
winged statues that guard the
Hoover Dam, forty-foot concrete hood ornaments
leaning steadfastly into an imaginary hurricane.
I saw
a dozen
shots of Frank Lloyd Wright's Johnson's
Wax Building,
juxtaposed with the covers of old
Amazing Stories pulps, by
an artist
named Frank R. Paul; the employees
of Johnson's
Wax must
have felt as though they were
walking into one of Paul's
spray-paint pulp Utopias.
Wright's building
looked as though it had
been designed for people
who wore
white togas and lucite sandals. I hesitated over one
sketch of a particularly grandiose prop-driven airliner, all
wing, like a fat symmetrical
boomerang with windows in
unlikely places. Labeled arrows indicated the
locations of the grand ballroom
and two
squash courts. It was
dated 1936.
"This thing couldn't
have flown . . .
?" I looked at Dialta Downes.
"Oh, no, quite
impossible, even with the twelve
giant .props; but they loved the
look, don't you see? New
York to London in less than
two days,
first-class dining rooms, private cabins,
sun decks,
dancing to jazz in the
evening . . . The designers
were populists, you see; they
were trying to give the public
what it wanted. What the
public wanted was the future."
I'd been
in Burbank
for three
days, trying to suffuse a
really dull-looking rocker with
charisma, when I got the
package from Cohen. It
is possible
to photograph
what isn't there; it's damned hard
to do,
and consequently
a very
marketable talent. While I'm not
bad at
it, I'm
not exacdy
the best, either, and this poor
guy strained
my Nikon's
credibility. I got out, depressed
because I do like to
do a
good job, but not totally depressed,
because I did make sure
I'd gotten
the check for the
job, and I decided to
restore myself with the sublime artiness of the Barris-Watford
assignment. Cohen had sent me some
books on thirties design, more
photos of streamlined buildings,
and a
list of Dialta Downes's fifty
favorite examples of the style
in California.
Architectural photography can involve a lot
of waiting;
the building becomes a kind of
sundial, while you wait for
a shadow to crawl away from
a detail
you want,'or
for the
mass and balance of the structure
to reveal
itself in a certain way.
While I was waiting,
I thought
myself into Dialta Downes's America. When I isolated a
few of
the factory
buildings on the ground glass of
the Hasselblad,
they came across with a
kind of sinister totalitarian
dignity, like the stadiums Albert
Speer built for Hitler.
But the
rest of it was relentlessly
tacky: ephemeral stuff extruded
by the
collective American subconscious of the
thirties, tending mosdy to survive
along depressing strips lined with
dusty motels, mattress wholesalers, and small used-car lots. I
went for the gas stations
in a
big way.
During the high
point of the Downes Age,
they put Ming the Merciless in
charge of designing California gas stations. Favoring the architecture
of his
native Mongo, he cruised up
and down the cqast
erecting ray gun emplacements in white stucco. Lots of
them featured superfluous central towers
ringed with those strange
radiator-flanges that were
a signature
motif of the style, and
made them look as though
they might generate potent bursts of
raw technological
enthusiasm, if you could only
find the switch that turned
them on. I shot one in
San Jose
an hour
before the bulldozers arrived and drove right through the
structural truth of plaster and
lathing and cheap concrete.
"Think of it,"
Dialta Downes had said, "as
a kind
of alternate
America: a 1980 that never
happened. An architecture of broken
dreams.''
And that was
my frame
of mind
as I
made the stations of her convoluted
socioarchitectural cross in
my red
Toyota —as I gradually tuned
in to
her image
of a
shadowy Amer-ica-that-wasn't, of
Coca-Cola plants like beached submarines,
and fifth-run
movie houses like the temples
of some
lost sect that had
worshiped blue mirrors and geometry.
And as I moved among these
secret ruins, I found myself
wondering what the inhabitants of that lost future
would think of the world I
lived in. The thirties dreamed
white marble and slipstream chrome, immortal
crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the
covers of the Gernsback pulps
had fallen on London in the
dead of night, screaming. After the war, everyone had
a car—no wings
for it—and the
promised superhighway to drive
it down,
so that
the sky
itself darkened, and the fumes
ate the
marble and pitted the miracle
crystal. . . .
And one day,
on the
outskirts of Bolinas, when I
was setting
up to
shoot a particularly lavish example
of Ming's
martial architecture, I penetrated a fine membrane, a
membrane of probability. . . .
Ever so
gently, I went over the
Edge—
And looked up
to see
a twelve-engined
thing like a bloated boomerang, all wing, thrumming its
way east
with an elephantine grace, so
low that
I could
count the rivets in its
dull silver skin, and hear—maybe—the echo of jazz.
I took
it to
Kihn.
Merv Kihn, free-lance
journalist with an extensive line
in Texas pterodactyls, redneck UFO contactées,
bush-league
Loch Ness monsters,
and the
Top Ten
conspiracy theories in the loonier reaches
of the
American mass mind.
"It's good," said Kihn, polishing his
yellow Polaroid shooting glasses
on the
hem of
his Hawaiian
shirt, "but it's not mental; lacks the true quill."
"But I saw
it, Mervyn."
We were
seated poolside in brilliant Arizona sunlight. He was
in Tucson
waiting for a group of retired
Las Vegas
civil servants whose leader received
messages from Them on
her microwave
oven. I'd driven all night and
was feeling
it.
"Of course you
did. Of course you saw
it. You've
read my stuff; haven't you grasped
my blanket
solution to the UFO problem? It's simple, plain and
country simple: people"—he
settled the glasses carefully
on his
long hawk nose and fixed
me with his best
basilisk glare—"see . .
. things.
People see these things. Nothing's there,
but people
see them anyway. Because they need
to, probably.
You've read Jung, you should know the score. ...
In your
case, it's so obvious: you admit you were thinking
about this crackpot architecture, having fantasies. . .
. Look,
I'm sure
you've taken your share of drugs,
right? How many people survived
the sixties in California without having
the odd
hallucination? All those nights
when you discovered that whole
armies of Disney technicians had been
employed to weave animated holograms of Egyptian heiroglyphs into the fabric of
your
jeans, say, or the times when—"
"But it wasn't
like that."
"Of course not.
It wasn't
like that at all; it
was 'in
a setting
of clear reality,' right?
Everything normal, and then there's
the monster, the mandala,
the neon
cigar. In your case, a
giant Tom Swift airplane.
It happens
all the
time. You aren't
even crazy. You know
that, don't you?" He fished
a beer
out of the battered foam cooler
beside his deck chair.
"Last week I
was in
Virginia. Grayson County. I interviewed
a sixteen-year-old
girl who'd been assaulted by
a bar hade."
"A what?"
"A bear head.
The severed
head of a bear. This
bar hade, see, was
floating around on its own
little flying saucer, looked kind of like the hubcaps
on cousin
Wayne's vintage Caddy. Had red, glowing
eyes like two cigar stubs
and telescoping
chrome antennas poking up
behind its ears." He burped.
"It assaulted
her? How?"
"You don't want
to know;
you're obviously impressionable.
'It was
cold' "—he lapsed into
his bad
Southern accent—" 'and metallic'
It made
electronic noises. Now that is the
real thing, the straight goods
from the mass unconscious, friend; that little girl
is a
witch. There's just no place
for her to function
in this
society. She'd have seen the
Devil, if she hadn't been brought
up on
'The Bionic Man' and all
those 'Star Trek' reruns.
She is
clued into the main vein.
And she knows that
it happened
to her.
I got
out ten
minutes before the heavy
UFO boys
showed up with polygraph. ' '
I must have
looked pained, because he set
his beer
down carefully beside the
cooler and sat up.
"If you want
a classier
explanation, I'd say you saw
a se-miotic
ghost. All these contactée stories, for instance, are framed in a
kind of sci-fi imagery that
permeates our culture. I could buy
aliens, but not aliens that
look like fifties' comic art. They're semiotic phantoms, bits
of deep
cultural imagery that have split
off and
taken on a life of
their own, like the Jules Verne
airships that those old Kansas
farmers were always seeing. But you
saw a
different kind of ghost, that's
all. That plane was
part of the mass unconscious,
once. You picked up on that,
somehow. The important thing is
not to
worry about it."
I did
worry about it, though.
Kihn combed
his thinning
blond hair and went off
to hear
what They had had
to say
over the radar range lately,
and I
drew the curtains in
my room
and lay
down in air-conditioned darkness to
worry about it. I was
still worrying about it when I
woke up. Kihn had left
a note
on my
door; he was flying up north
in a
chartered plane to check out
a cattle-mutilation
rumor ("muties," he
called them; another of his
journalistic specialties).
I had a
meal, showered, took a crumbling
diet pill that had been kicking
around in the bottom of
my shaving
kit for
three years, and headed back to
Los Angeles.
The speed limited
my vision
to the
tunnel of the Toyota's headlights. The body
could drive, I told myself,
while the mind maintained. Maintained and stayed away from
the weird peripheral window dressing of
amphetamine and exhaustion, the spectral,
luminous vegetation that grows out
of the corners of the mind's
eye along
late-night highways. But the mind had
its own
ideas, and Kihn's opinion of
what I was already thinking of
as my
"sighting" ratded endlessly
through my head in
a tight,
lopsided orbit. Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream,
whirling past in the wind
of my passage. Somehow this feedback-loop
aggravated the diet pill, and the
speed-vegetation along the
road began to assume the
colors of infrared satellite images,
glowing shreds blown apart in the
Toyota's slipstream.
I pulled over,
then, and a half-dozen aluminum beer cans winked good-night as I killed
the headlights.
I wondered
what time it was
in London,
and tried
to imagine
Dialta Downes having breakfast in her
Hampstead flat, surrounded by streamlined chrome figurines and books
on American
cul-
Desert nights
in that
country are enormous; the moon
is closer. I watched the moon
for a
long time and decided that
Kihn was right. The
main thing was not to
worry. All across the continent, daily, people who were
more normal than I'd ever aspired
to be
saw giant
birds, Bigfeet, flying oil refineries;
they kept Kihn busy and
solvent. Why should I be
upset by a glimpse of the
nineteen-thirties pop imagination
loose over Bolinas? I decided to
go to
sleep, with nothing worse to
worry about than rattlesnakes
and cannibal
hippies, safe amid the friendly roadside
garbage of my own familiar
continuum. In the morning I'd
drive down to Nogales and
photograph the old brothels, something
I'd intended
to do
for years. The diet pill had
given up.
The light
woke me, and then the
voices.
The light came
from somewhere behind me and
threw shifting shadows inside
the car.
The voices
were calm, indistinct, male and
female, engaged in conversation.
My neck was
stiff and my eyeballs felt
gritty in their sockets. My
leg had
gone to sleep, pressed against
the steering
wheel. I fumbled for
my glasses
in the
pocket of my workshirt and finally got them on.
Then I looked behind
me and
saw the
city.
The books on
thirties design were in the
trunk; one of them contained sketches
of an
idealized city that drew on
Metropolis and Things to Come, but squared everything,
soaring up through an architect's perfect clouds to Zeppelin
docks and mad neon spires. That
city was a scale model
of the
one that rose behind me. Spire
stood on spire in gleaming
ziggu-rat steps that climbed to
a central
golden temple-tower ringed-with the
crazy radiator flanges of the
Mongo gas stations. You could
hide the Empire State Building
in the
smallest of those towers. Roads
of crystal
soared between the spires, crossed and
recrossed by smooth silver shapes
like beads of running mercury. The
air was
thick with ships: giant wing-liners, little darting silver things
(sometimes one of the quicksilver shapes from the sky
bridges rose gracefully into the air
and flew
up to
join the dance), mile-long blimps,
hovering dragonfly things that
were gyrocopters . . .
I closed my
eyes tight and swung around
in the
seat. When I opened them, I
willed myself to see the
mileage meter, the pale road dust
on the
black plastic dashboard, the overflowing
ashtray.
"Amphetamine psychosis," I said. I opened
my eyes.
The dash was still there, the
dust, the crushed filter tips.
Very carefully, without moving
my head,
I turned
the headlights
on.
And saw
them.
They were blond.
They were standing beside their
car, an aluminum avocado with a
central shark-fin rudder jutting up
from its spine and
smooth black tires like a
child's toy. He had his arm
around her waist and was
gesturing toward the city. They were
both in white: loose clothing,
bare legs, spotless white sun
shoes. Neither of them seemed
aware of the beams of my
headlights. He was saying something
wise and strong, and she was
nodding, and suddenly I was
frightened, frightened in an
entirely different way. Sanity had
ceased to be an issue; I
knew, somehow, that the city
behind me was Tucson—a dream Tucson
thrown up out of the
collective yearning of an
era. That it was real,
entirely real. But the couple in front of me
lived in it, and they
frightened me.
They were the
children of Dialta Downes' '80-that-wasn't;
they were Heirs to
the Dream.
They were white, blond, and
they probably had blue
eyes. They were American. Dialta
had said that the
Future had come to America
first, but had finally passed it
by. But
not here,
in the
heart of the Dream. Here, we'd gone on and
on, in
a dream
logic that knew nothing of
pollution, the finite bounds of
fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to
lose. They were smug, happy,
and utterly
content with themselves and their
world. And in the Dream, it was their world.
Behind me,
the illuminated
city: searchlights swept the sky
for the sheer joy
of it.
I imagined
them thronging the plazas of white
marble, orderly and alert, their
bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their floodlit avenues
and silver
cars.
It had all
the sinister
fruitiness of Hider Youth propaganda.
I put the
car in
gear and drove forward slowly,
until the bumper was within three
feet of them. They still
hadn't seen me. I rolled the
window down and listened to
what the man was saying. His
words were bright and hollow
as the
pitch in some Chamber of Commerce
brochure, and I knew that
he believed in them absolutely.
"John," I heard
the woman
say, "we've forgotten to take
our food pills.'' She
clicked two bright wafers from
a thing
on her belt and passed one
to him.
I backed
onto the highway and headed for
Los Angeles,
wincing and shaking my head.
I phoned
Kihn from a gas station.
A new
one, in bad Spanish Modern. He
was back
from his expedition and didn't seem to mind the
call.
"Yeah, that is
a weird
one. Did you try to
get any
pictures? Not that they ever
come out, but it adds
an interesting
frisson
to your
story, not having the pictures
turn out. ..."
But what
should I do?
"Watch lots of
television, particularly game shows and
soaps. Go to porn
movies. Ever see Nazi Love Motel? They've got it
on cable,
here. Really awful. Just what
you need."
What was
he talking
about?
"Quit yelling and
listen to me. I'm letting
you in
on a
trade secret: really bad
media can exorcise your semiotic
ghosts. If it keeps
the saucer
people off my back, it
can keep
these Art Deco futuroids
off yours.
Try it.
What have you got to lose?"
Then he
begged off, pleading an early-morning
date with the Elect. "The
who?"
"These oldsters
from Vegas; the ones with
the microwaves."
I considered
putting a collect call through
to London,
getting Cohen at Barris-Watford
and telling
him his
photographer was checking out for
a protracted
season in the Twilight Zone. In
the end,
I let
a machine
mix me
a really
impossible cup of black
coffee and climbed back into
the Toyota for the haul to
Los Angeles.
Los Angeles
was a
bad idea,
and I
spent two weeks there. It was
prime Downes country; too much
of the
Dream there, and too many fragments
of the
Dream waiting to snare me.
I nearly wrecked the car on
a stretch
of overpass
near Disneyland, when the road
fanned out like an origami
trick and left me swerving through
a dozen
minilanes of whizzing chrome teardrops with shark fins. Even
worse, Hollywood was full of
people who looked too
much like the couple I'd
seen in Arizona. I hired an
Italian director who was making
ends meet doing darkroom work and
installing patio decks around swimming pools until his ship
came in; he made prints
of all
the negatives I'd accumulated,
on the
Downes job. I didn't want to look at the
stuff myself. It didn't seem
to bother
Leonardo, though, and when
he was
finished I checked the prints, riffling through them like
a deck
of cards,
sealed them up, and sent them
air freight
to London.
Then I took a taxi
to a theater that was showing
Nazi Love Motel, and kept
my eyes
shut all the way.
Cohen's congratulatory wire was forwarded to
me in
San Francisco a week later. Dialta
had loved
the pictures.
He admired
the way
I'd "really
gotten into it," and looked
forward to working with me
again. That afternoon I spotted
a flying wing over Castro Street,
but there
was something
tenuous about it, as though
it were
only half there. I rushed
into the nearest newsstand and gathered
up as
much as I could find on the petroleum crisis
and the
nuclear energy hazard. I'd just decided
to buy
a plane
ticket for New York.
"Hell of
a world
we live
in, huh?"
The proprietor
was a
thin black man with
bad teeth
and an
obvious wig. I nodded, Fishing in my jeans for
change, anxious to find a
park bench where I could submerge
myself in hard evidence of
the human
near-dystopia we live in. "But
it could
be worse,
huh?"
"That's right," I said, "of even
worse, it could be perfect."
He watched me
as I
headed down the street with
my little
bundle of condensed catastrophe.
The proliferation of technology brings with
it many
threats to the balance of
nature, as ecologists and environmentalists
have warned us for decades. Twenty-five years ago, they
had to
contend with the lunatic-fringe reputation of those people
who warned
darkly that unusually hot or rainy
summers were caused by nuclear
tests, but by now we
have enough evidence to know that
even such "minor" developments as the widespread use of
aerosol sprays have effected great
damage to Earth's atmosphere. What else
may be
happening even now to cause,
for instance,
serious changes in worldwide weather
patterns?
It isn't
necessary to postulate a Second
Deluge that would flood the
whole world. As Kim
Stanley Robinson shows us in
this evocative and moving story, the
loss of a single city,
famed for its beauty and
history, would be catastrophe
enough.
Kim Stanley
Robinson lives in Southern California.
An alumnus
of the Clarion SF Writers' Conference,
he had
sold stories to such publications
as Orbit and Clarion.
VENICE DROWNED
Kim Stanley Robinson
By the
time Carlo Tafur struggled out
of sleep,
the baby
was squalling, the teapot
whistled, the smell of stove
smoke filled the air. Wavelets slapped
the walls
of the
floor below. It was just dawn.
Reluctantly he untangled himself from
the bedsheets and got up. He
padded through the other room
of his home, ignoring his wife
and child,
and walked
out the
door onto the roof.
Venice looked best
at dawn,
Carlo thought as he pissed
into the canal. In
the dim
mauve light it was possible
to imagine that the city was
just as it always had
been, that hordes of visitors would
come flooding down the Grand
Canal on this fine summer
morning. . . . Of
course, one had to ignore the
patchwork constructions built on the
roofs of the neighborhood to indulge
the fancy.
Around the church—San
Giacomo du Rialto—all
the buildings
had even
their top floors awash, and so
it had
been necessary to break up
the tile
roofs, and erect shacks
on the
roofbeams made of materials fished up from below: wood,
brick, lath, stone, metal, glass.
Carlo's home was one
of these
shacks, made of a crazy
combination of wood beams, stained
glass from San Giacometta, and drainpipes beaten flat. He
looked back at it and
sighed. It was best to look
off over
the Rialto,
where the red sun blazed over the bulbous domes
of San
Marco.
"You have to
meet those Japanese today," Carlo's wife Luisa said from
inside.
"I know."
Visitors still came to Venice,
that was certain.
"And don't go
insulting them and rowing them
without your pay," she went on,
her voice
sounding clearly out of the
doorway, "like you did
with those Hungarians. It really
doesn't matter what they
take from under the water,
you know. That's the past. That
old stuff
isn't doing anyone any good under
there, anyway." ■
"Shut up,"
he said
wearily. "I know."
"I have to
buy stovewood
and vegetables
and toilet
paper and socks for the baby,"
she said.
"The Japanese are the best customers
you've got; you'd better treat
them well."
Carlo reentered the
shack and walked into the
bedroom to dress. Between putting on
one boot
and the
next he stopped to smoke a
cigarette, the last one in
the house.
While smoking he stared at
his pile
of books
on the
floor, his library as Luisa sardonically
called the collection; all books
about Venice. They were tattered,
dog-eared, mildewed, so warped by
the damp that none
of them
would close properly, and each
moldy page was as
wavy as the Lagoon on
a windy
day. They were a miserable sight,
and Carlo
gave the closest stack a
light kick with his
cold boot as he returned
to the
other room.
"I'm off,"
he said,
giving his baby and then
Luisa a kiss. "I'll be back
late; they want to go
to Torcello."
"What could
they want up there?"
He shrugged.
"Maybe just to see it."
He ducked
out the
door.
Below the roof
was a
small square where the boats
of the
neighborhood were moored. Carlo
slipped off the tile onto
the narrow floating dock
he and
the neighbors
had built,
and crossed to his boat, a
wide-beamed sailboat with a canvas
deck. He stepped in,
unmoored it; and rowed out
of the
square onto the Grand
Canal.
Once on the
Grand Canal he tipped the
oars out of the water and
let the
boat drift downstream. The big
canal had always been the natural
course of the channel through
the mudflats of the Lagoon; for
a while
it had
been tamed, but now it was
a river
again, its banks made of
tile rooftops and stone palaces, with
hundreds of tributaries flowing into
it. Men were working on roof-houses
in the
early morning light; those who knew
Carlo waved, hammers or rope
in hand,
and shouted hello. Carlo wiggled an
oar perfunctorily
before he was swept past. It
was foolish
to build
so close
to the
Grand Canal, which now had the
strength to knock the old
structures down, and often did;
but that
was their
business. In Venice they all were
fools, if one thought about
it.
Then he was
in the
Basin of San Marco, and
he rowed
through the Piazetta beside
the Doge's
Palace, which was still imposing at
two stories
high, to the Piazza. Traffic
was heavy as usual; it was
the only
place in Venice that still
had the crowds of old, and
Carlo enjoyed it for that
reason, though he shouted
curses as loudly as anyone
when gondolas streaked in front of
him. He jockeyed his way
to the
Basilica window and rowed
in.
Under the brilliant
blue and gold of the
domes it was noisy. Most of
the water
in the
rooms had been covered with
a floating dock; Carlo
moored his boat to it,
heaved his four scuba tanks on,
and clambered
up after
them. Carrying two tanks in each
hand he crossed the dock,
on which
the fish
market was in full
swing. Displayed for sale were
flats of mullet, lagoon sharks,
tunny, skates, flatfish, and little
red fish
packed in crates head
up, looking
appalled at their situation.
Clams were piled
in trays,
their shells gleaming in the
shaft of sunlight from the east
window; men and women pulled
live crabs out of holes in
the dock,
risking fingers in the crab-jammed
traps below; octopuses inked their
buckets of water, sponges oozed foam;
beyond them were trays of
fish parts, steaks, joints, guts, glistening
roe, beady-eyed heads; a slippery
field of pink and white
and yellow
and red
and blue.
In the middle
of the
fish market Ludovico Salerno, one
of Carlo's best friends,
had his
stalls of scuba gear. Carlo's
two Japanese customers were
there. He greeted them and
handed his tanks to
Salerno, who began refilling them
from his machine. They conversed in
quick, slangy Italian while the tanks
filled; Carlo paid him and
led the
Japanese back to his boat. They
got in
and stowed
their backpacks under the canvas decking; Carlo joined them
with the scuba gear.
"We are ready
to voyage
at Torcello?"
one asked,
and the
other smiled and repeated
the question.
Their names were Hamada and Taku;
they had made a few
jokes concerning the latter name's similarity
to Carlo's
own, but Taku was the
one with less Italian,
so the
sallies hadn't gone on for
long. They had hired him four
days before, at Salerno's stall.
"Yes," Carlo said.
He rowed
out of
the Piazza
and up
back canals past Campo
San Maria
Formosa, which was nearly as crowded
as the
Piazza. Beyond that the canals
were empty, and only an occasional
roof-house marred the look of
flooded tranquility.
"That part of
city Venice here not many
people live," Hamada observed.
"Not houses on houses."
"That's true," Carlo replied. As he
rowed past San Zanipolo and the
hospital, he explained, "It's too close to the
hospital here, where many
diseases were contained. Sicknesses, you know."
"Ah, the hospital!"
Hamada nodded, as did Taku.
"We have swam hospital in our
Venice voyage previous to that
one here. Salvage many
fine statues from lowest rooms."
"Stone lions,"
Taku added. "Many stone lions
with wings in room below Twenty-forty
waterline."
"Is that right,"
Carlo said. Stone lions, he
thought, set up in the entry
way of
some expensive Japanese businessman's home around the vvorld. . . .
He tried
to divert
his thoughts
by watching the brilliandy
healthy, masklike faces of his
two passengers as they
laughed over their reminiscences.
Then they were
over the Fondamente Nuova, the
northern limit of the city,
and on
the Lagoon.
There was a small swell from the north. Carlo
rowed out a way and
then stepped forward to raise the
boat's single sail. The wind
was from the east, so they
would make good time north
to Torcello. Behind them Venice looked
beautiful in the morning light,
as if
they were miles away, and
a watery
horizon blocked their full
view of it.
The two Japanese
had stopped
talking and were looking over the side. They were
over the cemetery of San
Michele, Carlo realized. Below
them lay the island that
had been
the city's chief cemetery for centuries;
they sailed over a field
of tombs, mausoleums, gravestones,
obelisks that at low tide
could be a navigational
hazard. . . . Just
enough of the bizarre white
blocks could be seen to
convince one that they were indeed
the result
of the
architectural thinking of fishes. Carlo crossed himself quickly to
impress his customers and sat back
down at the tiller. He
pulled the sail tight and
they heeled over slightly, slapped into
the waves.
In no more
than twenty minutes they were
east of Mu-rano, skirting its
edge. Murano, like Venice an
island city crossed with canals, had
been a quaint little town
before the flood. But it didn't
have as many tall buildings
as Venice,
and it was said that an
underwater river had undercut its
islands; in any case, it
was a
wreck. The two Japanese chattered
with excitement.
"Can we
visit to that city here,
Carlo?" asked Hamada.
"It's too dangerous,"
Carlo answered. "Buildings
have fallen into the canals."
They nodded,
smiling. "Are people live here?"
Taku asked.
"A few, yes.
They live in the highest
buildings on the floors still above
water, and work in Venice.
That way they avoid having to
build a roof-house in the
city."
The faces of
his two
companions expressed incomprehension.
"They avoid the
housing shortage in Venice," Carlo said. "There's
a certain
housing shortage in Venice, as
you may
have noticed." His listeners
caught the joke this time
and laughed uproariously.
"Could live on
floors below if owning scuba
such as that here," Hamada said,
gesturing at Carlo's equipment.
"Yes," he replied.
"Or we could grow gills."
He waved
his fingers at his
neck and bugged his eyes
out to
indicate gills. The Japanese
loved it.
Past Murano the
Lagoon was clear for a
few miles,
a sunbeaten blue covered with choppy
waves. The boat tipped up and
down, the wind tugged at
the sail
cord in Carlo's hand. He began
to enjoy
himself. "Storm coming,"
he volunteered
to the
others and pointed at the
black line over the horizon to the north. It
was a
common sight; short, violent storms swept over Brenner Pass
from the Austrian Alps, dumping on the Po Valley
and the
Lagoon before dissipating in the Adriatic
. .
. once
a week,
or more,
even in the summer. That
was one
reason the fish market was
held under the domes of San
Marco; everyone had gotten sick
of trading
in the rain.
Even the
Japanese recognized the clouds. "Many
rain fall soon here," Taku said.
Hamada grinned and
said, "Taku and Tafur, weather
prophets no doubt, make
big company!"
They laughed. "Does
he do
this in Japan, too?" Carlo asked.
"Yes indeed,
surely. In Japan rains every
day—Taku says, it rains
tomorrow for surely. Weather prophet!"
After the laughter receded,
Carlo said, "Hasn't all the
rain drowned
some of your cities too?"
"What's that here?"
"Don't you
have some Venices in Japan?"
But they didn't
want to talk about that.
"I don't understand. . .
. No,
no Venice
in Japan,"
Hamada said easily, but neither laughed
as they
had before.
They sailed on. Venice was
out of
sight under the horizon, as
was Murano.
Soon they would reach Burano. Carlo
guided the boat over the
waves and listened to
his companions
converse in their improbable language, or mangle Italian
in a
way that
alternately made him want to
burst with hilarity or bite
the gun-whale
with frustration.
Gradually Burano bounced
over the horizon, the campanile
first, followed by the few
buildings still above water. Murano still had inhabitants, a tiny market, even
a midsummer
festival; Burano was empty. Its
campanile stood at a distinct
angle, like the mast of
a foundered
ship. It had been an
island town, before 2040;
now it
had "canals"
between every rooftop. Carlo disliked the
town intensely and gave it
a wide berth. His companions discussed it quiedy in
Japanese.
A mile beyond
it was
Torello, another island ghost town.
The campanile could be
seen from Burano, tall and
white against the black clouds to
the north.
They approached in silence. Carlo
took down the sail, set
Taku in the bow to
look for snags, and rowed cautiously
to the
edge of town. They moved between rooftops and walls
that stuck up like reefs
or like old foundations out of
the earth.
Many of the roof tiles
and beams had been
taken for use in construction
back in Venice. This happened to
Torcello before; during the Renaissance
it had
been a little rival of
Venice, boasting a population of 20,000, but during
the sixteenth
and seventeenth
centuries it had been
entirely deserted. Builders from Venice
had come looking in
the ruins
for good
marble or a staircase of the right dimensions. . . . Briefly
a tiny
population had returned, to make lace
and host
those tourists who wanted to
be melancholy; but the
waters rose, and Torcello died
for good. Carlo pushed off a
wall with his oar, and
a big
section of it tilted over and
sank. He tried not to
notice.
He rowed them
to the
open patch of water that
had been
the Piazza. Around them
stood a few intact rooftops,
no taller than the mast of
their boat; broken walls of
stone or rounded brick; the shadowy
suggestion of walls just under
water. It was hard
to tell
what the street plan of
the town
would have been. On
one side
of the
Piazza was the cathedral of Santa Maria Ascunta, however,
still holding fast, still supporting
the white
campanile that stood square and
solid, as if over a living
community.
"That here is
the church
we desire
to dive,"
Hamada said.
Carlo nodded. The
amusement he had felt during
the sail
was entirely gone. He
rowed around the Piazza looking
for a
flat spot where they
could stand and put the
scuba gear on. The church outbuildings—it
had been
an extensive
structure—were all underwater.
At one
point the boat's keel scraped the ridge of a
roof. They rowed down the
length of the barnlike nave, looked
in the
high windows: floored with water. No surprise. One of
the small
windows in the side of
the campanile had been
widened with sledgehammers; di-recdy inside
it was
the stone
staircase, and a few steps
up, a
stone floor. They hooked
the boat
to the
wall and moved their gear up
to the
floor. In the dim midday
light the stone of the interior
was pocked
with shadows; it had a
rough-hewn look. The citizens
of Torcello
had built
the campanile
in a
hurry, thinking that the
world would end at the
milennium, the year 1000.
Carlo smiled to think how
much longer they had had than
that. They climbed the steps
of the
staircase, up to the sudden sunlight
of the
bell chamber, to look around;
viewed Burano, Venice in
the distance
... to
the north,
the shallows of the Lagoon, and
the coast
of Italy.
Beyond that the black line of
clouds was like a wall
nearly submerged under the horizon,
but it
was rising;
the storm
would come.
They descended,
put on
the scuba
gear, and flopped into the water
beside the campanile. They were
above the complex of church
buildings, and it was dark;
Carlo slowly led the two Japanese
back into the Piazza and
swam down. The ground was silted,
and Carlo
was careful
not to
step on it. His charges saw
the great
stone chair in the center
of the
Piazza (it had been called
the Throne
of Attila,
Carlo remembered from one of
his moldy
books, and no one had
known why), and waving to each
other they swam to it.
One of
them made ludicrous attempts to stand
on the
bottom and walk around in his
fins; he threw up clouds
of silt.
The other
joined him. They each
sat in
the stone
chair, columns of bubbles rising
from them, and snapped pictures
of each
other with their underwater cameras. The
silt would ruin the shots,
Carlo thought. While they
cavorted, he wondered sourly what they wanted in the
church.
Eventually Hamada
swam up to him and
gestured at the church. Behind the
mask his eyes were excited.
Carlo pumped his fins up and
down slowly and led them
around to the big entrance at
the front.
The doors
were gone. They swam into the
church.
Inside it was
dark, and all three of
them unhooked their big flashlights and turned them on.
Cones of murky water turned to crystal; the beams
swept about. The interior of
the church was undistinguished, the floor
thick with mud. Carlo watched his two customers swim
about and let his flashlight
beam rove the walls.
Some of the underwater windows were still intact, an
odd sight.
Occasionally the beam caught a
column of bubbles, transmuting them to silver.
Quickly enough
the Japanese
went to the picture at
the west end of the nave,
a tile
mosaic. Taku (Carlo guessed) rubbed the slime off the
tiles, vastly improving their color.
They had gone to
the big
one first,
the one
portraying the Crucifixion, the Resurrection of the Dead, and
the Day
of Judgment: a busy mural. Carlo
swam over to have a
better look. But no sooner had
the Japanese
wiped the wall clean than they were off to
the other
end of
the church,
where above the stalls of the
apse was another mosaic. Carlo
followed.
It didn't take
long to rub this one
clean; and when the water had
cleared, the three of them
floated there, their flashlight beams converged on the
picture revealed.
It was the
Teotoca Madonna, the God-bearer. She stood against a dull
gold background, holding the Child
in her
arms, staring out at
the world
with a sad and knowing
gaze. Carlo pumped his legs to
get above
the Japanese,
holding his light steady on the
Madonna's face. She looked as
though she could see all of
the future,
up to
this moment and beyond; all
of her child's short life, all
the terror
and calamity
after that. '. . . There were
mosaic tears on her cheeks.
At the
sight of them Carlo
could barely check tears of
his own
from joining the general wetness on
his face.
He felt
that he had suddenly been transposed
to a
church on the deepest floor
of the ocean; the pressure of
his feelings
threatened to implode him, he could
scarcely hold them off. The
water was freezing, he was
shivering, sending up a thick,
nearly continuous column of bubbles . . . and thé Madonna watched.
With a kick he turned and
swam away. Like startled fish
his two
companions followed him. Carlo
led them
out of
the church
into murky light, then
up to
the surface,
to the
boat and the window casement.
Fins off, Carlo
sat on
the staircase
and dripped.
Taku and Hamada scrambled through the
window and joined him. They conversed
for a
moment in Japanese, clearly excited.
Carlo stared at them
blackly.
Hamada turned to
him. "That here is the
picture we desire," he said.
"The Madonna with child."
"What?" Carlo
cried.
Hamada raised his
eyebrows. "We desire taking home
that here picture, to
Japan."
"But it's impossible!
The picture
is made
of little
tiles stuck to the wall—there's no
way to
get them
off!"
"Italy government
permits," Taku said,
but Hamada
silenced him with a gesture:
"Mosaic, yes. We
use instruments
we take
here—water torch. Archaeology method, you understand. Cut blocks out of wall,
bricks, number them—construct on new
place in Japan. Above water."
He flashed
his pearly
smile.
"You can't
do that,"
Carlo stated, deeply affronted.
"I don't understand?"
Hamada said. But he did:
"Italian government permits us
that."
"This isn't
Italy," Carlo said savagely, and
in his
anger stood up. What good would
a Madonna
do in
Japan, anyway? They weren't even
Christian. "Italy is over there,"
he said, in his excitement mistakenly waving to the
southeast, no doubt confusing his listeners
even more. "This has never
been Italy! This is
Venice! The Republic!"
"I don't understand."
He had
that phrase down pat. "Italian government has giving permit
us."
"Christ," Carlo said. After a disgusted
pause: "Just how long will this
take?"
"Time? We work
that afternoon, tomorrow; place the
bricks here, go hire
Venice barge to carry bricks
to Venice—"
"Stay here overnight?
I'm not
going to stay here overnight,
God damn
it!"
"We bring
sleeping bag for you—"
"No!" Carlo
was furious.
"I'm not staying, you miserable
heathen hyenas—" He pulled
off his
scuba gear. "I don't understand."
Carlo dried off,
got dressed.
"I'll let you keep your
scuba tanks, and I'll be back
for you
tomorrow afternoon, late. Understand?"
"Yes," Hamada said,
staring at him steadily, without
expression. "Bring barge?"
"What?—yes, yes, I'll
bring your barge, you miserable
slime-eating catfish. Vultures ..."
He went
on for
a while,
getting the boat out
of the
window.
"Storm coming!"
Taku said brightly, pointing to
the north.
"To hell
with you!" Carlo said, pushing
off and
beginning to row. "Understand?"
He rowed
out of
Torcello and back into the
Lagoon. Indeed, a storm was
coming; he would have to
hurry. He put up the sail
and pulled
the canvas
decking back until it covered
everything but the seat he
was sitting
on. The
wind was from the north now,
strong but fitful. It pulled
the sail
taut; the boat bucked over the
choppy waves, leaving behind a
wake that was bright
white against the black of
the sky.
The clouds were drawing over the
sky like
a curtain,
covering half of it: half black,
half colorless blue, and the
line of the edge was solid.
It resembled
that first great storm of
2040, Carlo guessed, that had pulled
over Venice like a black
wool blanket and dumped water
for forty
days. And it had never
been the same again, not anywhere
in the
world. . . .
Now he was
beside the wreck of Burano.
Against the black sky he could
see only
the drunken
campanile, and suddenly he realized why
he hated
the sight
of this
abandoned town: it was a vision
of the
Venice to come, a cruel
model of the future. If
the water
level rose even three meters,
Venice would become nothing but a
big Burano.
Even if the water didn't
rise, more people were
leaving Venice every year. .
. .
One day it would be empty.
Once again the sadness he
had felt
looking at the Teotaca
filled him, a sadness become
a bottomless
despair. "God damn it," he
said, staring at the crippled
campanile; but that wasn't enough.
He didn't
know words that were enough. "God
damn it."
Just beyond Burano
the squall
hit. It almost blew the
sail out of his hand; he
had to
hold on with a fierce
clench, tie it to the stern,
tie the
tiller in place, and scramble
over the pitching canvas deck
to lower
the sail,
cursing all the while. He
brought the sail down
to its
last reefing, which left a
handkerchief-sized patch exposed
to the
wind. Even so the boat
yanked over the waves
and the
mast creaked as if it
would tear loose. . . .
The choppy
waves had become whitecaps;
in the screaming
wind their tops were tearing
loose and flying through the air,
white foam in the blackness.
. .
.
Best to head
for Murano
for refuge,
Carlo thought. Then the rain started.
It was
colder than the Lagoon water
and fell
almost horizontally. The wind
was still
picking up; his handkerchief sail was going to
pull the mast out. .
. .
"Jesus," he said. He
got onto
the decking
again, slip up to the
mast, took down the sail with
cold and disobedient fingers. He
crawled back to his
hole in the deck, hanging
on desperately
as the boat yawed. It was
almost broadside to the waves
and hastily he grabbed the tiller
and pulled
it around,
just in time to meet a
large wave stern-on. He shuddered
with relief. Each wave seemed bigger
than the last; they picked
up quickly on the Lagoon. Well,
he thought,
what now? Get out the oars?
No, that
wouldn't do; he had to
keep stern-on to the waves, and besides, he couldn't
row effectively
in this
chop. He had to go where
the waves
were going, he realized; and
if they missed Murano and Venice,
that meant the Adriatic.
As the
waves lifted and dropped him,
he grimly
contemplated the thought. His mast
alone acted like a sail
in a
wind of this force; and the
wind seemed to be blowing
from a bit to the west
of north.
The waves—the
biggest he had ever seen
on the Lagoon, perhaps the biggest
ever on the Lagoon— pushed in about the
same direction as the wind,
naturally. Well, that meant
he would
miss Venice, which was directly
south, maybe even a
touch west of south. Damn,
he thought.
And all because he
had been
angered by those two Japanese
and the Teotaca. What
did he
care what happened to a
sunken mosaic from Torcello?
He had
helped foreigners find and cart off
the one
bronze horse of San Marco
that had fallen . . .
more than one of the
stone lions of Venice, symbol
of the
city . . . the
entire Bridge of Sighs, for
Christ's sake! What had
come over him? Why should
he have
cared about a forgotten mosaic?
Well, he had
done it; and here he
was. No altering it. Each
wave lifted his boat
stern first and slid under
it until
he could
look down in the
trough, if he cared to,
and see
his mast
nearly horizontal, until he
rose over the broken, foaming
crest, each one of
which seemed to want to
break down his little hole in
the decking
and swamp
him—for a second he was in
midair, the tiller free and
useless until he crashed into
the next trough. Every
time at the top he
thought, this wave will catch us,
and so
even though he was wet
and the
wind and rain were cold, the
repeated spurts of fear adrenalin
and his thick wool coat kept
him warm.
A hundred
waves or so served to convince
him that
the next
one would
probably slide under him
as safely
as the
last, and he relaxed a
bit. Nothing to do but wait
it out,
keep the boat exactly stern-on
to the swell. . . and
he would
be all
right. Sure, he thought, he would just ride these
waves across the Adriatic to
Trieste or Rijeka, one of those
two tawdry
towns that had replaced Venice as Queen of the
Adriatic . . . the
princesses of the Adriatic, so to
speak, and two little sluts
they were, too. . .
. Or ride the storm out,
turn around and sail back
in, better
yet. . . .
On the other
hand, the Lido had become
a sort
of reef,
in most places, and waves of
this size would break over
it, capsizing him for sure. And,
to be
realistic, the top of the
Adriatic was wide; just
one mistake
on the
top of
these waves (and he couldn't go
on forever)
and he
would be broached, capsized, and rolled
down to join all the
other Venetians who had ended up
on the
bottom of the Adriatic. And
all because
of that damn Madonna.
Carlo sat crouched in the
stern, adjusting the tiller for
the particulars
of each
wave, ignoring all else in the
howling, black, horizonless chaos of
water and air around him, pleased
in a
grim way that he was
sailing to his death with such
perfect seamanship. But he kept
the Lido
out of mind.
And so he
sailed on, losing track of
time as one does when
there is no spatial
referent. Wave after wave after
wave. A little water collected at
the bottom
of his
boat, and his spirits sank; that was no way
to go,
to have
the boat
sink by degrees under him. .
. .
Then the high-pitched,
airy howl of the wind
was joined
by a low booming, a bass
roar. He looked behind him
in the
direction he was being driven
and saw
a white
line, stretching from left to right;
his heart
jumped, fear exploded through him. This was it. The
Lido, now a barrier reef
tripping the waves. They were smashing
down on it; he could
see white
sheets bouncing skyward and
blowing to nothing. He was
terrifically frightened. It would
have been so much easier
to founder at sea.
But there—among the white breakers, off
to the
right—a gray finger pointing up at
the black—
A campanile.
Carlo was forced to look
back at the wave he
was under, to straighten
the boat;
but when
he looked
back it was still there. A
campanile, standing there like a
dead lighthouse. "Jesus,"
he said
aloud. It looked as if
the waves
were pushing him a couple hundred
meters to the north of
it. As
each wave lifted him
he had
a moment
when the boat was sliding down the face of
the wave
as fast
as it
was moving
under him; during these moments
he shifted
the tiller
a bit
and the boat turned and surfed
across the face, to the
south, until the wave rose up
under him to the crest,
and he
had to
straighten it out. He
repeated the delicate operation time
after time, sometimes nearly broaching
the boat
in his
impatience. But that wouldn't do—just
take as much from each
wave as it will
give you, he thought. And
pray it will add up
to enough.
The Lido got
closer, and it looked as
if he
was directly
upwind of the campanile. It was the one
at the
Lido channel entrance or perhaps
the one
at Pellestrina,
farther south; he had no way
of knowing
and couldn't
have cared less. He was
just happy that his ancestors had
seen fit to construct such
solid bell towers. In between waves
he reached
under the decking and by touch
found his boathook and the
length of rope he carried. It was going to
be a
problem, actually, when he got
to the campanile—it would not do
to pass
it helplessly
by a few meters; on the other hand he couldn't
smash into it and expect to survive either, not in these waves. In fact the
more he considered it the more exact and difficult he realized the approach
would have to be, and fearfully he stopped thinking about it and concentrated
on the waves.
The
last one was the biggest. As the boat slid down its face the face got steeper,
until it seemed they would be swept on by this wave forever. The campanile
loomed ahead, big and black. Around it waves pitched over and broke with sharp,
deadly booms; from behind, Carlo could see the water sucked over the breaks, as
if over short but infinitely broad waterfalls. The noise was tremendous. At the
top of the wave it appeared he could jump in the campanile's top windows—he
got out the boathook, shifted the tiller a touch, took three deep breaths. Amid
the roaring, the wave swept him just past the stone tower, smacking against it
and splashing him; he pulled the tiller over hard, the boat shot into the wake
of the campanile—he stood and swung the boathook over a window casement above
him. It caught, and he held on hard.
He
was in the lee of the tower; broken water rose and dropped under the boat
hissing, but without violence, and he held. One-handed he wrapped the end of
his rope around the sailcord bolt in the stern, tied the other end to the
boathook. The hook held pretty well; he took a risk and reached down to tie the
rope firmly to the bolt. Then another risk: when the boiling soupy water of
another broken wave raised the boat, he leaped off his seat, grabbed the stone
windowsill, which was too thick to get his fingers over—for a moment he hung by
his fingertips. With desperate strength he pulled himself up, reached in with
ooe hand and got a grasp on the inside of the sill, and pulled himself in and
over. The stone floor was about four feet below the window. Quickly he pulled the
boathook in and put it on the floor, and took up the slack in the rope.
He looked out the window. His boat rose and
fell, rose and fell. Well, it
would sink or it wouldn't.
Meanwhile, he was safe. Realizing this
he breathed
deeply, let out a shout.
He remembered shooting past the side
of the
tower, face no more than two
meters from it—getting drenched by
the wave
slapping the front of it—Christ,
he had
done it perfecdy! He couldn't do it again like
that in a million tries.
Triumphant laughs burst out
of him,
short and sharp: "Ha! Ha!
Ha! Jesus
Christ! Wow!"
"Whoooo's theeeerre?" called a high scratchy
voice, floating down the staircase
from the floor above. "Whoooooo's
there? . . ."
Carlo froze. He
stepped lighdy to the base
of the
stone staircase and peered
up; through
the hole
to the
next floor flickered a faint light.
To put
it better,
it was
less dark up there than anywhere
else. More surprised than fearful
(though he was afraid),
Carlo opened his eyes as
wide as he could—
"Whoooooo's theeeeeeerrrrrrrre?
. .
."
Quickly he went
to the
boathook, untied the rope, felt
around on the wet
floor until he found a
block of stone that would serve as anchor for
his boat.
He looked
out the
window: boat still there; on
both sides white breakers crashed
over the Lido. Taking
up the
boathook, Carlo stepped slowly up the
stairs, feeling that after what
he had
been through he could slash any
ghost in the ether to
ribbons.
It was a
candle lantern, flickering in the
disturbed air—a room filled with junk—
"Eeek! Eeek!"
"Jesus!"
"Devil! Death, away!"
A small
black shape rushed at him, brandishing
sharp metal points.
"Jesus!" Carlo repeated, holding the boathook
out to
defend himself. The figure stopped.
"Death comes for
me at
last," it said. It was
an old
woman, he saw, holding
lace needles in each hand.
"Not at
all," Carlo said, feeling his
pulse slow back down.
"Swear
to God, Grandmother, I'm just a sailor, blown here by the
storm."
The
woman pulled back the hood of her black cape, revealing braided white hair,
and squinted at him.
"You've got the scythe," she said
suspiciously. A few wrinkles left her face as she unfocused her gaze.
"A boathook only," Carlo said,
holding it out for her inspection. She stepped back and raised the lace
needles threateningly. "Just a boathook, I swear to God. To God and Mary and Jesus and all the saints, Grandmother.
I'm just a sailor, blown here by the storm
from Venice." Part of him felt like laughing.
"Aye?"
she said. "Aye, well then, you've found shelter. I don't see so well anymore, you know. Come in, sit down, then." She
turned around and led him into the room. "I was
just doing some lace for penance, you see . . . though there's scarcely enough
light." She lifted a tomboli with the lace pinned to it; Carlo noticed big
gaps in the pattern, as in the webs of an injured spider. "A little more
light," she said and, picking up a candle, held it to the lit one. When it
was fired, she carried it around the chamber and lit three more candles in
lanterns which stood on tables, boxes, a wardrobe. She motioned for him to sit
in a heavy chair by her table, and he did so.
As
she sat down across from him, he looked around the chamber. A bed piled high
with blankets, boxes and tables covered with objects . . . the stone walls
around, and another staircase leading up to the next floor of the campanile.
There was a draft. "Take off your coat," the woman said. She arranged
the little pillow on the arm of her chair and began to poke a needle in and
out of it, pulling the thread slowly.
Carlo
sat back and watched her. "Do you live here alone?"
"Always
alone," she replied. "I don't
want it otherwise." With the candle before her face, she resembled Carlo's mother or
someone else he knew. It
seemed very peaceful in the room
after the storm. The old
woman bent in her chair
until her face was
just above her tomboli; still
Carlo couldn't help noticing that her
needle hit far outside the
apparent pattern of lace, striking
here and there randomly. She
might as well have been blind.
At regular
intervals Carlo shuddered with excitement and tension; it was
hard to believe he was
out of danger. More infrequendy they broke the silence
with a short burst of conversation,
then sat in the candlelight
absorbed in their own thoughts,
as if
they were old friends.
"How do you
get food?"
Carlo asked, after one of
these silences had stretched
out. "Or candles?"
"I trap lobsters
down below. And fishermen come
by and
trade food for lace.
They get a good bargain,
never fear. I've never given less,
despite what he said—" Anguish twisted her face like
the squinting
had, and she stopped. She
needled furiously, and Carlo
looked away. Despite the draft
he was
warming up (he hadn't
removed his coat, which was
wool, after all), and he was
beginning to feel drowsy. .
. .
"He was
my spirit's
mate, do you comprehend me?" - Carlo jerked upright.
The old
woman was still looking at
her tomboli.
"And—and he left
me here,
here in this desolation when the floods began, with
words that I'll remember forever
and ever and ever. Until death
comes. ... I wish you
had been death!" she
cried. "I wish you had."
Carlo remembered her brandishing the needles.
"What is this place?" he asked
gendy.
"What?"
"Is this
Pellestrina? San Lazzaro?"
"This is
Venice," she said.
Carlo shivered
convulsively, stood up.
"I'm the last
of them,"
the woman
said. "The waters rise, the heavens
howl, love's pledges crack and
lead to misery. I—I live to
show what a person can
bear and not die. I'll
live till the deluge drowns the
world as Venice is drowned,
I'll live till
all else
living is dead; I'll live
..." Her voice
trailed off; she looked up at
Carlo curiously. "Who are you,
really? Oh, I know, I know.
A sailor."
"Are there
floors above?" he asked, to
change the subject.
She squinted at
him. Finally she spoke. "Words
are vain.
I thought I'd never
speak again, not even to
my own
heart, and here I am, doing
it again.
Yes, there's a floor above
intact; but above that, ruins.
Lightning blasted the bell chamber
apart, while I lay in
that very bed." She pointed
at her
bed, stood up. "Come
on, I'll
show you." Under her cape
she was tiny.
She picked up
the candle
lantern beside her, and Carlo
followed her up the stairs,
stepping carefully in the shifting
shadows.
On the floor
above, the wind swirled, and
through the stairway to the floor
above that, he could distinguish
black clouds. The woman put the
lantern on the floor, started
up the stairs. "Come up and
see," she said.
Once through the
hole they were in the
wind, out under the sky. The
rain had stopped. Great blocks
of stone
lay about the floor, and the
walls broke off unevenly.
"I thought the
whole campanile would fall," she shouted at him over
the whistle
of the
wind. He nodded, and walked
over to the west
wall, which stood chest high.
Looking over it he could see
the waves
approaching, rising up, smashing against the stone below, spraying
back and up at him.
He could feel the blows in
his feet.
Their force frightened him; it
was hard to believe
he had
survived them and was now
out of
danger. He shook his
head violently. To his right
and left,
the white lines of
crumbled waves marked the Lido,
a broad
swath of them against
the black.
The old
woman was speaking, he could
see; he walked back to
her side
to listen.
"The waters
yet rise,"
she shouted.
"See? And the lightning . . . you can see the lightning breaking
the Alps
to dust.
It's the end, child.
Every island fled away, and
the mountains
were not found . . . the second angel poured
out his
vial upon the sea,
and it
became as the blood of
a dead
man: and every living thing died
in the
sea.'' On and on she
spoke, her voice mingling with the
sound of the gale and
the boom
of the waves, just carrying over
it all
. .
. until
Carlo, cold and tired, filled with
pity and a black anguish
like the clouds rolling over
them, put his arm around
her thin
shoulders and turned her around. They
descended to the floor below,
picked up the extinguished
lantern, and descended to her
chamber, which was still
lit. It seemed warm, a
refuge. He could hear her still
speaking. He was shivering without
pause.
"You must be
cold," she said in a
practical tone. She pulled a few
blankets from her bed. "Here,
take these." He sat down in
the big
heavy chair, put the blankets
around his legs, put his head
back. He was tired. The
old woman
sat in
her chair and wound
thread onto a spool. After
a few
minutes of silence she began talking
again; and as Carlo dozed
and shifted position and nodded off
again, she talked and talked,
of storms, and drownings,
and the
world's end, and lost love. . . .
In the morning
when he woke up, she
wasn't there. Her room stood revealed
in the
dim morning
light: shabby, the furniture battered, the
blankets worn, the knickknacks of Venetian glass ugly,
as Venetian
glass always was . .
. but
it was clean. Carlo got up
and stretched
his stiff
muscles. He went up to the
roof: she wasn't there. It
was a
sunny morning. Over the east
wall he saw that his
boat was still there, still floating. He grinned—the first one in a
few days;
he could feel that in his
face.
The woman was
not in
the floors
below, either; the lowest one served as her boathouse,
he could
see. In it were a
pair of decrepit rowboats and some
lobster pots. The biggest "boatslip" was empty;
she was
probably out checking pots. Or perhaps
she hadn't
wanted to talk with him
in the
light of day.
From the
boathouse he could walk around
to his
craft, through water only
knee deep. He sat in
the stern,
reliving the previous afternoon, and grinned
again at being alive.
He took off
the decking
and bailed
out the
water on the keel with his
bailing can, keeping an eye
out for
the old
woman. Then he remembered
the boathook
and went
back upstairs for it. When he
returned there was still no
sight of her. He shrugged; he'd
come back and say good-bye
another time. He rowed around the
campanile and off the Lido,
pulled up the sail
and headed
northwest, where he presumed Venice was.
The Lagoon was
flat as a pond this
morning, the sky cloudless, like the
blue dome of a great
basilica. It was amazing, but
Carlo was not surprised. The weather was like
that these days. Last night's storm,
however, had been something else. That was the mother
of all
squalls; those were the biggest
waves in the Lagoon ever,
without a doubt. He began
rehearsing his tale in
his mind,
for wife
and friends.
Venice appeared
over the horizon right off
his bow,
just where he thought it would
be: first
the great
campanile, then San Marco and the
other spires. The campanile .
. .
Thank God his ancestors had wanted
to get
up there
so close
to God—or so far off the
water—the urge had saved his
life. In the rain-washed air the
sea approach
to the
city was more beautiful than ever,
and it
didn't even bother him as
it usually
did that
no matter
how close
you got
to it,
it still
seemed to be over the horizon.
That was just the way
it was,
now. The Serenissima. He was happy
to see
it.
He was hungry,
and still
very tired. When he pulled
into the Grand Canal and took
down the sail, he found
he could
barely row. The rain
was pouring
off the
land into the Lagoon, and
the Grand
Canal was running like a
mountain river. It was
tough going. At the fire
station where the canal bent back, some of his
friends working on a new
roof-house waved at him,
looking surprised to see him
going upstream so early in the
morning. "You're going the wrong
way!" one shouted.
Carlo waved an
oar weakiy
before plopping it back in.
"Don't I know it!"
he replied.
Over the Rialto,
back into the little courtyard
of San
Giacometta. Onto the sturdy
dock he and his neighbors
had built, staggering a bit—careful there, Carlo.
"Carlo!" his wife shrieked from above.
"Carlo, Carlo, Carlo!" She
flew down the ladder from
the roof.
He stood
on the
dock. He was home.
"Carlo, Carlo, Carlo!"
his wife
cried as she ran onto
the dock.
"Jesus," he
pleaded, "shut up." And pulled
her into
a rough hug.
"Where have you
been, I was so worried
about you because of the
storm, you said you'd be
back yesterday, oh Carlo, I'm so
glad to see you. ..."
She tried
to help
him up
the ladder. The baby
was crying.
Carlo sat down in the
kitchen chair and looked
around the little makeshift room
with satisfaction. In between
chewing down bites of a
loaf of bread, he told Luisa
of his
adventure: the two Japanese and
their vandalism, the wild
ride across the Lagoon, the
madwoman on the campanile.
When he had finished the
story and the loaf
of bread,
he began
to fall
asleep.
"But, Carlo, you
have to go back and
pick up those Japanese."
"To hell with
them," he said slurrily. "Creepy
little bastards. . . .
They're tearing the Madonna apart,
didn't I tell you? They'll take
everything in Venice, every last
painting and statue and carving and
mosaic and all. ... I
can't stand it."
"Oh, Carlo. .
. .
It's all right. They take
those things all over the world
and put
them up and say this
is from
Venice, the greatest city in the
world."
"They should
be here."
"Here, here, come
in and
lie down
for a
few hours.
I'll go see if Giuseppe will
go to
Torcello with you to bring
back those bricks." She arranged him
on their
bed. "Let them have what's under
the water,
Carlo. Let them have it."
He slept.
He sat
up struggling,
his arm
shaken by his wife. "Wake up, it's late. You've
got to
go to
Torcello to get those men. Besides,
they've got your scuba gear."
Carlo groaned.
"Maria says
Giuseppe will go with you;
he'll meet you with his boat
on the
Fondamente."-"Damn."
"Come on,
Carlo, we need the money."
"All right, all
right." The baby was squalling.
He collapsed
back on the bed. "I'll
do it;
don't pester me."
He got up
and drank
her soup.
Stiffly he descended the ladder, ignoring Luisa's good-byes and
warnings, and got back in his
boat. He untied it, pushed
off, let it float out
of the courtyard to the wall
of San
Giacometta. He stared at the
wall.
Once, he remembered,
he had
put on
his scuba
gear and swum down into the
church. He had sat down
in one
of the
stone pews in front
of the
altar, adjusting his weight belts
and tank to do so, and
had tried
to pray
through his mouthpiece and the facemask.
The silver
bubbles of his breath had
floated up through the
water toward heaven; whether his
prayers had gone with
them, he had no idea.
After a while, feeling somewhat foolish—but
not entirely—he
had swum
out the door. Over
it he
had noticed
an inscription
and stopped to read it, facemask
centimeters from the stone. Around this Temple Let the Merchant's Law Be
Just, His Weight True, and His Covenants Faithful. It was
an admonition
to the
old usurers of the
Rialto, but he could make
it his,
he thought; the true weight could
refer to the diving belts,
not to
overload his clients and
sink them to the bottom.
. .
.
The memory passed
and he
was on
the surface
again, with a job to do.
He took
in a
deep breath and let it
out, put the oars in the
oarlocks and started to row.
Let them
have what was under the
water. What lived in Venice was
still afloat.
Carter
Scholz's first contribution to Universe ("The
Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven and Other Lost Songs, " in #7) was nominated for both the Nebula and Hugo awards, and Scholz himself
was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award as "best new writer.'' Last
year he appeared in both Universe and New Dimensions,
with "The Johann
Sebastian Bach Memorial Barbecue and Nervous Breakdown" and
"Amadeus"—both stories, like the first in Universe, being about famous composers (though much different in plot and tone).
This new story is totally unlike those
earlier ones. It tells of an exploration team visiting a planet circling a
faraway star . . . and of humanity 's first contact with an alien race,
raising disturbing questions about our view of life and species evolution.
Scholz is another Clarion alumnus and has
also distinguished himself in the fields of art and music. His other stories
have appeared in Orbit, Altemities, Clarion, and Isaac Asimov's
Science Fiction Magazine.
IN RETICULUM
Carter Scholz
1. The Burial of the Dead
They came
down out of the long
night and set their rocket
on cool evening sands.
Wind blew the smoke away
in shreds,
and the metal creaked
under strain of weight and
temperature. Dust devils played around
the landing
legs.
Not far off
stood a fragile sandstone building.
How much
had been carved by
hand, and how much by
wind, was impossible to judge.
The wind
had made
or enlarged
windows. Walls joined around
tear-shaped gaps, where the thin
wind abraded endlessly, and the building
had ceded
with grace.
They had come
across an inconceivable amount of
space for reasons equally inconceivable. Each had a network
of personal reasons that had driven
him to
the irrevocable
loneliness of space flight, and
these they would not, or
could not, discuss. Then there were
the larger
reasons of government and industry which
had sent
them here, and those they
were not privy to. The immediate,
the putative,
reason was the building.
After a time they
emerged.
There were five
in all.
Bright, the sixth, was in
a sling
in the ship. There the gravity
varied in hour-long pulses from
zero to one sixth
that of Earth. Two days
from planetfall, after their torturous
awakening, Bright had been afflicted
with the commonest of spacemen's psychoses, the Berkeleian conviction that nothing outside
oneself is real. In Bright
this had taken a nasty turn:
he believed
himself dead, and everything else illusions of torment. Therapy
made it worse. Twice he
had tried to swing
the ship
out of
orbit, and finally he had
broken into the reactor
room. Then he had been
restrained. Keitel had wanted
to postpone
the landing,
fearing the effects of gravity on
Bright: the irrefutable proof of
an external
force would, he feared, shatter Bright's
defenses. Koster had said that was
too damned
bad. They had compromised and brought the ship down
with negative gravity in Bright's
cabin only.
They blinked under
the strange
sun. Here was a frozen
twilight, for the planet
was so
old that
the tides
of its
moon had slowed its rotation to
twice a year. The moon
itself was long gone. The sun
was a
bitter and brutal orange, a
hands-breadth over the horizon.
Koster and the
others approached the building in
a rough
arc. They were space-suited
and they
carried meter-high spindles of metal. These
they arranged around the building,
and then attached cables
between them. The ship itself
formed the sixth point
on the
perimeter enclosing the building. Keitel observed Jobes with
the control
box, waving the others away from
the ring
of spindles.
The field
leaped, and at once a
bubble of interference formed on the
slope nearest Koster. Rainbows slid
down the bubble, faster and faster,
and within
a second
the field
broke.
Roster's voice
came on the intercom without
preamble.
—Keitel, move
your spindle back ten meters.
On the second
try, the field held for
five seconds, until a dimple formed
on the
slope near Wulf and pulled
it apart
in a
vortex. Wulf s voice
came on:
—There's a ferrous
deposit here. Keitel, five meters
back. Roeg, ten meters forward.
This time the
field held, and after Jobes
had made
flux measurements, Keitel and
Roeg returned to the ship
to release
the tinned
atmosphere. During the hundred-year flight, the small hydroponics farm on board had
processed their cold exhalations and stored
two thousand
tons of oxygen. Harvesters had plowed
the uneaten
crops into nutrient vats and waste
sinks, whence came their monthly
injections and inert gases stored against
planet fall. Waste from engines
and batteries was likewise stored, and
the legumes
were periodically stripped of nitrogen.
These tanks now vented an
atmosphere into the force bubble
in a
long polyphonic hiss; as much air
again was held in reserve.
The air
smelled like Los Angeles on a
summer day. Condensation set streams
free on the invisible skin of
the field.
The field was
extravagant, but necessary. Men could
not come out of a century's
cold sleep and be asked
to function
in space suits. They needed the
illusion of sky, freedom, unimpeded
movement.
The building had
six rooms.
The largest
was tiled
in monochrome hexagons; at the moment
of entrance
Roeg had taken them, impossibly, for heptagons. The floor
was half
obscured by a fine
red dust.
Jobes scooped a sample into
a small plastic sack.
The strange
shapes thrown into twilit relief
reminded one man of reefs he
had seen
in the
Bahamas; another recalled mesas in Arizona;
another thought of Mars; another
was stirred as if the figures
were from his own dreams;
but none
spoke. After the void,
and the
fierce screaming hour of descent,
all voice
for the
moment had left them.
The danger of
the field
breaking was greatest in its
first twelve hours, so they spent
their first night in the
ship. Jobes punched four figures into
the lock,
which changed its entrance combination
every twenty-four hours by a
cesium clock that kept Earth time,
and the
outer door swung back. There was a brief aseptic
pulse of hard ultraviolet which blackened their visors momentarily.
After the pressure cycle, the inner door opened; they
desuited and went in.
Keitel checked on
Bright, who slept. Three dreams
had been recorded. From a sense
of responsibility
rather than interest, he played
them back. The interpreter had boggled at the first
dream, and offered twenty-two different visuals. Keitel
reflected that if it was
going to be that complicated
he would rather not know about
the dreams.
By now
Earth likely had a machine that
not only
recorded dreams accurately, but supplied
interpretation and therapy,
and in
extreme cases administered euthanasia on the spot. Of
course that was the kind of
thinking that had got him
into the space services in the
first place.
Jobes relaxed in
his cabin
after depositing his sample in
the bioanalytic computer. A
few microbes,
perhaps. But at this end of
a planet's
life-cycle there could be no
surprises. He allowed himself half
of his
computer memory space to begin
a painting on the four-foot viewscreen.
Roeg, in his
cabin, worked on the fifth
dimension of his chess program. Interesting
problem with knight moves in
the odd dimensions. He thought he
had a
handle on a general algorithm
for n-dimensional
chess. He did not play
the game.
Wulf played solitaire
with a deck of Bicycle
playing cards, brought at great cost.
The deck
weighed 70.6 grams. By leaving the jokers on Earth
he had
saved enough energy to light New
York for a day.
Of them
all, only Koster worried about
the purpose
of the
flight.
In the
year 2040 there had commenced,
from a point in the
constellation Reticulum, a history
of radio
on Earth.
A repeater
station was amplifying and replaying
every signal from Earth it could
pick up. Radio astronomers at Jodrell Bank, Green Bank,
Arecibo, RA-TAN-Gorki, and at the
Very Large Array in
New Mexico
were receiving television
broadcasts, navigational beacons,.and so on—all a hundred
years old.
The frequencies
of the
original broadcasts had been raised
by a factor of pi.
By the act
of repetition
this far point was indicating
that it had seen Earth. There
was no
attempt to send data, hence
no problems with language or coding—just
the standing
if ambiguous
invitation: Here.
First ships had
gone to nearer stars: Proxima,
Sirius, Barnard's, Wolf 359,
Ross 154. Some Jupiter-class planets were found, void of
life. The transmissions from Reticulum
continued. By 2230 the
agency was prepared to send
a ship
there. Only the state
of microelectronics
caused the delay: cosmic radiation destroyed
silicon substrates over long exposures,
and a
flight to Reticulum would take
over a hundred years each way.
In 2240
this problem was solved, and
the ship Janus commissioned.
The lander, heart
and brain
of the
ship, large as it was,
was one-thousandth the mass
of the
whole. The shell and bulk were
still in orbit, comprising two remaining thrusters, immense hemispherical reaction chambers ringed
by fuel
tanks, in which half
a million
tons of deuterium and tritium
would be ignited on
the trip
back, hundreds of bombs per
second for twenty years,
until the coasting velocity of
.7 c
was reached. The last twenty years
of the
flight would be a like
deceleration.
What worried Koster
was that
he did
not know
the purpose
of the
flight.
* * *
Prepared they
were, within limits. But no
simulation could prepare a man for
the return
from cold sleep. This explained
the presence of Keitel
and the
oneiranalytic devices. Emerging from that
long suspension, where the blood
was near
freezing and the pulse
a daily
tick, the brain rebelled. After
the first few waking
days it began to cut
capers; routinely these were dreams in
which the dreamer was forced
back into cold sleep. Regarding significant
content, these dreams were void: they were so explicit
as to
suggest nothing, expressing only
a deep
feral terror that surpassed any
psychotic response to death or sex.
The first morning
on the
planet only Bright was undisturbed
by dreams.
Keitel had a particularly bad one, in which unseen
hands pushed him face first
into a black door. He was
crushed and finally smeared into
the material
of the
door, which he knew
was dense
as a
dark star. There was nothing at all on the
other side.
He prescribed,
against his conscience, Thorazine for
the whole crew.
Jobes's bioanalysis was negative, as expected,
and after
bathing the enclosed area
in ultraviolet
for the
proscribed hour, he went
out unsuited.
The air
under the field was warm, and
fresher than yesterday. Twenty meters
from the ship he dug a
water hole, lined it with
polystyrene, and filled it from the
ship's water. Then he stripped
and jumped
in, yelling.
—Rubber men! he
shouted up hoarsely. —Stretch out
those relativistic kinks! Come
out of
that god damned meat locker!
Placid Wulf
emerged, yawning. Then came Keitel,
still worrying over Bright,
and Roeg
holding a steaming coffee, and lasdy sour Koster, who
wandered toward the building. While the first three were
still in the pool, Roeg
reentered the ship and came out
naked, strapped in a hopper.
He soared
in four-meter leaps on the negative-gravity
pulses, stretched out as if to
touch the sky field.
—How's this
for rubber!
he shouted.
—Shut it off!
yelled Koster. He ran to
intercept Roeg, who turned a high
somersault and came down by the edge of
the pool.
Koster reached them,
scowling. —It's bad enough we
have a basket case inside. Do
you know
how much
power that uses?
—Ten thousand watts
a jump,
sir, said Roeg, unbuckling the device.
Wulf said ingenuously,
—Sir, could we turn on
the sunlamp for a spell?
Koster relented. —All
right. Damn it, you could
have broken a leg, Roeg. He
walked into the ship.
Wulf directed Roeg
a look
of mock
contrition. Keitel said, —That's all very
nice, but now he'll make
me take
Bright out of the sling.
—Oh, all
right, William. Christ's sake, said
Roeg.
—How is
Jack? Wulf asked.
—I don't
know. I ought to check
on him.
—Can't you
sun a
bit first?
asked Jobes.
Keitel looked at
the plate
warming red on the lander's
side against the black sky. —Better
not. I, I have to
. .
. He
left them without finishing.
—Narcosynthesis? said Bright
as Keitel
entered the cabin. —That's right, Jack.
—Don't think I
need it today. The drugs,
I mean.
I've been dreaming anyway. Dreaming that
I'm here.
Keitel looked at
his hands
for a
minute. —All right. We'll see how
it goes.
Why did
you enter
the service,
Jack?
—They'd been taking
me a
piece at a time, said
Bright pleasantly. —Cancer of
the testicles,
of the
lungs, of the larnyx, of the
stomach. Never a metastasis, always piecemeal, and the
doctor, an ethical son of
a bitch,
the last
time I was in asked me
seriously if I wanted to
go on
that way. That was for the
lungs. He said, you won't
have any feeling there.
The Teflon sac
will work like a lung,
but you
won't feel it working. Well, I
wondered. You knew I had
an artificial
larnyx, Will. It was
a chore
getting used to it; I
literally had to learn to talk
again. So I wondered about
that lung. About being cut off
that way. Damned son, I
said to myself, let them. Let
them take liver, lights, and
endocrine glands. The seat of your
soul, if you have one,
is surely
your brain, worse luck, and that they can't replace,
not yet.
So I
told the doctor, just leave the
brain. Take out the whole
damned diaphragm and bumgut if you
have to, but don't touch
the brain.
—Why did you join,
Jack?
—By then of
course they didn't call it
cancer, no, cancer was licked. Instead
we had
this, a kind of lupus,
used to be called noli-metangere, this whatever the hell
it is,
thoroughgoing viral internal
leprosy. But I called it
cancer. I knew well enough what
they were up to. Any
cancer they couldn't cure was lupus,
you see.
—But tell
me why.
—One time,
I'll tell you, one time
I hiked
up Half
Dome in California, and at that
time they hadn't hewn the
steps or sunk the railings in
the last
approach to the brow. You
had to
climb cables, and I
went, nervous, I'll tell you,
right after the snows had melted,
and not
knowing were the cables sound
or not. Well, halfway up I
looked over my shoulder. Two
thousand feet to a pine-and-granite
floor, and I wondered, why
not? Hell yes, this
is what
you came
for, why not, sick son?
And I turned cold, not from
fear of death, not exacdy.
I feared I would die yet
not be
extinguished. If I could have
known that all profit
of experience,
all laborious
mental roads, would be effaced by
death, I would have dropped,
then and there. But
I imagined
a trap
waiting for me, just this side
of death.
An anteroom.
Not a
spiritual state, but a state of
prolonged physical torment, in which
my damned
brain just would not
give up the ghost. I
saw myself
like a sack of rotten vegetables
on the
valley floor and the damned
brain still trying to
get up.
You see,
my instincts
for selfpreservation were
too damned
good. I didn't trust my
brain to know when it was
licked. —Yes?
—Odd thing is,
it makes
you immune
to other
diseases. The body's very systematically burning itself and it
wants no outside interference.
Whole damned field crew in
Venezuela caught malaria, but
not me.
Well, this is ideal for
interstel-lars, you see;
you don't
have to worry about your
man kicking off suddenly.
Keitel decided
to chance
a direct
statement. —You wanted a cure, and
couldn't afford cryogenics on Earth.
Said Bright, —And
isn't that where the service
gets half its men? But not
me. The
pain of consciousness, which death
does not abate, is
what I want a cure
for.
—Are you
dead, Jack?
—I'm a memory.
See, that's how I know.
I always
had a dreadful memory, Will, but
now everything
is coming
back—why, I've remembered a dream I had
when I was five, two hundred
years ago. In the dream
I wake
up before
morning, the house is dark,
and I
try to
put on
lights. But they come on only
faindy, and as I jiggle
the switches
it gets
darker and darker. Then
the shadows
come alive. And I even
remember that I told
my brother
this dream once, and he
said seriously, I have
a flashlight
under my bed, and you
can use that; it always works.
And you
know, it did. I never
had that dream again. And I
remember too when I was
in school
studying literature this line
from a story: mirrors and copulation are abominable because
they duplicate entities. Now what is that from? It was
on an
upper-right hand page.
—I don't
know.
—You ought to
know, Will. And ... I
never had a woman.
—Jack, that's
not true.
—Even before, I
never had a woman who
wasn't contra-cepted. Never a chance
to, to.
. .
. Suicide
missions. I feel them thrashing there
in the
dark.
Bright then
covered his head with his
arms. When he looked out he
said, —What was that? —Was what?
—What I was saying.
Did I
fall asleep?
—No. I think we're
done for today. Try to
get some
rest.
—Yes. Let
the dead
bury the dead.
2. A Game of Chess —Wulf? said Koster.
—This is it?
—Oh yes. Concatenation
of narrow-band
signals at one megawatt. No mistaking
it.
—So where
the hell's
the antenna?
The power
supply?
—Underground.
—Ridiculous. Why
hide it?
—Sir, the best
guess was that this is
an automated
station. I think that's right. This
planet is long dead.
—And it's been
transmitting for what, three hundred
years? Without maintenance? Without power?
—Tides, possibly. Planet
this size has a lot
of kinetic
energy even turning slow as
it does.
The dwarf sun
was now
threatening the horizon. They stood at the threshold of
the building.
—We go in
singly. Each take a room.
Keep your recorders running.
Twenty minutes if you don't
find anything.
They went
in.
Violet shimmer
in the
air. Keitel turned. A purple
sphere circled him and
colored through the spectrum to
red, then vanished. He ceased to
turn. Then in front of
him a
diffuse orange glow condensed
into a sphere large as
himself and turned milky. The milk
pulled itself into galactic spirals,
which commenced to swirl
so rapidly
they disappeared. Then the sphere was
blue, brown, and green. Keitel
circled it and saw it was
a globe
with one land mass. A
faint blue halo extended nearly an
inch from its surface. Broad
estuaries slowly cracked the
continent. He ran his hand
over a brown area and felt
a roughness
like unfinished wood. The blue
area was wet; his finger penetrated
it to
a depth
of a
millimeter and then encountered
the same
roughness.
Now there were
four distinct continents on the
globe, or perhaps five. In the
slanting light, microscopic mountains cast shadows. On the night
side of the globe he
fancied brief red pinpricks. The continents
pulled apart, making six, two
of them bound by
a slender
isthmus, another two roughly abutted. Cold white pulsed regularly
down from the pole. For hours
he was
rapt as a child with
a kaleidoscope.
Occasionally he sat on the
floor with his eyes shut
for a
few minutes
and returned
to find
the continents
inches farther apart. When the configuration
grew familiar, he commenced to
scan the globe closely.
He found,
in a
favorable light, a line no thicker
than a blond hair snaking
up the
east of Asia. On the night
side he hunted for faint
yellow glows.
It seemed to
him the
white wisps of galaxies were
becoming more distinct, and the
continents now moved imperceptibly, as if the time
scale of the model was
slowing.
His hand was
resting on Japan when he
felt a stab of pain.
On his palm were two charred
dots, equivalent to burns from
a powerful laser pulsed
for a
nanosecond. He backed away. Almost at once there was
a constellation
of white
flashes across Asia and
America. He covered his eyes
with his burned hand.
When he looked
up he
saw a
fading streak like a vapor
trail, cleary diagrammatic and not part of
the model;
it circled
Earth twice and extended tangentially
through a wall of the room.
He peered
closer, his eyes weak from
much seeing, but now granted it
seemed a second precision from
fatigue, and saw glinting motes like
dust moving in blurry circles
two inches above the globe. After
many minutes more he saw
a considerable silver speck,
the size
of a
comma, hanging in synchronous orbit over
America. As he watched, it
vanished, leaving the same
diagrammatic vapor trail he had
seen before. With this the
model came to rest. The
milk coalesced into clouds and stood
still. The orbiting motes stopped.
Kei-tel knew without doubt that
he had
just witnessed the launch of Daedelus 7, the first mile-long,
manned interstellar craft to leave Earth
in 2082.
Whine overhead. Jobes
hunched like a dog. The
tone descended in pitch, until
the entire
room throbbed like an organ
loft. Jobes clapped his hands
to his
ears, and the pitch went lower still, loosening his
sphincters. When he came to
himself he was kneeling
in a
pool of urine. His nose
bled. A drop of blood struck
the tile
and vanished
into it. Then, in a red
glow over the tile, Joves
saw a
sudden shifting of images, resolving into a gelatinous sphere enclosing a smaller
sphere of deeper hue. He studied
this, and at last said:
—A red
corpuscle.
The image blurred
and twisted
itself. Jobes took a breath.
—Deoxyribonucleic acid.
The image
changed again. Jobes confronted himself, naked, six inches
tall. —Oh my God.
The image
waited. Jobes said: —Homo sapiens.
There was a
pause. Then the image flickered
rapidly. Barely able to
keep up, Jobes said: —Homo
neanderthalen-sis, Homo erectus,
pithecanthropus, australopithecus, rama-pithecus, proconsul,
p, propliopithecus,
amphipithecus . . . Christ! He
left off. Another minute passed
in silence.
At last
the image rested. Said
Jobes: —Chaos chaos, I believe.
In a moment
the image
reversed itself and, like a
maturing tree, created branches,
first dozens, then hundreds and
thousands, filling the tiles, turning
the room
into a menagerie. At his feet
Jobes saw his own image
emerge unchanged.
—Do that
again, he said.
The room
complied, and this time he
watched some of the beasts evolve. Each had a
characteristic movement, which generally repeated
a number
of times
and terminated
in a
green splash of dissolution.
He observed
the great
lizards, and the amphibians, and was
startled again when the tree
shrew scampered to its
feet and grew, in thirty
seconds, to the image of himself.
But this
time the room went on,
and he
saw, almost before it
happened, the abrupt disappearance of genus homo.
Cetaceans frolicked
a moment,
then the room was filled with
a polyphonic
glissade of membranous wings; his hands flailed through the
holographic swarm. Then a barrage of
green flashes left the room
blank.
He turned, and
saw his
body again, life size. A
speedy and deft dissection followed. The
major systems were left standing
in single
file, unsupported. Another image detailed
the articulation of the
hand. Another detailed the brain,
shrinking and expanding parts
in orderly
fashion. The gray dome was shot
through with rivers of phosphorescence.
It dizzied him to watch, and
so he
left.
In Roeg's
room a resdess hum. It
had thickness,
and a
constandy shifting overtone structure.
—What is this? murmured
Roeg.
The timbre of
the sound
slid slighdy, as if rocks
had been
moved in a fast-running
brook.
Roeg repeated:
—I said,
what is this?
The timbre
of the
stream shifted again and began
to stutter.
Suddenly Roeg recognized the sound:
it was
a set
of vowels,
changing rapidly and at random.
—You're listening
to me.
Trying to learn to speak:
Again the babel
of vowels
changed. There began scattered stops and plosives, and Roeg
could now distinguish discrete phonemes.
—How far can
this go? Is it possible
you can
extract meaning? First you'd want
a hierarchy
of rules,
what sounds can and can't go
together, then some assumptions about grammar, and finally
a vocabulary
of words
that can't be defined from context.
The stream
broadened, slowed, and the sounds
became more prolonged.
—Personally I don't
believe it. You may be
a deft
mimic, but. . . .
The sound abrupdy
stopped. In the silence Roeg
stopped as well. Then he heard:
—What is mimic?
—Well I'll
be damned,
said Wulf.
A small table,
loaded to groaning with platters,
carafes, bowls, in the
center of the room. He
approached the buffet.
—Koster would
have a fit if I
ate any
of this.
He lifted
covers, bathing his face in
steam.
—Damned if that's
not Mongolian
beef. And here? Rijs-taffel, carré d'agneau,
artichoke and
aioli, zabaglione, saumon béarnaise, calamari, and
a Caesar
salad. And I am very much
mistaken if this is not
a Château Margaux. Wulf
tipped a decanter and
nibbled a crouton.
—Well, it must
be a
hallucination, and I
surely can't die from it.
He arranged
the dishes
in his
mind: the lighter first, the
fishes, then the sauced
and sautéed meats, finally the hot
Indonesian and Szechwan, with breaks
to clear
the palate
with salad and wines, and last
the sweets
and fruits.
—Fall to,
old man.
He spent
a good
three hours at it, after
which the table folded into itself
in midair
and vanished.
He flipped
his empty port glass at the
spot, and it vanished too.
—Four-star, gentlemen. Service exemplary. I thought
I detected an excessive enthusiasm for cilantro in the
moussaka, but perhaps not. No
bill? Well, twenty percent of
nothing is nothing, I fear.
Many thanks.
When Koster
entered his room the temperature
dropped forty degrees. He extended a
hand back through the entrance.
Outside the air was normal.
As he
stood there the temperature rapidly ascended,
and he
yanked his hand back inside. Once he broke a
sweat the temperature plummeted. He hunched over for warmth,
and after
twenty seconds was roasted once more.
The next
time it grew cold, he
passed out.
He awoke in
fetal posture with two memories
of awakening
superimposed: when, as a boy,
he had
fallen from a rooftop and, coming
to, found
everything strange and new; and when,
as a
trainee, he had been taken
from a sense-deprivation tank after
eight hours. He imagined the
sterile vaseline scent of
the lab.
He began
to open
his eyes,
then* clamped them shut again: he
smelled wisteria. After a moment
it was
gone, and a heavy hydrogen
sulfide funk was in the room.
He coughed,
and the
odor was replaced by a
faint perfume. Tears of
longing sprang to his eyes,
but the
scent was gone before he could
recognize it. Then, rapidly: cut
grass, gasoline, rain on
hot tar,
rotting mulch, cold stone, distilled alcohol, deep jungle, grape
must, sharp nullity of Freon, menstrual
blood, sawdust, old books, musk,
chlorine, the heavy sweet of yeast,
and each
of these
carried its freight of memory, till
he could
not bear
it, and
cried out: —Stop! Stop it! and
all sank
in windless
air. Like a man half-drowned
he staggered
up, coughing
long strings of mucus from his nose. He wept
and went
from there, not seeing the
others in their rooms.
That night
the computer
prescribed a game of dollar-ante
poker. Keitel lost a
year's wages, nearly eight hundred
fifty dollars.
3. The Fire Sermon
Keitel was
outside when the sky turned
red. There was a sound like
a deep
insensible bell, and his ears
popped. Above him the air boiled.
Rose rivers of flux wiped
out the
stars and bitter brick sun. Under
this inverted bowl of lava
he ran
to the ship. He had to
try three
combinations before the airlock opened. The pressure outside was
so lowered
that the warm push from within
almost knocked him backward. He
went in and swallowed furiously as
the lock
shut and filled.
In the common
room Bright was lazing in
a chair.
Koster stood by, dull with fury.
Roeg and Jobes were sipping
coffee. Wulf stared into space.
—This bastard
depolarized the field.
—I was
outside, said Keitel.
—Four times.
Four times he's tried to
kill us.
—Koster, he doesn't
know. He thinks he's dead.
He thinks we're all dead.
—If he
does this once more, he
won't be wrong. Lock him
up, Keitel! Kostel worked
controls to let the last
of the
ship's air into the restored field.
Outside there
was a
faint thunder.
—Now what
the hell?
A monitor
showed dust from the building.
A weakened
wall had collapsed under
the renewed
air pressure.
—What is
life? asked Bright. —We would
never have known of them or
they of us but for
a certain
progression of materials. Transfer of information.
For them
the earth
was barren before radio.
—And for
us? said
Keitel. —Five million years of
slime and blood before we had
shelter and food when we
needed it. That's not life?
—Preparation. No life
till after death. That's what
I learned on the way out.
It almost
came to me on the
Sirius flight, coming out
of the
sleep, but they kept us
doped and I lost the meaning
of it.
You see,
we are
material. Life is techne. We stripped
the planet,
poisoned it, and only then
did our
cosmic life begin, when
we had
depleted all our resources, transformed them, and
pushed outward. Radio was a
birth cry. We are living now
on the
outer margin of depletion. That's why we're out here,
seeking.
—Seeking what?
—A way of
living, Will, of living past
depletion. We've depleted physical, discursive,
and spiritual
resources. Life . . . you
reach a physical age of
about twenty-five, and you begin
to break down, bit
by bit.
A glide
pattern. Probably most races, by the
time they achieve space flight,
are too
depleted to find a new perspective.
But we're
lucky, Will. We found one close
by. We
may have
a chance.
But we
can't do it in the
usual ways. We can't
expect to bring anything back
from here.
Though Bright could
not have
known it, this was quite
true. All recorders had
come out of the building
blank. The crew met at the
Andrew's-cross table in
the common
room, Koster at the head and
the other
four in the crotches. Keitel
recalled that the last
ship he had served on
had a
table formed like a stellated hexagon.
Roeg read
from notes he had taken
shorthand.
—Then at last
God called
the human
embryo to the throne, and it
said, "Please, God, I think
you have
made me in the best form
possible, and it would be
rude to change. If I
must choose, I will
stay as I am, a
defenseless embryo, doing my best to
make myself a few poor
tools from whatever you put before
me." "Well done," said God,
smiling. "Here, all you embryos with
your bills, gills, wings, and
whatnot, come look upon genus homo. He is the only one to
have guessed Our secret. He will
look like an embryo till
he dies,
but the
rest of you will
be embryos
before him. Eternally undeveloped, he will remain ever
potential, and able to see
some of Our own joys and
sorrows. We are partly sorry
for you,
homo,
but partly
hopeful. Go and do your
best to survive." Asked
homo timidly, "And
if I
succeed?" God ceased
to smile.
Roeg said: —This
is like
a story
I read
once, but the point is that
the building
made it up. In less
than an hour it advanced
from random sounds to esthetic
discourse. This violates every tenet
of information
theory I've ever heard.
—Did you
bother to ask it what
it was?
—I don't think
it understood
me. I
asked who its makers were, where they lived, I
asked what its purpose was,
and how long it's been here.
I asked
if it
was a
form of life. It seemed happy
to affirm
any possibility
I advanced.
Koster turned
to Keitel.
—Did you get anything?
—Blank tape.
It showed
me the
history of Earth up to
our departure. I saw
the globe,
and touched
it. But
no image
recorded. Unconsciously, Keitel rubbed two
fingers against his burned palm.
Said Wulf: —I
think it was taking measurements.
It was
pushing the outer limits
of our
senses, each of us.
—And we have
nothing for it. Just Roeg's
fairy tale. What are we supposed
to do,
tear the damned thing apart
to get
to its guts? We were scheduled
to spend
two weeks
here. Bright has cut that in
half. Gone two hundred years,
and we
come home empty-handed. They'll like that.
—I was thinking,
said Keitel. —Since nothing records,
it must be reaching our brains
direcdy. We could use an
oneiranalysis rig, hook it
to someone
to get
a record.
—Who? asked Koster.
—It almost
cooked me. I don't want to risk anyone.
Jobes said,
—Bright.
Keitel looked
at him,
stricken. Koster said, —Hell, yes.
Bright.
Keitel said,
—Look here, the man's unbalanced.
His EEG
shows theta spindles the
size of. . . .
No, I
won't have it.
—That makes him
ideal, doesn't it? REM-like state,
half asleep, we'll get a good
reading.
—No!
—Keitel, you
just keep your damned mouth
shut. You're a psychometrist.
You have
the lowest
rating on this vessel. —I'll certify you, Koster.
—You'll do no
such thing. Koster swung around
the lazy
Susan holding the computer
console and punched a request.
He then swung the
unit to face Keitel.
The silver
screen was dark with characters.
Koster's rating was 5.2, indicating optional retirement. Keitel's was
0.8, indicating mandatory retirement. Next to Koster's name
were three dark stars, indicating that Keitel would be
decommissioned on the
moment he certified the captain.
Bright's rating
was classified.
Keitel thought a
moment and swung the unit
to Wulf.
—Punch in JANUS and
the Earth
date, said Koster. Wulf did so
and swung
the unit
the long
way around,
so that Keitel could read it
before it stopped in front
of Koster.
Bright's rating was 9.9.
Koster swore, and
Keitel said, —I take it
we have
to ask
Jack's permission.
Bright consented.
Eagerly.
Around the
cross table they listened to
the tides
of Bright's
brain. It was a
placid sound, like waves breaking
stricdy along the tones of a
harmonic series.
After a while Bright's
voice came.
—The history of
humanity is a series of
transformations. Your race is
bilaterally symmetric, but imperfecdy so. Consider the notion
of past
and future.
Consider symmetry. Nothing in your physics
points the direction of time,
so you
had to invent a thermodynamics to give time the
meaning you wished it to bear.
And then
you invented
a thermodynamics
of information.
—What are
we listening
to? asked
Wulf.
—Bright's mind. The
building is speaking. His vocal
cords move sympathetically, so we hear his
voice.
—All things suffer
entropy: organisms, races, machines, messages. A linear sense of
time, that is, a sense
of entropy,
is necessary to develop
intelligence, but it is not
sufficient to maintain it. This is
the next
indicated transformation. You must
transform entropy. You yourselves are its refutation. You strive for symmetry while
your bodies abhor the idea:
a crystal of levophenylalariine would
cause you to sicken and
die, while its right-handed
equivalent would not.
Then Bright's own
voice spoke, and the difference
was that between a telephone and
a live
voice. —What is life?
—If there is
a difference
between life and death it
cannot be found in your chemistry.
Your Wohler synthesized urea five hundred
years ago. You can create
bacteria at will and destroy them. Yet you cannot
see the
reason. Life is due to
an event of singular and improbable
character, occurring once by accident and
thus starting an avalanche by
autocatalytic multiplication.
—How singular?
asked Bright. —Are we alone?
—Define alone.
There was a
long, liquid silence, and nothing
from Bright's mind.
—What is
this? demanded Koster. —I don't
want a god damned philosophical discussion on these tapes.
Why doesn't he ask it something
useful?
—You
insisted on
putting a sick man in
there, said Keitei. —Now shut up
and listen.
—You are alone,
said the building. —This is
what makes you you. You are
self. You are dirt. All
cognate with the word human.
—Where in
Christ's name did it get
all this?
—Three hundred
years of listening to radio,
said Roeg drily.
—Why are
you afraid
of mirrors?
asked the building. —But you know
that, said Bright.
—Duplication. Self-absorption.
Ruinous self-reflection. Infinite regress.
Loss of origin. —Yes, said Bright.
—But that
is the
symmetry you crave.
—Yes. Symmetry of
life and death, past and
future. But how achieve it?
All at
once there was a pulsing
in the
room. Complex patterns of tone
skirled in the air. Keitei
was on
his feet
at the
oneiranalyzer. Two discrete patterns
suddenly meshed, and a single chord
of tones
smote them, rapidly repeated.
—My God, said
Keitel. —It's done something to
him. His two hemispheres are in
unison. His right and left
brain are doing the same.
The heavy pulse
in major
key was
still proceeding when Bright entered the
ship with the light of
inspiration shining in his countenance.
Keitel was
awakened by a distant clangor.
The sharp
scent of fuel was in his
nostrils.
They had stopped
Bright before much fuel had
been dumped. The cocks shut, Bright
restrained, Koster furious astride the computer
as Keitel
entered the common room, all
successfully suppressed a dream
he had
had of
universal destruction. Entering,
his mind
put away
for future
reference the image of a burning
house, a large house in
which everyone he had e'ver
known (and he was two
hundred and fifty years old) was
quartered.
—One thousand kilos
overweight, said Koster, with some
satisfaction. —We haven't enough
fuel left to get off
the ground.
—Keitel, said
Roeg, give us some drugs.
—Get him out of
here, said Koster, and Jobes
led Bright
away.
Practiced Wulf was
calculating. —What can we leave
behind?
—Not much. Leftover
air. Personal memory boards. Spindles. Some batteries. Jumpers. Not
bloody much. Cutting everything to the bone, we're
still sixty kilos over.
Wulf sadly drew
his playing
cards from a pocket. Everyone
smiled sourly at that.
—Can we
bring the big ship to
a closer
rendezvous?
—Not unless
you want
to risk
crashing it.
There was a
silence. Koster began to nod,
looking at the others.
—What does
Bright weigh? Keitel sat down.
Roeg punched
the console
and said,
—Sixty-five kilos. —That's it, then. Weight
for thrust.
After much
arguing, Keitel went to tell
Bright. He was in the sling,
though the antigravity was off.
The cabin
was dark.
—Jack, why?
—You know, I
used to think that there
were beings in mirrors. I
stared and stared when I
was little,
and a
couple of times I thought I
saw something
move, very far in.
Keitel foolishly pushed
the stud
on his
recorder, then realized that no
therapy could help Bright now.
Nonetheless he let the machine run.
—Why are
you so
interested in mirrors?
—That's all
this place is.
—We came
this far to find ourselves,
is that
it?
—In a way. Or
else we're mirrors. Have you
thought that what we see and
hear in there is not
what the building intends? That
our minds
read the information according to
their own biased patterns?
Bright's language became
more fevered; he rushed fragments
with groping pauses between.
—Consider Parsifal, who
passed by the Grail the
first time he saw it and
thereby did greatly sin. This,
this is our Grail: like the kalpa vrishka of the
Jains, wish-fulfilling trees which gave sweet fruit, leaves that
sang at night, and gave
forth light. But the Grail is
invisible to those not pure.
He paused, and
continued almost sanely: —On Earth
they told me I was the
most important man on this
ship. Because of my instinct for
self-preservation. I spent
forty hours in the sense-deprivation tank, Will,
and they
took me out only because
they couldn't believe it; they
thought I was in trauma.
But I could have stayed there
forever. It's where I first
learned the meaning of
depletion. And farther in space.
Though they meant
to sacrifice
me, I
loved them for it. They
were teaching me. And
now I
must return this gift, by
teaching them. All systems on
Earth, from the economic to
the biologic,
have been corrupted, by death,
by fear
of death.
They cannot survive that way. This
mission is a last hope,
Will, to find a race that
has survived
that fear of death and
transcended entropy. But we must
stay here for the learning.
We can't return to Earth with
our samples
and tapes,
where the agency will twist us
and see
only what they want to
see, use knowledge for profit.
Keitel could not
bear the strain any longer.
He burst
out: —Jack we're leaving you here.
—What?
—You drained too
much fuel. We're overweight. We have to leave you
behind. It's not my decision.
Bright sat silent
for a
minute, then said: —You have
brought me pain as
well as joy, yet more
honor than I have ever received
from any before.
4. Death by
Water
Working alone
in the
hour before lift-off, Keitel placed
spindles close around the
building, powering them with a
battery. He drained the
last of the ship's air
into the small field. It would
not last
long, but neither would the
battery. He brought Bright there.
—You'll drown
me, Will?
—Jack.
—Pearls for
my eyes.
An end
to profit
and loss.
—Jack!
—Will, it's
so simple,
and you
can't see it. We were
sent to bring back. And here
is something
we can't
bring back, can't balance their books
back home. We need to
stay, Will, we really do.
—I don't
want to do this thing.
Oh Christ.
—It's not
enough to leave me. We
all have
to stay.
Will, haven't you learned? There is
no return.
You leave
your world, and in the course
of your
travels it changes. You return
only to a changed world.
Christ, the horror of it.
We're farther out than any have
been. Drowned and gone. Those
who sent us long
dead. They think of us
as dead,
Will. We're lost. We should stay
here, lost.
—Jack, we can't
stay. We haven't enough air
or food
or water.
—Don't need. We're
dead already. We're information. Koster entered. —Let's go. —I had
hoped, said Bright.
—I know
what you hoped, you bastard.
You hoped
to strand us all here.
Bright pressed palms
together before his mouth. —Give,
sympathize, control. We have
given ourselves to the sky.
Now we must sympathize, and later
we may
control. Why are you afraid? We
can learn
all this
place has to offer. When
the time came our
message would get through.
—Two minutes,
Keitel, or we'll leave you
too.
—What message,
Jack?
—One who has
been made mad by the
sight of a demon will be healed upon glancing
in the
mirror. Earth's demon is space. Death.
The long
cold sleep. But you all
look away.
—We think
we'll drown there, said Keitel,
trying to understand. —Mirrors lead
to, to
loss of origin. . .
.
—Oh, Will,
said Bright, sorrowing.
—I have
to go.
—When you
get back,
don't hate me.
—Hate you?
—For what
I've done.
Keitel felt
tears starting. —Jack, you've done
nothing.
—What we've done.
He spread
his arms.
—You can't carry this fear of
death out here. You just
can't. And you're all so afraid.
—What, Jack?
What have you done?
Koster said,
—That's it. Dope him.
Keitel leaned forward
with the hypo. He lifted
Bright's arm, but on impulse bent
instead and applied the snout
to Bright's breast. Bright slumped.
5. What the Thunder Said
On waking
he left
the building,
hoping to see the fusion
drive of the main
ship come on. There was
a bright
star in the sky opposite the
set sun,
roughly where the ship should
be once under way, but he
could not be sure. So
he went
back in. He thought of the
custom of covering mirrors in
a room
containing a corpse. This
was to
prevent it looking out a
comrade from among those
present. But that custom would
not work here.
In the main
room he said a few
words. The computer beneath the
building reversed fields, switching from
analysis to synthesis. It commenced to
make projections. It told Bright
how long his air
would last. Then, at his
request, it created Earth models, and
it told
Bright in great detail the
future of Earth and of genus
homo. There was
not very
much to tell.
Ten years later
the transmissions
from Earth ceased. Bright was long
dead. The relay station spent
a short
time trying to regain the signals,
then it marked its hypothesis
verified
and began
scanning the sky for another
radio source.
A hundred years
later the decelerating Janus, still outside the orbit of
Pluto, awoke its crew ahead
of schedule.
There was a malfunction. It could
not find
the beacon
needed to navigate to Earth.
They found Earth
with the optical telescope and
navigated back by eye.
But by
the time
they had seen that the
moon was gone, and that the
seas were red, and the
continents ashen, and the sky utterly
without clouds, there had been
much violence on the ship,
and there
was no
one left
to land
it.
Here's
a fascinating story about a secret, illegal experiment in DNA manipulation for
the purpose of creating Homo
superior—immediately,
transforming a woman and a man of today into super humans, many stages of
evolution beyond you or me. But who can say what directions human evolution
might take? Ian Watson, one of the premier writers of "idea" science
fiction, suggests some answers. . . .
Watson, who lives in England, has written
such acclaimed novels as The Embedding and The Martian Inca; a collection of his short stories, The Very Slow Time Machine, was published in 1979. His most recent novel,
written in collaboration with Michael Bishop, is Under Heaven's Bridge.
JEAN SANDWICH, THE SPONSOR, AND I
Ian Watson
Jean Sandwich
was not
her real
name. Her real name was
Jean Sandra Norwich, but
she had
slammed two of the names together
in bitter
humor at her situation.
She did not
alter the spelling of her
first name to make her
point even plainer. As
"Gene" she might
have been sexually confusing,
and she
was not
in the
least confused about her sex, nor
about the fact that sex
(in the
broadest sense) had done her in—had
hogtied her, condemned her to
a ludicrous
fate.
However, it was
not annoyance
at sexual
role-typing which inspired her
sarcastic change of name. It
was something
much more basic. As one
scientist had put it, "A
human being is just a
device used by a gene,
to manufacture
another gene." Like a
sort of comic book antihero,
whirling around and stripping
off her
mundane disguise to reveal her
secret nature, Jean Sandra
Norwich became: a gene sandwich,
the slice
of meat
imprisoned between the genes of
her parents
and the genes of
her offspring.
She went
where she wanted, she spoke
her mind,
she showed all the signs of
free will and of leading
her own
uniquely precious, autonomous existence—yet she knew it
was all an utter
illusion. She was sandwiched. For the genes had expressed
themselves in exactly the same
way in
Jean's daughter as they
had in
her mother.
Jean had believed fiercely that she
was an
improvement on her mother—until her own daughter was born.
She was
sure she had pulled herself
up by
her own
bootstraps—till her own
stupid mother was repeated, out of
Jean's womb.
The genes couldn't
have cared less for Jean's
creativity and sensitivity, for the things of
beauty she had wrought in
oils and fabric and
clay, or for the creature
of beauty
and wit
she had made of
herself. Jean dreamed that a
daughter of hers would outdazzle her
as much
as she
outdazzled her own mother. "Irrelevant machine," said the genes;
and out
of her squirmed another creature so
lacking in sensitivity that she would
be able
to run
through life, as Jean's mother
had, like a chicken with its
head chopped off.
Perhaps the genes,
smelling the competition of an
overcrowded world, had decided that
sensitivity was out of place?
Perhaps they had foreseen
a nuclear
war or
an ice
age, whereby life would be a
matter of grubbing around for
the next few thousand years? Jean
might be best-lean meat, but
bread was the" staple.
While her daughter
was still
young and there was hope,
Jean threw herself into
imprinting love and humor, excellence
and sensitivity
into the palimpsest of her
daughter. But the inflexible programs were
already written, and as her
daughter grew up the
writing showed through ever more
clearly: the dumb vandalistic
scrawl on the wall, which
denied that there was
any particular
point in Jean's own life.
In her
chagrin, Jean Sandra Norwich became
Jean Sandwich.
* * *
Oh, how
lucky we were to discover
her! For Jean was the
ideal volunteer for the
great experiment. She would join
in our project with a passion
that went far beyond the
lure of earning one million Swiss-banked
dollars.
Indeed, she almost
sought us out, though at
the time
she had no idea that we
existed. Nor does anyone—apart from us ourselves, and Jean
now, and of course our
sponsor, originator of the millions
of dollars.
The whole
matter is far too controversial
not to
be kept
secret.
Jean advertised herself, as it were,
by a
series of vehement articles in a
newspaper under the byline of
Jean Sandwich, in which she explained
why she
had walked
out on
her husband
and her daughter, and
railed against Nature's deceits. She
would do anything to
pay Nature
back for the trick it
had played on her. But of
course there was nothing that
one could
do! One of her
articles even touched, plaintively, on the theme of DNA
research; though of course, if
a single
egg from her ovaries could theoretically
be removed
and retai-lored
to give
rise, in a test tube,
to something
nearer to her heart's desire, all
the remaining
eggs would still bear the
same betraying message written
in them—as
would every damn cell in her
whole body. Whatever miracle the
DNA tinkers achieved in their laboratories,
she would
still be Jean Sandwich. Even so,
she was
fiercely on the side of
human DNA experiments.
It was following
this article—and a painstaking check-out of Jean's background through our sponsor's organization—
that I contacted her.
"Five thousand
dollars for hearing me out—then
saying nothing whatever about
this conversation, which, believe me, you could never prove
took place—"
"It would seem
exacdy like the sort of
thing that I'd make up?" She smiled devastatingly. Jean was beautiful, with glossy brown eyes, short
auburn hair cut in a
pageboy style, and a perfect creamy
skin. Her nose was Grecian,
her chin
firm, and her figure
was as
trim as it had been
before her terrible child was
born and reared. Her body
had never
despaired, as other women's bodies
might have done; the sad
thing was that, coiled
up in
each cell in it, was
the genetic
government—temporarily in exile—that had swept back to
power in that child.
Jean herself was a sort
of sport
of Nature:
a once-only Romeo and Juliet tossed off
by the
genetic monkey typists, who tapped out
dumb pulp "novels"
the rest
of the
time.
"Exacdy. May
I call
you Jean?
Please call me Frank." "Which isn't your
real name?"
"Actually, it is.
So, five
thousand for listening to me.
And one million dollars clear, banked
in Zurich
in your
name, if you'll go through with
what I propose—whether it succeeds
or not."
"How can
a girl
refuse?"
I put a
packet of money on the
table. She riffled through the big bills without bothering
to count
them.
"We'd like you
to take
part in a DNA experiment,
Jean—an illegal one, but
one that
I'm sure
from your writings that you'll
approve."
"Illegal? The genes
are the
real law—and look what their
law had done to
me." She lit a cigarette,
then hesitated.
"We aren't worried
about you breaking chromosomes," I reassured her.
"We're way beyond that kind
of small
change. No, I was
referring to illegal in the
public sense. The prohibition on human
experimentation."
"You want an
egg? Permission granted!"
She exhaled
smoke. "No, that's ridiculous.
It would
be the
most expensive egg in the
world; and surely you've got
some women on your team. ...
So you
want me to play host
mother, do you? No, that's silly
too. You could easily hire
some poor cow for a lot
less than that. What is
it?"
"Just this.
Our sponsor
is a
rich man—very rich. Obviously I'm not going to
tell you his name. He
would like to be a superman,
Homo superior, in his own
lifetime—and to sire
supermen. And superwomen. The next
race. He wants to be
the first, the founder,
the Adam."
"And I'm to be
. .
. ?"
"In this case,
Eve will
be created
first. We don't quite know whether we can do
it with
a human
being, though it has worked with
rats and monkeys. The monkey
subjects are, well, supermonkeys
now. But a supermonkey isn't the same as an
'almost man.' They belong to
a different
niche of existence. There isn't
a simple
ladder with monkeys down there
and us up here."
"And the
rats?"
"We've had to
destroy the rats. If they
escaped into the wild, well. .
."I left the outcome undefined,
but Jean
could guess it.
"Not," I hastened
to add,
"that we intend to destroy
the supermonkeys. That would
be .
. .
unfair. Our sponsor is most scrupulous."
Nor destroy
you either,
Jean. ... But that was better
left unsaid.
"So he has
set up
a million-dollar
trust fund for them too?"
"They have delightful
conditions. We have sterilized their offspring, though.
As a
precaution."
"Yech," said Jean.
But she
accepted it. "How is this
miracle accomplished?"
"It depends
on the
preadaptation of many gene sites
for a
sort of quantum jump
to a
new order
of being.
The old
notion of evolution as something
slow has gone out the
window. Change happens rapidly—like
a seed
crystal suddenly altering the whole
consistency of a saturated solution.
Of course, it might be a
million years before it does happen. But when it
does, it happens fast. The
new being
is waiting
in us
like the butterfly in
the chrysalis.
This isn't any ordinary tinkering with a few genes,
and recombination.
It's a question of nudging
the whole
works. We've developed a self-replicating
virus which will attach to
the DNA
and spread
through all the cells
in the
whole body, optimizing the genetic
potential and the very
body and brain—the whole protein
and nerve package—of the infected party. The
flesh itself changes, not just the
seed. But our sponsor wants
to see
this new being—Eve—before he commits himself,
as Adam."
"So I'll become
Super Eve? Arid he'll be
my mate,
once he takes the plunge?"
"That's about it.
It'll certainly alter you. It
altered the rats and the monkeys—but
there was less potential for
change there. We believe the human
potential is enormous."
Jean giggled. "Maybe
I'll be able to fly
by will
power? Maybe I'll become Wonder Woman?
Or a
telepath?"
"Who knows?"
"I'd hardly need
a million
dollars then. Though," she added hastily,
"it'll be handy to have
them."
"The money's more
by way
of reassurance,
in case
it doesn't work. Obviously, if it
does, you'll be our sponsor's
only peer on Earth."
"In case?
Were they any mishaps with
the monkeys?"
"None," I assured her.
"I'll have
to think
about it." '
"Take your
time, Jean. Take a week.
Two weeks."
"Hell, I've thought already.
The answer's
yes. I'd like to see your
monkey farm, though." "Be
our guest."
The visit
to the
farm (to use Jean's word)
went well. She scanned all the
videotapes of the superrats, and met the supermonkeys, conversing with them through
a sign
language interpreter. She was most
impressed. She preened herself. Nature
had played
the devil's
own trick
on her,
but now
Nature would get its
rightful comeuppance. Not that Nature
wasn't preparing for better
things—but in her own bad
time.
And Jean Sandwich
dropped out of sight of
the world—
inasmuch as the world
cared whether she was in
sight or not.
The day came
to inject
the virus
into her. It should take
a day to establish itself, and
a further
week to replicate itself through her body, and a
week more to express itself
in a
new Jean, Super Eve. This latter
would be a painful week,
as her
very body reabsorbed itself and generated new
tissue. However, she would spend
all that
time under full sedation, to
be awakened when it seemed that
the process
had run
its full
course. Our sponsor would
be watching
all this
very closely over a closed-circuit link.
We injected—feeling that the syringe was
rather like God's finger up on
the Sistine
Chapel roof. Then we settled
ourselves, to await developments.
The transformation
of Jean
into Jean-Eve, Homo superior, began—imperceptibly at first—eight days after the
injection.
Sedated now, and
connected to a spaghetti tangle
of catheters
and intravenous
drips and vital sign monitors,
she lay
naked in the glassed,
sterile room upon a white
waterbed that should conform to any
bodily alterations—not that any really
drastic ones were expected.
She wasn't,
for example,
very likely to sprout wings.
The waterbed looked
like a great slab of
white bread. Jean lay on it,
sandwiched between the past of
the human
race— and the future. However, the
future was as yet invisible:
she was an open sandwich.
Gradually, day by
day, the alterations became more
obvious.
Her face grew
plumper, with an expression that was a weird blend
of cunning
and vacuity.
We hoped
this was just the effect of
the sedative
and a
certain retensioning of facial muscles. She put on fat
all over,
draining our intravenous drips dry time
and again.
Her chin
was engulfed,
doubled. Her neat breasts swelled. Her
creamy skin grew ruddy, as
though she had been
exposed to a cold wind
for weeks;
but also her body temperature was quite high—perhaps this was
just the fever
of the
change in her. Her pageboy
hair fell out, and grew back
again at amazing speed, thick
and black
and greasy, as though her scalp
had become
a spinning
loom.
Her skeletal structure
enlarged; she became not merely
fat, but more massive.
We watched, bemused,
wondering how our sponsor was
reacting to this metamorphosis.
I suppose
you could
say that
the figure developing on the waterbed possessed
a kind
of coarse Rubens magnificence . .
. however,
she was
hardly a svelte beauty queen by
our standards.
Still, the sponsor did not complain;
he kept
his musings
to himself.
One thing
already was for sure: this
was not
Jean's mother, rebom in her
own flesh—nor was it
anything like her daughter extrapolated
into adult shape.
By the tenth
day of
the metamorphosis,
which was taking quite a bit
longer than the monkey metamorphoses—as
I suppose we should have expected—much
of Jean's
new fat
had compacted into well-buffered
muscle, and she was a
prima donna Wagnerian Valkyrie
with a huge bust and
great limbs. She had become a
giantess two meters tall and
proportionately girthed, weighing
almost two hundred kilos. The
Rubens-like impression had given
place to something out of
heroic legend: one of
the giants
who predated
the Gods
on Earth, the first type of
being to emerge from the
icy void—a
troll woman, who could
have taken Thor's hammer from
him with one hand.
By the thirteenth
day she
was two
and a
quarter meters long (or tall) and
massed well over two hundred
kilos.
Was this to
be the
future of the human race:
a race
of giants? Myth had been turned
inside-out in the past few
days! But was this
giantess clever, or was she
dumb? Had all the energy she
had soaked
up been
poured into mere bone and body
tissue? What had happened to
Jean's mind?
By the fourteenth
day the
changes seemed to have stopped.
We eased off the
sedatives, disconnected her from the
drips and catheters, and on the
next day early in the
morning she awoke.
She arose
suddenly, her mighty muscles rippling,
a female
Samson or Goliath with
thongs of oily hair whipping
her shoulders.
Stepping off the
waterbed, she gazed at herself
in a
long mirror. And laughed boomingly, slapping her palms against
her thighs in a
way reminiscent
of the
display of a gorilla.
The two doctors
who were
in the
room with her inquired, quailingly, how she
felt. Beside her they seemed
like a pair of thin, shaved
monkeys in white coats.
She grinned hugely.
"I feel like a million
dollars. And I feel like swallowing my daughter for breakfast.
Or perhaps
a roast ox. Feed me!" she
ordered. She glanced round the
aseptic room as though
it were
really some cave littered with
carcasses and bones. She
strode from the room, through
to where we were, tossing the
two steel
doors open jarringly, and thumped herself
onto a steel table, after
dismissing the available chairs as too
miniature.
Hesitandy, I held
out the
largest smock I could find.
She accepted it ironically and pulled
it over
her head,
the better,
to demonstrate its inadequacy.
The garment
parted at the seams. She blew
her nose
boisterously on the torn fabric,
balled it up and
tossed it aside.
"I shall wear
robes," she announced. "Something long and strong and bright,
with a leather belt, and
thong sandals."
"It'll take
a while."
She waved my
apologies aside with a great
hand. The draft was terrific.
I gave instructions
by telephone,
then asked her cautiously: "You are still . . .Jean?"
"I have eaten
Jean," said the giantess. "Jean
is too
mean a name for me. She
was just
hors d'oeuvres. Everyone is just
that. But I'm the
main course. I shall call
myself. . . well, I
shall decide that after
breakfast."
Presendy, sitting vastly
naked on the steel table,
Jean-that-was demolished five steaks in
a row
and a
dozen fried eggs. I was beginning
to wonder—as
I'm sure
we all
were— where exactly to draw the
line between exuberance and incipent madness.
After her
megabreakfast, she belched
appreciatively.
"This room's too
small," she remarked. "All your
rooms are puny. I need great
halls." She focused on the
camera, by which our distant sponsor
was watching.
She waved
to it.
"Hi. When are the
next Olympic Games?"
Our hearts were
in our
shoes by now. Surely the
sponsor couldn't contemplate . . . congress,
with this titan? And he
certainly wasn't a sports
promoter, even if Jean-that-was did now seem like the
ultimate East European athlete, pumped
up with anabolic steroids.
On the
other hand, maybe she was on to something—if she was as
fleet as she was mighty.
But that wasn't the point, damn
it! The
point was what a future
superbeing would be like.
If they
were all going to be
like this, we'd eat ourselves into
extinction. Come to think of
it, perhaps that was what had
really gone wrong with the
dinosaurs: they had dined too
sumptuously. They had cleaned the board. Left nothing for
the next
meal.
"I know! I
shall call myself Geneva. That's
Jean, plus Eva—from Eve. And all
my money's
in Zurich."
She laughed, deafening us.
At which point
the orange
telephone burbled—the hot line to the
sponsor. It fell to me
to pick
it up.
"Frank Caldero
speaking."
"This is .
. ."
Who else?
I had
heard his voice half a
dozen times before. It
was a
twangy, singsong voice, of a man
of about
forty, but I could never
be sure
whether it was lyrically contented or
about to become enraged. Particularly
at this moment I
detected no clue in the
tone.
"She isn't what
I expected,
exacdy. But of course, none
of us knew what to expect,
did we?
I am
. .
. shocked—and
pleased too. Such strength
and presence
pleases me, Frank. I can hardly
feel amorously attracted to her,
but of
course I am viewing her with
the eyes
of now,
not the
eyes of someone transformed.
Could a prehuman possibly feel
excited by an example of Homo sapiens? Hardly! I do recognize this, Frank.
Perhaps you thought
that I expected a Primavera
or an
Aphrodite? Rather than a Titan?
Not necessarily. You have
done remarkable work, all
of you.
At the
moment I cannot like her, or admire her—though there is admiration in
my soul
for the
prodigy she has become.
I'm coming
down in person, Frank. Anyone in the world can
be ordinarily
handsome and clever and strong—but we seek the extraordinary,
don't we? I certainly do. I want security
precautions redoubled, Frank. I'll need a
few days
to arrange
things. I don't think I'm
going to be very interested in my old life-style
in a
few weeks'
time. I too will be a
prodigy. We shall be the
first of a new race."
"What about
Jean—I mean, Geneva?"
"Request her
to remain
there, till we can meet
... on
equal terms."
I cradled the
phone and told the team.
We all
breathed out and clapped each other
on the
back. Fortunately, Geneva refrained from joining us.
"I'd forgotten about
him," she said,
with a peculiar expression on her face.
"It's part
of the
deal," I reminded her cautiously.
"Ho, ho," she
said. "He'll need to be
superb, to bowl me over."
I couldn't visualize
the sponsor,
or anyone,
bowling her over and taking her;
and personally
I would
want to have a few inches
of steel
between me and that tryst
of the
Titans. There was little point in
harping on her obligations, though.
"Point taken,"
I agreed.
"He'll need to be."
We could always
shoot a hypodermic dart into
her— something suitable for
stunning rhino, say—and do the
job with an A.I. syringe. But
somehow I didn't think that
was what the sponsor had in
mind; he had sounded intoxicated
by the coming wedding of the
giants.
Geneva spent
the next
couple of weeks, duly robed
and thong-sandaled, sprinting about
the extensive
grounds of the farm, splashing through
lakes, scaling hills, crashing through
thickets. Her amazing new
body seemed quite tireless. She
made no attempts on
our high-walled,
electrified frontiers. Why should she? She
wasn't particularly a prisoner, and
if she took it into her
head to burst out, barreling
straight through the main
gate, where would she find
a plentiful
enough supply of steaks
and such
in the
rural vicinity? Raw, on the hoof?
The idea
of roaming
the countryside
like some kind of Grecian-attired Bigfoot no doubt had
litde appeal.
Meanwhile, in a
well-curtained, black-glassed limousine, our sponsor arrived and
was whisked
down to the Transformation Room.
He was a
wiry—or weedy—specimen of a man,
depending upon one's point
of view,
and I
couldn't help thinking of those advertisements
for Charles
Adas body-building courses, where
the runt
has sand
kicked in his face by
the tough guy. Obviously our sponsor
had developed
his financial
muscles to the bursting point,
but when
it came
to making
his body
superhuman only science was going
to help,
not workouts.
He was injected,
and later
sedated to lie on Geneva's
waterbed while his two
bodyguards stood watch with us,
turn by turn, in the observation
room.
Presently, while Geneva
thrashed around the estate, enjoying
herself, the changes began.
He went
through what I now thought
of as
the stage
of banal
caricature—just as Geneva
had looked
for a
while: merely fat, stupid, and sly.
However, during this
period he actually shrank, becoming
more like an Egyptian
mummy, shriveled and dried up,
as though not only were the
catheters draining fluid from his
body but so were
the feeding
tubes. It was as though
he were
regressing to some wizened
monkey thing. We watched this
with considerable concern—especially the bodyguards, who were seeing
the body
they were paid to guard
evaporate before their very eyes.
But then
he stabilized.
He did
not build
back, though. Instead—weighing by
now less
than fifteen kilos, and just
over a meter long from head
to foot—he
became ineffably beautiful: a sprite, something
elfin, fairylike, angelic. We were consumed
with wonder and anxiety.
"I don't think
we got
it right,"
murmured Axel Norman to me, out
of hearing
of the
bodyguards. "This can't be the
future of the human
race: giant ladies and tiny
males. It wouldn't work with our
species. We aren't spiders! What's
happening, Frank, I do
believe, is a strange psychobiological change: it's
what the subject really wants
to become,
deep down in his soul. It's
how he
really feels he is: the
idealization of himself. Himself
as metaphor,
rather than meat. A dream
person."
"There's plenty
of meat
on Geneva,"
I pointed
out.
"So that was
her secret
dream. To be an Amazon—it
was her soul's dream, unknown even
to her."
"And his dream was to
be a
fairy?"
"His soul's dream
was that.
He wanted
to be
utterly beautiful—and damn it,
he is,
but it
isn't any ordinary human standard
of good
looks. It's the beauty of
a hummingbird
or a
butterfly. I bet that if
you took
the drug,
you wouldn't turn out anything like
either of them. You might
be a werewolf or . .
. oh,
I don't
know what. Breathe water, maybe."
"The rats and
monkeys all ended up looking
physically similar, by and
large."
"Monkeys have
dexterity, rats have cunning—that's their dream. They haven't as
much imagination. But with
us, it's
. . . it's everyone's form of'perfect satisfaction—as though the world is newly
made, and you can create
yourself according to your heart's
desire. Without prejudice. Only you
can't consciously command what it'll
produce. You can't foreguess it either. Because none of
us knows
what we really want. But
the body cells do.
Or something
does—the unconscious? This is mythological, Frank; it's the real
dream of mythology. It's
the way
back to a crazy, magical
race of Sirens and Harpies and Manticoras and Mermaids.
Everyone his or her own race.
This thing's a soul teratogen.
It produces
monsters, but perfectly viable ones.
Beautiful ones, all in their
own terms. Wow."
"That's one
way of
looking at it."
"It'll be
kis way of
looking at it. I know
it will."
"He'll be satisfied? Lord, let's hope
so. The
way I
see it,
this whole project has
just gone up the spout."
"Oh no,
Frank, no."
"How are
they going to mate?"
"Don't you see,
other people will join this
. .
. this
Wonderland
by invitation?
With his consent, that is.
Brave spirits, bold spirits—they'll
beg to.
Naturally, we'll have to be very
discreet about it. . .
. And
if they
don't beg, well, he'll still want
unusual company, won't he?"
"For Christ's
sake!"
"Plenty of room
here. Big estate. Geneva seems
pretty delighted with her transformation,
unexpected as it was. I
haven't heard her going
on about
her Swiss
bank account lately."
"This isn't what
the experiment
was about!"
"It could just be
this is what it's about
now." "Axel!"
"Okay, just elaborating.
Fantasizing. Joking off the top
of my head, really. It's pretty
crazy, this." But Dr. Axel
Norman did not sound like
he was
joking.
Our sponsor
became slighdy smaller, and even
more beautiful, before he
awoke. A kind of filmy
ballooning membrane—angel wings, fixed
like the membrane of some
gliding animal—grew between his
arms and sides, extending from wrist and waist. We
got a
sort of electric shock when
we touched his comatose body now—a
fierce protective shock.
We discontinued the sedation, and the
next morning he sat up and
saw himself.
He stared
in amazement,
and unrecognition,
with great dewy eyes. Then he
warbled . . . joyously,
and hopped
about the room, the
membrane inflating as he danced,
holding him momentarily free of
the ground
like twin-arm parachutes. He was
a fairy
kite, something that children might
fly high on the end of
a string
on a
blowy, sunny day. Except, he
was the child and the kite, together in one. It
was his
apotheosis, from long ago, before
the paper
of the
kite became one color: green, printed
with bank serial numbers.
"Sir," I said hesitandy,
fearing his electric eel defenses—
electricity conducting down that
string out of the heavens.
"How do you feel,
sir?"
I thought perhaps
he couldn't
talk, but only warble like
that bird character in
The Magic Flute. Or so
I remembered
The Magic Flute, no doubt
inaccurately—an opera needs
a verbal libretto, after all.
He could
speak, singingly, lyrically.
"Geneva doesn't need a million dollars!" he trilled. "She already has what she needs!
She must
know that by now. Let
me out; let me
out onto
the grounds!"
Naturally we complied.
He was
still the sponsor; and there
was no binding someone who could
shock you dead—any more than mighty
Geneva could be restrained by anything less than a
cannon.
Half an hour
later, I watched through field
glasses as our sponsor—who had decided
on the
spur of the moment to
rename himself Ariel—came gliding in
from some trees to land
on Geneva's great shoulder.
No shock
encounter there! So it was under
voluntary control now. She laughed
merrily as he whispered in her
ear. Then she picked him
from her shoulder and tossed him
high into the air, and
he glided
around her head and around, to
land again, and bend as
though to sip at her breast.
The ill-matched
pair, the great troll woman
and the sprite, seemed to be
getting on famously. I'd have
said they were in love—much more
so than
if there
had been
a rambunctious thrashing about
of randy
Titans. They were in love with what they were, because of what they were.
They did
not return
to the
farm buildings that night; but
what they were up
to, I've
no idea.
Geneva checked in, in the
morning, ravenous for steaks—with
Ariel perched on her shoulder, wanting a bowl of
milk and honey.
Which would
have been a fine, if
interim, ending to the saga of
Jean Sandwich and our sponsor,
except that a few days later
during one of their mighty
and minute
banquets, Geneva pointed a
great finger at me while
Ariel twittered excitedly in her
ear. Later I saw Dr.
Axel Norman conferring with the sponsor,
with a wry smile upon
his lips.
I tried
to escape
from the farm that night,
but one
of the
guards brought me down
with a hypodermic dart in
my buttocks.
When I awoke, I was
in the
Transformation Room, with a giantess and a
fairy and various of my
ex-colleagues peering in.
I wonder: did
Geneva point her finger at
me in
revenge—or was it out
of gratitude?
When I wake
up as
a hobgoblin
or an
ogre or a centaur, to
join them in their
play, will I feel grateful
too?
Stories
of alien invasions of Earth have been a standard form of science fiction since
at least the time of H. G. Wells—in fact, this subgenre was so thoroughly
explored and exploited in sf's early years that writers soon had to turn to
variations on the theme. (Perhaps the classic novel of this latter type was
Fredric Brown's Martians,
Go Home, published
more than a quarter century ago.) Still, sf writers are known for their
ingenuity, so they're still able to come up with new approaches. . . Carol
Emshwiller has long been one of our most original writers, and her version of
the alien invasion is characteristically offbeat, intriguing . . . and
satirical.
Carol Emshwiller's stories have been
appearing in the genre sf publications since 1955; many have also turned up in
nongenre magazines such as Cavalier, New Directions in Prose and Poetry, Trans-atlantic Review, and TriQuarterly. A
collection of her short stories, Joy in Our Cause, was published in 1974.
THE
START OF THE END OF THE WORLD
Carol
Emshwiller
First the
distant sound of laughter. i thought it
was laughter.
Kind of chuckling . .
. choking
maybe ... or spasms of
some sort. Can't explain
it. Scary
laughter coming closer. Then they came
in in
a scary
way, pale, with shiny raincoats
and fogged glasses, sat
down, and waited out the
storm here. Asked only for warm
water to sip. Crossed their
legs with refined grace and
watched late-night TV. They spoke
of not
wanting to end up
in a
museum . . . neither
them nor their talismans nor their
flags, their dripping flags. They
looked so vulnerable and sad .
. .
chuckling, choking sad that I
lost all fear of them. They
left in the morning, most
of them.
All but
three left. Klimp, their
regional director, and two others
stayed.
"It is important
and salutary
to speak
of incomprehensible
things," they said, and
so we
did till
dawn. They also said that their
love for this planet, "this
splendid planet," knows no bounds, and
that they could take over
with just a tiny smidgen of violence, especially since we had been
softening up the people ourselves as
though in preparation for them.
I believed them. I saw their
love for this place in
their eyes.
"But am I"—and
I asked
them this directly—"am I, a
woman, and a woman
of, should
I say,
a certain
age, am I really to be
included in the master plan?"
They implied, yes, chuckling
(choking), but then everyone has
always tried to give me that
impression (former husband especially) and it never was true
before. It's nice, though, that
they said they couldn't do it
without me and others like
me.
What they also
say is,
"As sun to earth, so
kitchen is to house and so
house is to the rest
of the
world. Politics," they say,
"begins at home, and most
especially in the kitchen, place of warmth, chemistry, and changes, means toward
ends. Grandiose plans cooked
up here.
A house,"
they say, "hardly need be more
than kitchen and a few
good chairs." Where they
come from that's the way
it is.
And I
agree that if somebody wanted to
take over the Earth, it's
true: they could do worse than
to do
it from
the kitchen.
They also say
that it will be necessary
to let
the world
lie fallow and recoup for fifteen
years. That's about step number
three of their plan.
"But first," they say (step number
one), "it will be necessary
to get
rid of
the cats."
Klimp! His
kind did not, absolutely not descend from apelike creatures, but from higher
beings. Sky folk. We can't
understand that, he said.
Their sex organs are, he
told me, pure and unconnected to excretory organs in
any way.
Body hair in different patterns. None,
and this
is significant,
under the arms, and, actually, what's
on their
head really isn't hair either. Just looks like it.
They're a manifestation in living
form of a kind
of purity
not to
be achieved
by any
of us
except by artificial means. They also
say that,
because of what they are, they
will do a lot better
with this world than we
do. Klimp promises me that and
I believe
him. They're simply crazy about this
world. "It's a treasure," Klimp keeps saying.
I ask, "How
much time is there, actually,
till doomsday, or whatever you call
it?"
No special name,
though Restoration Day or (even
better) Resurrection Day might serve.
No special
time either. ("Might take
a lifetime.
Might not.") They live like
that but without confusion.
But first,
as they
say, it is necessary to
get rid
of the
cats, though I am trying to
see both
sides: (a) Klimp's and his
friends' and (b) trying
to come
to terms
with three hyperactive cats that
I've had since the divorce.
The white
one is
throwing up on the
rug. Turns out to be
a rubber
band and a long piece of
string.
Of the
three, Klimp is clearly mine.
He likes
to pass
his cool hands . . .
his always-cold
hands through my hair, but
if I try to sit on
his lap
to confirm
our relationship,
he can't
bear that. We've known
each other almost two weeks
now, shuffled along in the park
(I name
the trees),
the shady
side of streets, examined the different
kinds of grasses. (I never
noticed how many kinds there
were.) He looks all right
from every angle but one, and
he always
wears his raincoat so we
don't have any trou.ble.
"I accept," I say, when he
asks me a few days
later, anthropomorphising as usual,
and tired
of falling
in love
with TV stars and newsmen or
the equivalent.
I put
on my
old wedding ring and start, then,
to keep
a record
of the
takeover, kitchen by kitchen by
kitchen. . . .
Klimp says,
"Let's get in bed and
see what
happens."
Something does,
but I
won't say what.
I haven't seen
any of
them, even Klimp, totally naked,
though a couple of
times I saw him wearing
nothing but a teacup.
(They read our
sex manuals
before beginning their takeover.)
But willing servants
(women are) of almost anything
that looks or feels like male
or has
a raspy
voice, regardless of the real sex
whatever that may be, or
if sex
at all.
And sometimes
one had to make
do (we
older women do, anyway) with
the peculiar, the alien or the
partly alien, the egocentric, the dis-grunded, the dissipated.
. .
. But
also, and especially, willing servants
of things
that can fly, or things,
rather, that may have descended from
things that could fly once
or things
that could almost fly (though lots
of things
can almost fly). But I heard some woman say
that someone told her that
one had
been seen actually vibrating
himself into the sky, arched
back, hands in pockets
. .
. had
also, this person said, been
seen throwing money off
the Ambassador
Bridge. The ultimate subversion.
Also I heard
they may have already infiltrated
the mayonnaise
company. A great deal of
harm can be done simply
by loosening all the jar lids.
Is this
without violence! And when one of
them comes up behind you
on the
street, grabs your arm with long,
strong thumb and forefinger, quietly asking for money and
your watch and promising not
to hurt
you
. . especially
not to
hurt you, then you give
them. Afterward I hear they
sometimes crumple the bills into
their big, white pipes and smoke
them on the spot. They
flush the watches down toilets. This
last I've seen myself.
But is all
this without violence! Klimp takes
the time
to explain it to
me. We're
using the same word with
two somewhat different meanings, as happens
with people from different places. But
then there's never any need
to justify
the already righteous. Sure of his own
kindnesses, as look at him right
now, Klimp, kiss to earlobe
and one
finger drawing tickly circles in
the palm
of my
hand. He sees, he says,
the Eastern Seaboard as
it could
be were
it the
kind of perfection that it
should be. He says it
will be splendid and these
are means toward that
end.
Random pats, now,
in the
region of the belly button.
(His pats. My belly button.) Asks
me if
I ever
saw a
cat fly.
It's important. "Not exacdy,"
I say,
"but I saw one fall
six stories once and not get
hurt, if that counts."
As we
sit here,
the white
cat eats
a twenty-dollar
bill.
I was
divorced, as I mentioned. We were, all of
us women
who are in this
thing with them, all divorced.
DIVORCE. A tearing word. I was
divorced in the abdomen and
in the
chest. In those days
I sometimes
telephoned just to hear "Hello." I was
divorced at and against sunsets,
hills, fall leaves, and, later on
in the
spring, I was divorced from
spring. But now, suddenly,
I have
not failed
everything. None of us
has failed.
And we
want nothing for ourselves. Never have. We want to
do what's
best for the planet.
Sometimes lately, when
the afternoon
is perfect
. .
a pale, humid day, the kind
they like the most .
. .
cool . . . white sky
. .
. and
Klimp or one of the
others (it's hard to tell
them apart sometimes, though Klimp usually wears
the largest
cap .
. .
yellow plastic cap) . .
. when
the one
I think
is Klimp is on the lawn
chair figuring how to get
rid of
all the
bees by too much
spraying of fruit trees or
how best
to distribute
guns to the quick tempered
or some
such problems, then I think that
life has turned perfect already,
though they keep telling me that
comes later . . .
but perfect
right now, at least as far
as I'm
concerned. I like it with
the take-over
only half begun. Doing
the job,
it's been said, is half
the fun.
To me it's all the fun.
And I
especially like the importance of the kitchen for things
other than mere food. Yesterday,
for instance, 1 destroyed (at the
self-cleaning setting) a bushel of
important medical records plus
several reference works and dictionaries, also textbooks and a
bin of
brand-new maps. When I see Klimp,
then, on the lawn, or
all three
sometimes, and all three
gauzy, pale blue flags unfurled,
and they're
chuckling and whispering and choking together, I
feel as though the kitchen itself,
by its
several motors, will take off
into the air .
. .
hum itself
into the sunset riding smoothly
on a warm updraft, all its
engines turned to low. I
want to tell them how I
feel. "Perfect," I say. "Everything's
perfect except for these three
things: wet sand tracked into
the vestibule,
stepping on the tails of
cats, and please don't look
at me
with such a steady,
fishlike gaze, because when you
do, I
can't read the recipes
you gave
me for
things that make pco-pie feel good, rot the brain,
and cost
a lot."
But I shouldn't have reminded them of the
cats. They are saying again that
I have
to choose
between the cats or them.
They say their talismans
are getting
lost under the furniture, that some of their wafers
have been found chewed on
and spat out. They say I don't realize the
politics of the situation and I suppose I don't. I never did
pay much
attention to politics. "You have
to realize
everything is political," they say,
"even cats."
I'm thinking perhaps
I'll take them to the
state park outside of town.
They'll do all right. Cats
do. Get
rid of
them in some nice place I'd
like to be in myself,
by a
river, near some hills. . .
. Leave
them with full stomachs. Be
up there
and back by evening. Klimp will
be pleased.
But look
what's coming true now! Dead
cats . . drowned cats washed up on the
beaches. I saw the pictures
on the
news. Great flocks of
cats, as though they had
been caught at sea in a
storm, or as though they
had flown
too far
from shore and fallen into the
ocean from exhaustion. Perhaps I
understand even less about politics
than I thought.
I decide to
please my cats with a
big dish
of fresh
fish. (Klimp is out tonight turning
up amplifiers
in order
to impair
hearing, while the others are
out pulling
the hands
off clocks.)
The house has
a sort
of air
space above the attic. There's
a litde vent which, if removed,
a cat
could live up there quite
comfortably, climbing up and
down by way of the
roof of the garage and a
tree near it. A cat
could be fed secretly outside
and might not be
recognized as one who lived
here. It isn't that I don't
dedicate myself to Klimp and
the others.
I do,
but, as for the
cats, I also dedicate myself
to them.
Klimp and
the others
come back at dawn, flags
furled, tired but happy. "Job's well done," they say.
I fill
the bathtub,
boil water for them to
dip their
wafers in. They chuckle, pat me. (They're so demonstrative.
Not at
all like
my husband
used to be.) They move
their hands in cryptic signals,
or perhaps it's just
nervousness. They blink at each
other. They even blink at me.
I'm thinking
this is pure joy. Must
never end. And now
I have
the cats
and them
also. I love. I love. Luff.
. .
loove . . . loofe
. .
they can't pronounce it, but they
use the
word all the time. Sometimes
I wonder
exactly what they mean by
it, it
comes so easily to their
lips.
At least I
know what / mean by
"love," and I
know I've gone from having nothing
and nobody
(I had
the cats,
of course, but I have people
now) to having all the
best things in life: love and
a kind
of family
and meaningful
work to do
. . world-shaking
work. . . . All
of us
useless old women, now part of
a vast
international kitchen network and I'm
wondering if we can
go even
further. Get to be sort
of a
world-watching crew while the
earth lies fallow. "Listen, what about us in all
this?" I ask, my arm
across Klimp's barrel chest. "We're
no harm.
We're all over childbearing age. What about if we
watch over things for you
during the time the Earth rests
up?"
He answers, "Is
as does.
Does as is." (If he
really loves me, he'll do it.)
"Listen,' we could
see to
it that
no smart
ape would
start leveling out hills."
"What we need,"
he says,
"are a lot of little,
warm, wet places.'' He tells me
he's glad the cats are
no longer
here. He says, "I know you
love ('lufF) me now," and wants me to
eat a big pink wafer. I
try to
get out
of it
politely. Who knows what's in it?
And the
ones they always eat are
white. But what has made me
worthy of this honor, just
that the cats are no longer
in view?
"All right," I say, "but just
one tiny
bite." Tastes dry and chalky and
sweet . . . too
sweet. Klimp . . .
but I
see it's not Klimp this time
. .
. one
of the
others . . . urges
another bite. "Where's Klimp?" "I also love ('luff)
you," he says and "Time to find lots of
little dark, wet places. We
told you already."
I'm wondering what
sort of misunderstanding is happening
right now.
I have
a vision
of a
skyful of minnows . .
. silver
schools of minnows . . .
the buzz
of air
. .
. the
tinkling . . . the
glitter . . . my minnows flashing by.
Why not?
And then
more and more until the sky
is bursting
with them. I can't tell
anymore which are mine.
Somewhere a group of thirty-six
. . .no, lots more than
that . . . eighty-four
. .
.I'm not sure. One hundred and
eight? Yes, my group among
the others. They, my own, swim
back to me, then swirl
up and
away. Forever. And forever
mine. Why not?
I wake
to the
sounds of sheep. I have
a backyard
full of them. Ewes, it turns
out. They are contented. As am I. I
watch the setting moon,
eat the
oranges and onions Klimp brings me, sip mint tea,
feel slightly nauseous, get a
call from a friend. Seems she's
had sheep
for a
couple of weeks now. Took her
cats up to the state
park just as I'd thought
of doing
and had sheep the
next day, though she wishes
now she
had put those cats in the
attic as I've done, but
she's wondering will I get away
with it? She wants me
to come
over, secretly if I can. She
says it's important. But there's
a lot
of work
to be
done here. Klimp is
talking, even now, about important
projects such as opening
the wild
animal cages at the zoo
and the best way to drop
water into mailboxes and how
about digging potholes in the roads?
How about
handing out free cartons of cigarettes
especially those high in tars?
He hangs
up the phone for me and
brings me another onion. I
don't need any other friends.
She calls
me again
a few
days later. She says she
thinks she's pregnant, but we both
know that can't be true.
I say
to see a doctor. It's probably
a tumor.
She says
they don't want her to, that
they drove her car away
somewhere. She thinks they pushed it
off the
pier along with a lot
of others.
I say
I thought they were doing just
the opposite.
Switching road signs and such to
get people
to drive
around wasting gas. Anyway, she says,
they won't let her out
of the
house. Well, I can't be bothered
with the illusions of every
old lady
around. I have enough troubles of
my own
and I
haven't been feeling so well lately
either, tired all the time
and a
little sick. Irritable. Too irritable
to talk
with her.
The ewes in
the backyard
are all
obviously pregnant. They swell up fast.
The bitch
dog next
door seems pregnant, too, which is funny because I
though she was a spay.
It makes
you stop and think. I wonder,
what if I wanted to
go out?
And is
my old car still in the
garage? They've been watching me
all the time lately. I can't
even go to the bathroom
without one of them listening outside-the
door. I haven't been able
to feed
the cats lately. I
used to hate it when
they killed birds, but now I
hope there are some winter
birds around. I think I
will put up a bird feeder.
I think
spring is coming. I've lost
track, but I'm sure we're well
into March now. Klimp says,
"I luff, I luff," and wants
to rub
my back,
but I
won't let him . .
. not anymore ... or not
right now. Why won't they
all three
go out at the same time
as they
used to?
What's wrong with
me lately?
Can't sleep . . .
itch all over . . .
angry at nothing. . .
. They're
not so
bad, Klimp and the others. Actually
better than most. Always squeeze
the toothpaste from the
bottom, leave the toilet seat
down
. . they
don't cut their toenails and
leave them in little piles
on the night table, use their
own towels
usually, listen to me when I
talk. Why be so angry?
I must
try harder.
I will
tell Klimp that he can
rub my
back later. I'll apologize for being
angry and I'll try to
do it
in a
nice way. Then I'll
go into
the bedroom,
shut the door, brace it with
a chair
and be
really alone for a while.
Lie down
and relax. I know I'll miss
cooking up some important concoctions,
but I've
missed a lot of things
lately.
Next thing
I know
I wake
up and
it's dark outside. I have
a terrible stomachache like a lot
of gas
rolling around inside. I feel very
strange. I have to get
out of
here.
I can hear
one of
them moving outside the door.
I hear
him brush against it. . .a
chitinous scraping. "Let me in.
I loofe
you." Then there's that
kind of giggle. He can't
help it, I know, but it's
getting on my nerves. "Is
as does,"
he says.
"Now you see that."
I put
on my
sneakers and grab my old sweatshirt.
"Just a minute, dear"—I try to say it
sweedy—"I just woke up.
I'D let
you in
in a
minute. I need a cup of
tea. I'd love if you'd
get one
for me."
(I really
do need
one, but I'm not
going to wait around for
it.) I open the window
and step
out on
the garage
roof, cross to the tree,
and climb down. Not hard. I'm
a chubby
old woman,
but I'm
in pretty good shape. The cats
foDow me. All three.
As I trot
by, I
see aD
the ewes
in the
backyard lying down and panting. God!
I have
to get
out of
here. I run, holding my stomach. I know of
an empty
lot with
an old
Norway spruce tree that comes down
to the
ground aD around. I think
I can make that. I see
cats aD around me, more
than just my own. Maybe six
or eight.
Maybe more. Hard to see
but, thank God, Klimp has broken
aD the
streetlights. I cross vacant lots,
tear through brambles, finally crawl
under the spruce branches and lie
down panting . . .
panting. It feels right to pant.
I saw
my cat
do that
under similar circumstances.
I have
them. I give birth to
them, the little silvery ones
squeaking . . .
sparkling. I'D surprise Klimp with
eighty-four . . . ninety-six
. .
. one
hundred and eight? Look what
we did together! But it wasn't
Klimp and I. Suddenly I
realize it. It was Klimp
and that
other. Through me. And all
those ewes . .
. fourteen
ewes and one bitch dog
times eighty-four or one
hundred and eight. That's well
over a thousand of them that
I know
about already.
My litde ones
cough and flutter, try to
swim into the air, but only
raise themselves an inch or
so .
. .
hardly that. They smell of fish.
They slither over each other
as though
looking for a stream.
They are covered with a
shiny, clear kind of slime. Do
I love
them or hate them?
So that's the
way it
is. As
with us humans, it takes
two, only I wasn't one of
them. I might just as
well have been a bitch or
a ewe
. .
. better,
in fact,
to have
been some dumb animal. "Lots of little warm, wet
places!" It must have been
a big night, that night. Some
sacred sort of higher beings
they turned out to
be. That's
not love
. .
. nor
luff nor loove. Whatever they mean
by those
words, this can't be it.
But look what
all those
hungry cats are doing. Eating
up my minnows. I try to
gather the little things up,
but they're
too slippery. I can't
even get one. I try
to push
the cats
away, but there are too many
of them
and they
all seem
very hungry. And then, suddenly,
Klimp is there helping me,
kicking out at the cats in
a fury
and gathering
up minnows
at the
same time. For him
it's easy. They stick to
him wherever
he touches them. He's up to
his elbows
in them.
They cluster on his ankles like
barnacles, but I'm afraid lots
are eaten
up already.
And now
he's kicking out at me.
Hits me hard on the
cheek and shoulder. Stamps
on my
hand.
"I'm confused," I say, getting up,
thinking he can explain all this in a fatherly
way, but now he stamps
on my
foot and knocks me down with
his elbow.
Then I see him give
a kind
of hop step, the standard dance
way of
getting from one foot to the
other. He was going to
lift. I don't know how
I know,
but I do. He has that
look on his face, too,
eyes half closed . . .
ecstasy. I see it now—flying,
or almost
flying, is their ultimate orgasm .
. .
their true love (or loofe)
... if
this is flying. Yes, he's up, but only
inches, and struggling . .
. pulling at my fingers. This
is not flying.
"You call this
flying!" I yell. "And you
call this whole thing being a
pure aerial being! I say,
cloaca . . . cloaca,
I say, is your only orifice."
I have,
by now,
one knee
hooked around his neck and both
hands grabbing his elbow, and
he's not really more than one
foot off the ground at
the very
highest, if that, and struggling
for every
inch. "Cloaca! You and your 'luff
!" The slime and minnows
are all
over him. He seems dressed in
them . . . sparkling
like sequins. He's too slippery with them. I can't
hang on. I slip off
and drop
lightly into the brambles. Klimp slides
away at a diagonal, right
shoulder leading, and glides,
luminous with slime, just off
the ground. Disappears in a few seconds
behind the trees. "Cloaca!"
I shout
after him. It's the worst
I've ever said to anyone. "Filthy fish thing! Call
that flying!"
Everything is
going wrong. It always does,
I should
know that by now. I'm thinking
that my former husband slipped
away in almost exactly
the same
way. He was slippery too,
sneaked out first with
younger women and then left
for one
of them later on. I tried
to grab
at him
the same
way I
grabbed at Klimp. Tried to hold
him back.
I even
tried to change my ways to
suit him. I know I've
got faults.
I talk
too much. I worry about things
that never happen (though they did finally happen, almost
all of
them, and now look).
I hobble
back (with cats), too angry
to feel
the pain
of my
bruises. No sign of
the ewes
or the
dog, but the backyard looks all silvery. No minnows
left there, though, just slime.
I have to admit it's lovely.
Makes me feel romantic feelings
for Klimp in spite of myself.
I wonder
if he
saw it.
They're so sensitive to beautiful things
and they
love glitter. I can see
why.
The house is
dark. I open the door
cautiously. I let in all
eight . . .
no, nine,
maybe ten cats. I call.
No answer.
I lock
all the windows and
the doors.
I check
under the beds and in
the closets. Nobody. I
go into
the bathroom
and lock
that door too. Fill tub. Take
off my
clothes. Find two minnows stuck inside my sweatshirt. One is dead. The
other very weak. I put him
in the
tub and
he seems
to revive
a little.
He has big eyes, four fins
where legs and arms would
be, a
tail . . . a minnow's
tail . . . actually
big blue
eyes . . . pale
blue, like Klimp's. He
looks at me with such
pleading. He comes to the surface
to breathe
and squeaks
now and
then. I keep making reassuring sounds as if I
were talking to the cats. Then
I decide
to get
in the
tub with
him myself.
Carefully, though. With me in
the tub,
the creature
seems happier. Swims around
making a kind of humming
sound and blowing bubbles. Follows my
hand. Lets me pick it
up. I'm thinking it's a clear
case of bonding, perhaps for
both of us.
Now that I'm
relaxing in the water, I'm
feeling a lot better. And
nothing like a helpless little
blue-eyed creature of some sort to
care for to bring brightness
back into life. The thing needs
me. And
so do
all those
cats.
I lie quietly,
cats miawing outside the door,
but I
just lie here and Charles (Charles
was my
father's name) . . .
Charles? Howard? Henry? He
falls asleep in the shallows
between my breasts. I don't
dare move. The phone rings
and there's the thunk of something
knocked over by cats. I
don't move. I don't care.
So what
about ecology? What about our
favorite planet, Klimp's and mine? How
best save it? And who
for? Make it safe for this
thing on my chest? (Charles
Bird? Henry Fishman?) Quiedy breathing. Blue eyes shut. And
what about all those thousands of
others? Department of fisheries? Department of lakes
and streams?
Gelatin factory? Or the damp basements
of those
housing developments built in former swamps?
* * *
I blame
myself. I really do. Perhaps
if I'd
been more understanding of their
problems . . . accepted
them as they are. Not criticized
all that
sand tracked in. And so
what if they did step on
the tails
of cats?
I've been so irritable these
last few days. No
wonder Klimp kicked out at
me. If
only I had controlled myself and
thought about what they were going through. It was
a crucial
time for them too. But
all I
thought about was myself
and my
blowing-up stomach. Me, me, me! No
wonder my former husband walked
out. And now the same old
pattern. Another breakup, another identity
crisis. It shows I
haven't learned a thing.
I almost
fall asleep lying here, but
when the water begins to get
cold we both wake up,
Charles and 1.1 rig up
a system,
then, with the electric
frying pan on the lowest
setting and two inches of water
on top
of a
piece of flannel. Put Charles
. . . Henry? . .
. inside,
sprinkle in crumbs of wafer.
Lid on. Vent open. Lock the
whole business in my bedroom
on top of the knickknack shelves. Then I check
out their
room, Klimp's and the others. It's
a mess,
wafers scattered around . . .
several pink ones, bed not
made. If they were, all
three, men, I'd understand it, but
that can't be. I wonder
if they
used servants where they
come from ... or slaves?
Well, Charles will be brought up
differendy. Learn to pick up
his underwear and help out around
the house,
cook something besides telephone
books and such. I find
a talisman
under the bed. I shut my
eyes, squeeze hard, wondering can
I lift
with it? Maybe, on the other
hand, it's some sort of
anchor to stop with or to
be let
down by. Something thrown out
to keep
from flying. I'll
save it for Charles.
I sit down
to rest
with a cup of tea,
two cats
on my
lap and
one across my shoulders.
All the
cats seem fat and happy,
and I really feel pretty happy
too .
. .
considering.
The telephone rings
again and this time I
answer it. It's a love call.
I think
I recognize
Klimp's voice, but he won't
say if it's him and they
do all
sound a lot alike, sort
of muffled
and slurred. Anyway, he
says he wants to do
all those
things with me, things, actually, he
already did. I suppose this
call is part of a new
campaign. I don't think much
of it
and I
tell him so. "How about breaking
school windows and stealing library books?" I say. But
whose side am I on
now? "Listen," I say, "I
know of a nice wet
place devoid of cats. It's
called The Love. Canal
and you'll
love it. Lots of empty
houses. And there's another
place in New Jersey that
I know
of. Call me back
and I'll
have the exact address for
you." I think he believes me.
(Evidendy they haven't read all the books about women.)
Political appointees.
I'll bet that's what they
are. Makes a lot of sense.
I could
do as
well myself. And who was
it sent
them out with spray-paint
cans? Who told them how
to cause
static on TV? Who
had thousands
of stickers
made up reading: NO DANGER, NONTOXIC, and GENERALLY REGARDED AS SAFE?
We can
do all
this by ourselves. Let's see:
number 1, day-care-aquarium centers; number
2, separate
cat-breeding facilities; number 3,
the take-over
proper; number 4, the lying-fallow period. And we have
time . . . plenty
of time.
Our numbers keep increasing,
too, though slowly . .
. the
rejected, the divorced, the
growing older, the left out.
. .
. Maybe they've already started it.
I can't
be the
only one thinking this way. Maybe
they're out there just waiting
for my call, kitchens all warmed
up. I'll
dial my old friend. "Include
me in,"
I'll say.
Everything perfect, and
I even
have Charles. We don't need them. Bunch of bureaucrats.
That wasn't flying.
The
possibility, or et\ n probability, of a major disaster in a nuclear
energy plant has been discussed by
nearly every major columnist or opin-ionator for years. (Yes, long before the ' 'event'' at Three Mile Island.) In the following
suspenseful story, Michael Swanwick shows us a future in which a meltdown at
Three Mile Island has occurred. . and the results nearly a century from now.
Michael Swanwick is a new writer whose other
sales have been to Destinies,
New Dimensions, TriQuarterly, and Penthouse.
He lives in Philadelphia,
where he works for the National Solar Heating and Cooling Information Center
at the Franklin Institute.
MUMMER KISS
Michael
Swanwick
It was
Mummers Eve morning, and a
cold north wind was blowing out of the Drift.
Keith Piotrowicz eased the tanker
truck through the blockade,
his nucleopore
mask hanging loosely around his neck.
Jimmy Bowles dozed lightly in
the seat beside him, dark face
at ease.
The guard waved
his clipboard
overhead. Keith nodded, fed the engine
more alcohol, shifted gears. With
a low
growl, the truck surged forward. The
guard, stationhouse, and red-and-white signs marked DRIFT with
radiation logos went bounce, bounce and
were gone from the rearview
mirror.
"Hey!" Keith jabbed
his co-worker's
shoulder. "Get out that map; tell
me where
we're supposed to be going."
Bowles snorted, and
his eyes
jerked open. He fumbled out
a map, unfolded it across two-thirds
of the
cab, and said: "Out past King
of Prussia.
You've been that way before,
right?" The truck jolted
roughly over untended highway.
"Yeah."
"Then don't
wake me up again till
we get
there." » * *
They back-ended
the truck
to the
edge of a short cliff,
a drop of perhaps ten feet,
and, donning protective garb, climbed out.
Keith undogged
the hose
and pulled
it loose
while Bowles took a wrench and
started to mate the connectors.
He stood
near the lip of
the cliff,
feet wide, bracing himself. A
century-old division of tract houses
lay below,
silent among small patches of snow.
Gendy rolling hills slowly rose
to the
horizon, covered with a black
stubble of stunted, sometimes twisted, trees.
Bowles cursed as
the cold
hindered his efforts to open
the master valve.
The hose was
thick and filled Keith's gloved
hands; together they barely circled
it. There
was a
sharp clank as the valve unfroze
under Bowles' wrench. The hose
throbbed and moved. Keith staggered and
quickly recovered as milky-white industrial waste spurted from
the nozzle.
The liquid flew
out in
a long
shallow arc to the frozen
ground. It flowed sluggishly,
covering sere brown grasses in
an ever-widening puddle. Yellowish
crystals formed, then were partially redissolved
as new
liquid overran them. They were supposed
to find
a new
site each time out; it
was usually
easier to reuse the
old dumps.
The land was
bleak and dreary. It depressed
Keith, left him feeling dull and
nihilistic. He remembered stories told
of how sometimes the toxic chemical
wastes from one dumping would combine with those from
previous dumps, and strange alchemical interactions would take place.
The ground
would burst into flames or weird
orange worms crawl out of
the earth. There was a site
he had
seen in upper Bucks County
where the ground actually
crawled, boiling and
bubbling year-round.
Burst into
flames, he thought at the
ground. But nothing
happened. The
last lucid drops of waste
fell from the hose.
He shook
it, then
started to reel it back
up.
• * *
Back in
the cab,
Bowles had pulled down his
cleansuit's orange hood, and
slipped off his nucleopore before Keith could get the
air-recycler going. Like most old-timers,
he didn't wear his mask much,
didn't believe that something he
couldn't smell, taste, feel,
or see
could possibly hurt him. Bowles, taking his turn at
the wheel,
eased the tanker onto the highway.
"Looking forward to
the parade,
hey, boy?" Bowles asked.
"I guess. Hey,
watch the road." The cab
lurched as they ran full-tilt over
a mudslide
that had obliterated twenty yards
of roadway. Bowles cackled.
Bowles was
the only
black on Quaker City Industrial
Disposal's payroll. Politics had gotten
him the
job, and it was politics that kept it for
him; he was out "sick"
more often than any man Keith
knew. But Bowles played for
a second-rate
North Philly string band, and
even a black man could
swing a job with
that kind of
pull. "Don't start talking like
my maiden aunt," he said. "Not much
traffic out here, is there?"
"Yeah, well. I'd
still feel better if. .
."Bowles swung the truck through a
figure-S, grazing both sides of
the road,
and Keith shut up. They roared
past the ruins of a
bank, and the wind kicked up
a white
spume of powder from a
mound of asbestos tailings that had
been dumped in its parking
lot.
"There's some nice
land out back, away from
the dump
sites," Bowles said reflectively.
"If I was young like
you, I'd take over an old
farmhouse, do a little homesteading.
You don't really believe it's dangerous
out here,
do you,
son?"
I've heard this
rap before,
Keith thought. That was the
trouble with Philadelphia: it was all Irish
and Italian.
So naturally
the Mick
dispatcher always puts the Nigger
and the
Polack together. Gives you
a chance
to learn
how tired
you can get of one man.
"You set up
a farm
out here
and your
privates will mutate into green fungus,"
he said,
instandy hating himself for the
words, for playing down
to Bowles'
level.
Bowles laughed, showing
a meager
scattering of eroded yellow teeth. He
swerved to avoid the trunk
of a
mutated tree that crawled along the
ground like a vine, intruding
onto the highway. "Then
you should
join the Mummers. Good thing
for an ambitious young man to
do."
If he pointed
out that
he didn't
have the pull to get
into the Mummers, Bowles would sneer
and lecture
him that
if a
black boy could
join, then a white boy certainly could, having
natural advantages of skin tone
and ancestry.
Instead he said, "I don't have the money, and
I'd look
funny wearing feathers. Anyway,
I'm not
interested in politics."
Keith's father had
been in the Mummers, the
bottom rung anyway, more gofer than
marcher, and much good it
had done him. Kept him poor
paying for the costumes, and
all the medical benefits hadn't stopped
his wife
from dying of leukemia. It had
probably killed him in the
end, too. The old man had
died of something
funny, anyway,
which Keith had always suspected he'd
picked up on the job
the Mummers
had gotten him. The
job that
was all
he'd had to leave to
his son. . . .
Bowles, swinging
wide around a blind corner,
turned and said, "I'm talking serious.
If you—"
"Jesus, look out!"
Bowles, startled, cut
the wheel
hard. The front wheels hit
a patch of ice, and the
truck skidded out of control.
Keith was slammed against the door,
his nucleopore
swinging wildly.
Something flashed by
the windshield,
a woman
riding a dirt bike. She had
been cutting across the road
when the truck rounded the corner
and its
tires lost traction. She leaned over the handlebars, coaxing the last bit
of speed
from her machine. "Dear God," Keith prayed as the
bike slipped past the front fender,
barely evading collision.
Before the motorcyclist
could clear the road, the
tank slewed around, catching the bike
a glancing
blow on its rear tire. There was a sickeningly
loud crunch. Keith caught
a glimpse of something flying through
the air.
Bowles was all
elbows and motion, braking the
truck and simultaneously trying
to keep
it on
the road.
He fought
it to
a halt, tires screeching, truck still
upright, one wheel resting on
the shoulder.
Bowles leaped from
the truck,
his door
swinging loosely on its hinges behind
him. Keith automatically cut the
motor, pulled on his mask, and
followed.
The woman's fall
had been
broken by a tangle of
dead brush. She lay still and
crumpled, looking like a bundle
of discarded clothing. Some way beyond
her lay
the dirt
bike, bent and twisted, clearly beyond
repair.
"You know
any first
aid?" Bowles asked.
"A little," Keith said. "Jesus." He stared at a
trickle of blood creeping out of
the woman's
nostril. It was paralyzing, this livid, glistening red. He
shook off the feeling, bent
to examine
her.
"First we look
for any
obvious broken bones, um, severe
bleeding—it's been a long
time since I learned this
stuff." She was a
lean muscular woman, somewhere in
her late
thirties or early forties.
Slavic cheekbones, a fierce set
to her
face, even unconscious. A heavy kaftan-like robe had fallen partially open, revealing khaki fatigues,
the light
green kind that the Northern Liberation
Front had worn two decades
ago. Her nucleopore was knocked half off
her face.
He checked to see that she
was still
breathing, reset it. "Well, / don't see anything."
"What next?"
"Um, we treat
her for
shock. Cushion the head, raise
the feet." He started
to take
off his
jacket to form a pillow,
stopped. "This is no
good. We've got to get
her into
town."
They carried her
to the
cab, awkwardly distributing her weight across their laps. Keith
took the wheel, carefully started the truck rolling.
"What's this tangled
around her neck?" Bowles asked.
He unstrapped a leather
case, looked inside. "Binoculars."
He set them
carefully on the dashboard, began going through her pockets.
"Passport here, stamped
in Philadelphia.
Occupation: Scholar." He paused. "Didn't
know you could make a living
at that.
Special Drift clearance to visit
Souderton."
"Souderton's nowhere near
here," Keith said. "It's hardly in the Drift at
all."
"Do tell." Bowles replaced the document,
continued rummaging. "Hello. She's got two of them." He pulled
a second passport from an inner
pocket.
"Hey, maybe you
shouldn't be going through her
things like that," Keith said uneasily.
Bowles ignored him.
"Says Suzette Fletcher
on both
of them.
Same name, same height. Age: Forty-two.
That's the same. Occupation: Reporter. Now isn't that
funny? She's a reporter for
the Boston
Globe,
up north.
And it's
not stamped
in Philadelphia
at all."
"Hey, really, man.
I'd feel
a lot
better if you didn't do
that."
"Yeah, okay, okay."
Bowles replaced the passport, smoothed the kaftan shut again-.
He studied
the woman's
face, nested in a
mass of dirty blond hair
in Keith's
lap. "This is one
damn handsome woman," he said.
"How's it feel, having that face
in your
crotch?"
Keith slowed to
negotiate a tricky patch of
road, where a careless dumping had
let a
frozen chemical slick form on
the concrete. "Aw come on," he
mumbled, involuntarily embarrassed.
"She's old enough to be
my mother."
"Looks like she's
still got bright eyes, though,"
Bowles said cheerily. "Bet she's got
a bushy
tail, too. A young man
like you could leam something from an older woman."
The woman
stirred and groaned as the
truck crossed Two Street. The sun
was a
red smear
against the horizon, weakly echoed in the rearview mirror's
grimy streaks. Scattered sweepers
cleaning the streets for tomorrow's
parade brushed the ancient asphalt free
of any
lingering hot particles blown in from
the Drift.
They were the hard-core unemployed,
unable to pay the Mummers
Gift in cash, with only
their services to offer. They
had been
working all day and would
go on working until the job
was done.
Then they would be given
a hot meal, with maybe a
cup of
alky-laced hot cider, and the
stupid asses would be
grateful.
The woman opened
her eyes,
painfully drew herself into a
sitting position. "Philadelphia," Bowles said.
"My name's Jimmy Bowles, and my
partner's Keith Piotrowicz."
She bent
forward, gingerly touched her forehead.
"God that smarts." She snuffled slightly, accepted
a handkerchief
from Bowles, held it
to her
nose.
"Jimmy's the
first man ever to create
a traffic
accident in the Drift," Keith said
with a touch of malice.
Bowles glared at him wordlessly.
The woman straightened
a bit.
A corner
of her
faded blond hair caught the sun,
glinted red. "Oh yes, it
all comes
back to me now."
She forced
a grin.
"S. J. Fletcher. Everybody calls me Fletch."
"Pleased to
meet you, Fletch," Keith said.
Almost simultaneously, Bowles
asked, "What were you doing
out in
the Drift?"
Fletch watched the
tall buildings of Philadelphia glide by. In an abstracted
tone, she said, "Some private genealogy. I was researching
the records
in Souderton—they're
almost untouched, you know—and
I found
my grandmother's
marriage license. It said she
was born
in King
of Prussia,
so . . . ." She
shrugged. "I was hoping for
the family
Bible, but it looks like a
lost cause. Hey, you guys
did pick up
my stuff, didn't you?"
"On the ledge,''
Bowles said. The had slowed
to a
crawl as Keith eased it through
the narrow
riverfront streets. It was a
tight turn into the
company parking lot, and he
nearly scraped two buildings
negotiating it.
"Not that!" Fletch snapped. "My goddamn
saddlebags. They've got all
my .
. .
supplies and stuff. All my
money."
All but
a handful
of drivers
had come
in ahead
of Keith
and his partner. The
lot was
choked, all the good slots
gone. He eased the truck into
Slot 97. "Must be with
the bike,"
Bowie said. "We didn't
go look
at it."
She slammed a
fist into her thigh. "Damn
damn damn," she muttered
to herself.
Then, abruptly authoritative,
"You'll just have to
take me back there to
get them."
"Hey now,"
Bowles objected.
"Look around you,"
Keith said. The trucks stretched
in long, even rows, their biohazard
logos dull in the failing
sunset. "The Company isn't going
to let
us take
this thing out into the Drift
again tonight." He cut the
engine, yanked the key.
Bowles hopped out
of the
cab. "Keith, you come out
back and read the meters for
me,'' he said. ' 'Then
I'll go log us in,
and you two can
hash this thing out between
yourselves."
"Okay." Keith pulled
his door
open, inhaled deeply, savoring
the clean
city air. He strolled around
to the
back of the truck, wondering what
Bowles wanted to say. There
were no meters, of course; either
the truck
was empty
or it
was full. He opened his jacket,
letting in a hit of
cold air.
"Listen," Bowles hissed fiercely.
"You can do what you
want with that woman;
tell her anything you like.
But you
will keep your mouth
shut about me
looking at her papers. You got that? This is
Mummer business, boy, and you'd
best keep that in mind." He waited for Keith's
nod, then began the long walk
to the
dispatcher's shed.
Keith shrugged to
himself, returned to the cab.
If Bowles
wanted to play secret
agent, that was nothing to
him.
"I've been thinking,"
he said
to Fletch.
"We can take you out the
day after
tomorrow, if you're willing to
spend the day in the truck.
The dispatcher
won't like it, but Jimmy
can work it for you. He's
got influence."
"Why not
tomorrow?"
"It's the
first of January," Keith explained.
"Mummers Day. Everything will be closed down."
"And just
what the hell am I
supposed to do with myself
between then and now?
Sleep in the gutter?"
"I'll put you
up," Keith said unhappily. "I've got a spare
couch." He wasn't sure
he liked
this woman, and he had
a sick feeling he was going
to regret
the offer.
But for
the life
of him he couldn't see any
alternative.
When Bowles returned.
Keith briefed him on the
situation. The old man slapped
Keith's back. "Behave yourselves," he said with a
smirk.
Keith led
Fletch into his fourth-floor walk-up, and hung his nucleopore
on a
hook by the door. "You
can take
the bed," he said.
"I'll sleep on the couch,
I guess."
She wrinkled her
nose. "This place is a
dump. Don't you ever clean up
in here?"
"Well. ..." Keith
lifted a clutter of dirty
clothes from the floor, dumped them
into an already crowded closet.
Fletch wandered over to
the only
window that wasn't boarded over for
the winter,
jerked the shutters open.
'' Nice view
of the
harbor if you squint between
the buildings
on the
left," she said wryly. Keith
fed a
miserly few lumps of coal into
the stove,
starting a fire with twists
of papers
from last'week's Inquirer.
Fletch unslung her
binoculars, peered through them. "It's
too dark to make
out," she muttered. "But I
could swear that some of those
ships are coal burners. Even—Good
Lord! That looks like a converted
oil tanker.''
"Oh yeah, we
get all
kinds." He blew gently on
the fire,
anticipating its warmth. Another
few minutes
and he'd
be able to shed his coat.
"But those things
are old! Single-hull construction, with the bottom
rusting out and the rivets
popping loose. How can you people
allow that garbage in your
harbor?"
"What harm could
it do?"
Keith asked. "Any spill would
just wash downriver and
out to
sea. Living this close to
the Drift, you learn to appreciate
what you've got."
* » *
The dinner
plates were piled in the
sink, waiting for the nighttime water rates, when there
was a
knock at the door. Fletch, wearing one of Keith's
old sweaters
óver her fatigues,
answered it.
A dozen or
so tenants
stood in the hallway. "Mummers
Gift, Mummers Gift!" they chanted. A single
Mummer, still in street clothes, stood
to the
fore, holding a muslin sack
in one hand.
"Mummers Gift,"
Keith mumbled to Fletch by
way of
explanation. He scooped two rolls
of silver
dollars from a dresser drawer and
gave them to the Mummer.
The man
broke them open, poured
them into the sack. Keith
ruefully watched this year's
savings disappear, and smiled dutifully.
As was customary,
the Mummer
had started
drinking early. He was
a small
man, with a slightly bloated
face, and the flush of alcohol
accentuated the broken veins in
his nose.
"Paid in full," he announced. "Let the
revels continue!"
The tenants cheered
and poured
into the room. Like the
drinking, the floating party
was an
ancient and hallowed custom. Somebody
shoveled coal into the stove,
and somebody
else waved a jug
of grain
alcohol in the air. Keith
hastened to dig out his last
gallon of cider for mixer.
Jerry from the
third floor grabbed Keith's sleeve
and demanded
an introduction
to Fletch.
Keith apologized, and complied.
When they heard that she
had come
out of
the Drift, several of his more
superstitious friends made the sign
of the horns to ward off
mutation.
"No, she
didn't!"
"Really?"
"Come off
it—she'd be dead."
Fletch smiled politely.
"You only have to worry
about radiation exposure if you're
right on top of the
Meltdown site. For most of the
Drift, the only thing to
contend with is particulate matter. As long as
you don't
eat, drink, or breathe, you're safe."
They laughed,
but there
was an
uneasy edge to their laughter. The rich kid from
the ground
floor—her father had
money, and reputedly she
only worked three days a
week— tried to change
the subject.
"Keith said that you're a
scholar, Ms. Fletcher," she said.
"Yes, I was mining
the records
in Souderton
and—"
"Next tenant!" the Mummer bellowed. "Time
to move
the party on, we
can't hang around here all
night!" He bullied the party out
into the hallway. They went
willingly, even anxiously. Contrary to custom, Keith
and Fletch
were not invited along.
"Was it
something I said?" Fletch wondered.
"Yes," Keith
said. And tried to explain.
Souderton was the
last city within the Drift
to die.
Its contamination
levels were low, and the
city had strong and determined
leaders. For almost twenty years
after the Meltdown, Souderton had
thrived after a fashion. But
after two decades of water and
foodstuff laced with radioactive isotopes, the cancers and
birth defects and leukemias became
too widespread, too common
to be
ignored.
By popular account,
the panic
started at a mass town
assembly to discuss the problems.
An alternative
version was that an old woman
suffering a heart attack triggered
the hysteria.
However it began, it turned
into a wholesale evacuation of the city, a
mob of
thousands that fled like lemmings
toward Philadelphia.
They were
met at
the city
limits by a horde of
self-appointed vigilantes, men who were afraid
of mutation,
of radiation poisoning, of anything that
came out of the Drift.
Masked and hooded
men with
filters and rebreathers went into Souderton
the next
day with
rifles and mopped things up.
"See, I go out
there almost every day so
it doesn't
bother me. I tend to forget how everybody
else feels about the Drift,
though," Keith said. "And
I guess
there's a kind of inherited
fear of Souderton itself, of
what might have happened if
the refugees had gotten
through."
"More likely it's
inherited guilt." Fletch sat down
on the
edge of the bed,
unlaced her boots, let them
drop. "Time for me to hit
the sack.''
She pulled
off the
sweater.
Her breasts bounced
once beneath her shirt. They
sagged slightly, not much
for a
woman her age. Keith found
himself trying to picture
them in his mind. The
room was uncomfortably warm, even
stuffy. The single drink he
had had
made him almost dizzy.
"Uh, listen,"
he said.
"The bed's big enough for
two."
Fletch smiled scornfully.
"Back off, sonny," she said.
"You can sleep on
the couch
for one
night without rupturing
anything."
At dawn
they were awakened by the
sound of children running gleefully
through the streets, beating on
pots and pans with sticks, and
shrieking with all the power
in their
young lungs. Keith trudged down the
hall to the bathroom and
returned to find Fletch up
and dressed.
"How you doing this morning?" he forced himself to
say.
"Oh, a litde
stiff and creaky around the
joints, but not bad for a
woman who's just been run
over by a truck."
After breakfast they
lingered for a few hours
over cups of mixed chicory and
coffee—the only luxury Keith allowed
himself—before going to watch
the parade.
Fletch made no reference to the
previous night, and Keith found
himself almost liking her again.
They were out on Two
Street by late morning, in time
to see
the last
several Comic bands.
Fletch watched with
fierce interest as men in
feathers, in sequins, dressed as clowns,
as Indians,
as playing
cards, strutted by in
organized disarray. A female impersonator
tagging after one brigade
waggled enormous mock-breasts at her, turned
around, and flipped up frilly
petticoats to reveal grossly overstuffed underthings. She threw back
her head
and laughed.
"Do women
participate in this?" she asked.
"All I've seen are men."
' 'They used
to. They
were banned a long time
ago, just after the Meltdown."
The brass band
for the
Comic troupe, resplendent in feathers, mirrors, and cheap glitter,
was playing
"The Bummers Reel." Behind them
a ragtag
batch of clowns pulled a
wagon float labeled christmas
with truesduel. Atop it stood a
skinny man in baggy Santa
Claus suit, who handed wrapped presents to blindfolded policemen. "What does that
mean?" Fletch asked.
"There's a city
councilman named Scott Truesdale, and there was an incident
last May . . .
um, it's
kind of hard to explain if you're not familiar
with local politics."
"I get the
general picture," Fletch said. "I
imagine your Mr. Truesdale won't be
too amused
by this,
however."
'No." It was
the end
of Truesdale's
career, in fact, but Keith didn't
bother saying that.
The Comics, with
the brass
bands, floats, and slapstick anarchy,
continued to strut by. At
one point
Keith bought two soft pretzels from
a vendor
and introduced
Fletch to that old Philadelphia tradition. They were barely
warm and cost three cents for
the two,
a price
the vendor
could never had gotten away with
any other
day.
The groups
ranged from the bright and
gaudy to the bright and gaudy and inventive. Some, obviously, took themselves
more seriously than others.
By the
same token, these were not always
more fun to watch.
"Who's next?" Keith asked. The last
Comic band was strutting away, strewing
confusion and firecrackers in its
midst.
Through her glasses,
Fletch studied the banner that
led off
the group. "Looks like . . .
Center City Club. Would that
be right?"
'Yeah. That's the
first of the Fancies. After
them come the String Bands."
"How did
all this
begin?" Fletch asked. "How did
it get
organized? What's it all
for?"
Keith started to
answer, stopped, tried again: "Uh.
I don't think anybody can answer
those questions. My old man used
to talk
a lot
about the history of the
Mummers. You can trace them back
for centuries,
back to Colonial times when they
were just random gangs of
men wandering
around on the First,
shooting off guns and raising
hell. But you can't say when
they became Mummers.
They just
kind of evolved.''
"I see."
The Fancy club
was less
than a block away. A
hundred-fifty strong, they strutted in
neatly ordered rows, their ostrich-plume headdresses bobbing, the feathered,
mirrored, and bedangled "capes"—more
like false wings than capes,
for they towered above
the marchers
and out
to the
sides— dipping to the
odd cadence
of the
Mummer's strut.
"Who are they?"
Fletch asked, indicating a number
of darkly dressed, furtive figures slipping
quickly through the crowd, roughly parallel
to the
band.
"Don't look!" he hissed. "You're supposed to pretend you don't see them."
"But who
are they?"
"Men in Black.
They're the spotters. They locate
certain people and point
them out to the King
Clown for a tapping-out or . . .or
whatever," he finished
lamely. At her questioning glance, he added, "The
King Clown is their captain,
the one marching in
front. King Clown used to
be a
type of costume, but now there's
just the one."
Except for the
traditional face paint, King Clown's
costume was nothing like a
real clown's. His cape was
a full
twelve feet high, and
he glittered
with sequins and mirrors and even a bit of
diffraction grating, which must have
come from somebody's grandmother's
trunk. Two guylines led from the
tips of the cape to
his hands,
so he
could manage the ungainly costume in
the light
breezes that sometimes blew up. He
strutted with great dignity, occasionally
bowing slightly to each
side in acknowledgment of the
cheers that sprang up.
Keith indicated the
Men in
Black with a sideways nod
of his head. "Look. They've marked
somebody."
Four Men in
Black had slipped up on
an unsuspecting
watcher, quietly jostling people
aside to take up positions
immediately behind him.
The Center City
troupe Mummer-stepped briskly down Two Street,
banjos, glockenspiels, and horns not
playing but at ready and, for
an instant,
looked as if they would
pass the man by. Then King
Clown raised a gloved hand,
and they
stopped, wheeling ninety degrees
as one
man. The Clown strutted around the
troupe and into the crowd.
They nervously backed away from
him.
The Mummer chief
strode up to the marked
man. The victim flinched away,
found himself held firm by
the Men
in Black. He blanched. King Clown
stretched out his arms, took the man by the
shoulders.
One arm rose
once, twice, again. It fell
on the
man's shoulders with an
audible crack three times. Then
King Clown whirled, returning to his
troupe. The crowd cheered, and the band broke into
"Oh Dem Golden Slippers," turned, and marched
on. The
man from
the crowd
joined a modey band of followers
in mufti,
strutting happily after the troupe.
"What the
hell was that all about?"
Fletch asked.
"It was a
tapping-out. The man was a
candidate, and the Mummers have accepted
him. He's one of the
lucky ones."
"I wouldn't mind
knowing more about all this.
Do you
think I could get
an interview
with the captain?"
"Don't do it,"
Keith said tensely. "Don't have anything at all to
do with
the Mummers.
Just smile and watch the
parade."
"Why?"
"Forget I said
anything." Keith stared
down the street, ignoring her as
best he could. The Fancy
troupe approached, all glitter
and flash,
advancing, pausing, and advancing again in their odd half
dance, half march. It was off, Keith realized, and strange that it
took an out-of-towner's questions to make him aware
of such
a simple
fact.
King Clown's troupe
was parallel
to them,
marching past, when the signal came
again. They wheeled to face
the crowd.
King Clown strutted into
the crowd,
direcdy at Keith and Retch. Sweet Jesus, Keith prayed
silendy. Let it be somebody
else.
People backed away
and King
Clown stood before Fletch, placed his hands on her
shoulders. He waited a beat.
Then he leaned down and kissed
her gendy
on both
cheeks. She smiled brighdy at him
and dipped
a curtsey.
He turned
as if
to move away.
Then he whirled
again, and before Keith could
react, the gloved hands were on
his shoulders,
and he
was staring
into the man's bloodshot eyes. Keith
tried to jerk away, but
several pairs of hands held
him firm.
He could
see the
weave of the Clown's costume, could
smell the alcohol on his
breath.
Slowly, very slowly,
King Clown bent over and
kissed his cheeks.
In an
instant the restraining hands, Men
in Black,
King Clown, and all were gone.
The band
was Mummer-strutting
away, playing "Death March of a Marionette."
Fletch's eyes sparkled
and she
started to say something bright. Keith grabbed her hand,
yanked her into a crowd
that shrank away from
them. Fletch hung back laughingly,
and he gave her arm a
ferocious tug.
"Come on!"
"What's the
matter?"
"Shut up
and run!"
Away from
Two Street
the city
was virtually
empty. By law all citizens had
to watch
at least
the middle
third of the parade. This worked
to their
advantage—there was no
one about to report the direction
of their
flight—but it also made them visible
a long
way off,
if anyone
was already
on their
trail. Rounding a corner,
Keith came face to face
with a large, distraught black man.
For an
instant he thought he was dead,
and then
the man
had turned
and fled,
another victim like themselves.
"Why are
we running?"
Fletch gasped.
"Because they're trying
to kill
us." He would answer no
more of her questions.
He needed
all his
attention to escape.
As a boy
he had
played Mummer Hunt, both as
victim and assassin, with an intensity
rivaled only by the real
thing. So he fled from the
waterfront because he knew that
was the
first place the hunters
would search. He passed by
fire escapes and basement windows
that looked like they could
be forced for much the same
reason. North and west he
headed, toward the Mummer
Hall, which used to be
the art
museum.
Only when they'd
reached their goal did he
realize he'd had a goal in
mind at all. It was
a pre-Meltdown
parking garage, its four levels
gaping open to the winds.
Panting, he arrived at the
stairwell. It was dark and
too grittily
rubbled to take footprints. Once inside
they could ascend slowly, try
to regain their breaths. As they
climbed, Keith explained as best he
could.
After the burnings
and panic
murders of the Meltdown evacuations, Philadelphia's city government collapsed. There was no help to
be had
from the state, which had
just lost its capital, or from
the Feds,
who were
busy with several million refugees. The
self-destruction of New
York City in a conflagration of riots triggered a
world-wide depression almost as a
matter of course.
The only organized
power remaining in the city
was the
Mummers. Clowns and buffoons,
they existed only because they wanted to. Decent men, they
marched and collected money to keep
the last
hospitals going. When there were
no police, they organized volunteers to patrol the neighborhoods.
It wasn't
long before they controlled the city, and not
long after that before
they realized that fact.
The Kiss
began as a way of
flensing mutants and carriers of genetic disease from the
population. It was extended to
include those who refused vaccinations,
when the epidemics began. Finally its
potential as a political tool
was realized,
and no reasons were given.
The rooftop
was cold
and windy.
Bent over, Keith scuttled to the tool shed standing
in its
center and beckoned for Fletch
to follow.
"Push on
the upper-right
corner of the doorway there."
He grabbed the opposite
corner and tugged as she
did so.
After a heartbreaking instant's hesitation,
the door
lurched in its frame and tilted
askew. There was a gap
wide enough to crawl inside.
Keith led the
way and,
when Fletch crawled after, slammed the door shut with
the heel
of his
palm. "I found a keg of
tenpenny nails here when I
was a
kid," he said. "Rusty, but I
sold them for scrap. So
probably nobody else has figured out
how to
get in.
"Very clever,"
Fletch said. "Now that we're
trapped in here, what do we
do next?"
"Look. I think
I've done pretty good so
far," Keith said angrily. "At least
I've bought some time to
think." He paced the shed—it wasn't
large, maybe eight by ten
feet—his footing unsure on
the rotting
burlap sacks that littered the
floor. "Why don't you come up with something? You're the one who got me into this
mess, miss hotshot reporter.''
"So you
know about that," she said.
"Bowles looked through
your pockets. Jesus Christ!— what kind of monster story
were you working on to
get the
Mummers so upset?" It was cold inside
the workshed.
Dim light seeped through vacant nailholes
in the
roof. He could see Fletch watching
him steadily,
a vague
gray figure.
"Could we sneak
aboard one of the ships
going to Boston?" she asked.
" 'Could we
sneak aboard one of the
ships going to Boston?' "
he mimicked
her bitterly.
"No, we could not.
There'll be Mummer
agents at every—I can't believe how you've messed
up my
life! You know, I was
doing okay until you came along.''
"Keith," Fletch
said quiedy.
"At least
I didn't
have half of Philadelphia trying to gun me down!"
"Keith."
He stopped,
looked at her. "Yeah?"
"Stop ranting, and
tell me how we're going
to get
out of
here alive."
He angrily thrust
his hands
in his
pockets. There was a slight jangle
of metal
objects, a few copper coins,
a salvageable
nail or two—and his key
ring.
"God damn," he whispered. He drew
out the
ring, triumphantly separated
out the
key to
his tanker
truck. "Hey, I may not be
dead after all."
"Let me see."
Fletch snapped her fingers and
extended her hand. He could tell
by her
expression that she had already
deduced his plan.
Keith shoved his
keys back in his pocket.
"Forget it. I don't trust you,
and I
can't think of a single
reason to take you along. You've
been deadweight so far, and
I might
be better off without you entirely."
There was a
brief silence. "I see." Something rustled in the gloom.
"You want your quid pro
quo." With a faint slumping sound, Fletch's kaftan fell
to the
floor.
"I don't—what
do you
mean?"
Fletch advanced
a step,
her eyes
steady, her voice preter-naturally calm. "You can take
what you want, can't you?
I can't exacdy yell for help."
"Hey, I-"
"It's understandable. You're a man, and
you've got me alone. Happens all
the time."
She was quite
close now. Keith flinched back.
"You're twisting what I
said."
Her expression
was scornful.
"But you are a man,
aren't you? I mean . .
. you
can still
perform?"
Outraged, Keith seized
her arms.
Cloth bunched up under his angry,
clutching fingers. For an instant
the tableau
held, then he released her, dropping
his head
in embarrassment.
"Hey, I'm sorry," he said, "I really
didn't mean to—"
"Oh, come
here." She pulled him back
to her.
Their lovemaking was almost tender. Fletch
spread out her kaftan to protect
them from the icy-cold burlap
sacks, and they undressed kneeling atop
it. Some
of what
they did was new to Keith,
but he
assumed from her lack of
criticism, indeed her passionate
response, that she could not
tell.
When it was
over, Fletch tugged and jerked
the robe
about the two of them like
a thick,
heavy blanket. It was warm
within the robe, and
tangled within it, Keith felt
oddly secure and sure of himself.
He felt
a sudden,
childish urge to shout or yodel
or laugh
with glee.
"I would've taken
you along
anyway," he said, not knowing
whether it was true or
not. "You really didn't have
to . . . you know."
Fletch laid a
finger on his lips. "It's
better this way. Now we can
operate as a team."
It was
perhaps three in the morning
before they made their move. They slipped through the
streets cautiously, every sense
brisding, avoiding the policed sections.
It took
an effort
to walk slowly, to
keep from hunching shoulders and
scut-ding from shadow to shadow.
Keith was drenched
with sweat by the time
they made it to the Company's
parking lot. Row upon row
of trucks
stretched into the darkness;
all was
still. He paced off the
way to Slot 97.
Laying a hand on
the cold
doorhandle, he grinned and whispered, "I'm begining to think
this might work." He yanked the
door open.
"Stupid," Jimmy Bowles said. "Very stupid, brother man."
Keith jerked
back reflexively, froze. Bowles was
sitting in the cab, a gun
in one
hand. It was pointed straight
at Keith.
"You've really blown
it," Bowles marveled. A corked
bot-de, half full of some
dark fluid, lay in Bowles'
lap. Its label was nearly rubbed
away from endless handlings and
refill-ings.
Behind Keith,
Fletch shifted her weight ever
so subdy.
The gun flicked in
her direction.
"Don't you move,
bitch!" The veins in Bowles'
forehead stood out angrily.
He passed
his free
hand over his brow, wiping away sweat. Keith realized
that the man was deeply,
dangerously drunk.
Bowles' eyes glared
at Keith
for an
instant, then dropped. His face underwent
a strange
alteration of expression, becoming almost
maudlin. "Listen, buddy, I didn't
know they would bang on you.
I just
passed the word about your
lady friend's papers up the line,
the way
I was
supposed to." He groped absendy for
the botde,
uncorked it one-handed. "And
then a few hours later
they called me up to
the Hall—in a car,
man, can
you believe
that?—to say it all over
again to the big
cats. And they decided to
bang the both of you." He took a long
swig from the bottle, holding
his head
sideways and watching them
from the corners of his
eyes. "I did my best, man.
Told them you didn't know
from nothin', but the word was
to bang
you both."
As he talked,
Bowles had let the gun
sink slowly to rest on
his knees. His eyes
were unfocused, half lost in
introspection. Keith mentally took
a deep
breath. It's now or never,
he thought. He dove for the
gun.
There was time
enough to take in an
incredible amount of detail. The clumsy
way his
body moved, not at all
smoothly, not at all responsive to his will, so
that he more fell than
leaped upon Bowles. The
way Bowles'
hand jerked up involuntarily, the gun's muzzle wobbling
in a
jagged S through the air. The
way his
hands connected with Bowles' wrist,
pushing past cold steel,
gripping aged sinew. Contact made,
the hand flew up
and to
the side,
and with
a shattering
roar, the gun went off.
Keith found himself
stomach down on the seat,
gun clutched maniacally in both hands.
He choked
it by
the barrel,
by the
back of the stock. There
was a
fierce ringing in his ears. His
palms tingled.
Jimmy Bowles stared
stupidly at a hole in
the cab's
roof. "Aw, man, you
didn't have to do that,"
he mummbled.
Fletch touched Keith's
shoulder, put a hand beneath
the gun. He straightened his fingers
slowly, letting the gun drop.
She snapped it up,
held it trained on Bowles.
Bowles ignored it.
"Didn't think I could go
through with it," he said, almost
to himself.
Then, "Take the truck, man."
He opened
the door,
unsteadily climbed out. With a
glance at Fletch, Keith
straightened, slid behind the wheel,
put the key in
the ignition.
As they eased
out of
the lot,
Bowles was standing alone in
Slot 97 crying drunkenly.
They crashed
the barrier
at top
speed, almost 70 kph, leaving
splinters of wood flying behind
them. The Mummer agents, caught unprepared,
fired after them. Three bullets
went through the body
of the
tanker, making hollow, gong-ing noises.
Fortunately the tank was empty,
and its
last cargo apparently not flammable. Something ricocheted about the
underside of the truck,
as the
guards tried to shoot out
the tires. Keith kept going.
Just beyond
the barrier
some joker had put up
a sign
reading: RADIOACTIVE
CONTAMINATION. DRIVE FAST. He proceeded to do just that.
"I don't
like the idea of going
through the Drift," he said.
"You can think
of a
better way to lose them?
Take an old combat reporter's advice, son. Move fast
and don't
look back. Hey, isn't this where
you hit
me?"
"No, it's
a few
miles on." The truck crested
a hill,
and he
pointed off to their
left. "See that blue glow
just below the horizon?"
"Yeah." It was
a light,
eerie smear in the distant
black land. No trees obscured it,
and it
had a
curious liquid quality.
"Cherenkov radiation. When the Meltdown happened,
there were five trucks
loaded with fuel rods they
tried to get out. The state
police turned them back somewhere
around here, so they drove them
into the swamps. It makes
a good
landmark. Your bike's somewhere
beyond there."
"Well, keep a
sharp eye out for the
spot. I want my saddlebags
back.
Keith discovered
the hole
in the
fuel tank when they stopped for the bags. A
dribble of alcohol was leaking
out, one slow, steady drop at
a time.
The bullet
along the underside of the
truck had apparently sent a
sliver of something through the tank
and, in the process, damaged
the fuel
gauge. Neither Keith nor
Fletch could think of any
way to
fix it. "We should head east,"
Keith suggested. "Get as far
out of the Drift as we
can before
it dies."
"Will the
Mummers follow us into the
Drift?"
"Yes."
"Then New
Jersey's not good enough. We
go north."
The engine breathed
its last
at dawn.
Following Fletch's directions, he
let the
truck glide to a halt
just off the road in
a stand of stunted pines.
Because of the
bullet hole in the cab's
roof, they were both wearing their masks already. Fletch
hopped out, slid her rifle
from its sheath in
the saddlebags,
and snapped,
"Let's get moving. You take the
bags and I'll lead. Don't
step in any patches of snow.
We can't
afford to leave a trail."
Keith shouldered the saddlebags and followed
her down
the road the way
they had come for perhaps
a quarter
of a
kilometer, and then up
a slope
on the
opposite side from the abandoned truck. In places the
ground crunched beneath his feet, and
climbing the slope was hard
work.
"Hey, we've
been running a long time,"
Keith grumbled.
"We'll rest at
the top
of the
hill. Right now we're exposed."
The sun had
risen slightly, and shone weakly
through the clouds by the time
they could rest. The sky
was white
and gray, almost colorless. The endless
hills beneath were not much better.
They huddled behind a tangle
of thorny
bushes, near to a
cluster of spruce trees whose
needles had a distinctly brownish tinge.
A half
hour passed.
"Here they come,"
Fletch said. "Following our trail."
She peered through her
binoculars, careful to keep them
in shadow.
With a low
growl, three four-wheel-drive vehicles swung
into view. They sped
down the roadway in formation,
coming to a halt by
the abandoned
tanker. Six dark figures climbed out, swarmed over the
site. They moved quickly, alertly, keeping each other covered
at all
times. After ten minutes, they returned
to their
vehicles and moved on down
the road, at a
much slower-pace.
Fletch stood. "They
go that
way and
we go
this way," she said with satisfaction.
"Let's go, kid. Miles to
go before
we sleep, you know."
They were
trudging up an endless country
road, detouring around the scattered patches
of snow.
The sun
was failing.
Keith stepped on a
cancerous-looking growth, bent
achingly to scoop it up and
throw it into the lifeless
woods at the side. ".
. .
snow," Fletch said. Her voice
was muffled
by the
nucleopore and Keith couldn't
make out her words.
"What did
you say?"
he asked,
annoyed.
"I said it's like snow!"
Then, seeing his difficulty, she fell back a step.
"The steam explosions were like
a geyser.
They sent particulate matter up where
the winds
could catch it, and it filtered
down like snow. Even then,
it still
got blown
about, so you'll have
bare spots and hots spots
throughout the Drift.
The concentrations
are still
too small
to see,
but you can gauge them by
their effects."
She stopped near
an old
stone farmhouse nesded within an
almost healthy-looking stand of
trees, and did a quick
scan of their limited horizons through
her binoculars.
Save for a collapsed front porch, the house
was virtually
intact. "Not bad," she
said. "We'll stay here tonight."
They forced the
lock on the kitchen door,
and chocked
it shut with an old dresser.
The interior
was untouched
from the time of the evacuations.
Cigars moldered in a humidor
atop the refrigerator. A child's drawing taped
to a
cupboard crumbled on being
touched.
There was a
wood stove in the living
room. They broke up furniture for firewood and heated
tins of beef from Fletch's
saddlebags. They had to
lift their nucleopores for each
bite, replacing them immediately
after.
When they were
done, Fletch scooped up the
empty meat tins and took them
outside. She paused on the
stoop, cocked her head. "Listen," she said.
Keith joined her,
strained his ears. After a
moment he caught it—a long, almost
musical howl. A pause, and
there was another, equally faint howl
in reply.
"Some kind of mutated dogs,"
Keith said. "I've seen them.
Big, shaggy animals, like wolves."
"Actually, they're a
hybrid," Fletch said. "A perfecdy
natural cross between a
dog and
a wolf.
They migrated down from Maine a
few years
back, and now they're expanding
through the Drift." She paused. "Good luck to them, say
I."
Keith stared into
the darkness.
But trees
blocked his vision, and there
was no
chance of his seeing the
animal. "Hybrid, mutant, what's the
difference?" he asked.
Fletch gawked at
him. "They really do keep
you poor
sods ignorant, don't they?"
she marveled.
She threw
the tins
away from the house.
They fell with a clatter.
"The only mutations you have
to worry
about coming out of the
Drift are the new diseases
that pop up every year."
She stood
still, listening. "No animals. Usually
there'll be rats at least,
in the
safe spots." She shrugged.
"Oh well, I still say
we're okay. Beddy-bye time for me."
She led the
way into
the house,
leaving him to slide the
dresser back against the
door. When Keith got to
the living
room, she had dropped
her robe
and was
shedding her shirt. Her breasts were
freckled, and they swayed gracefully
as she
moved. Keith watched them,
fascinated, wondered did he really want
to make
love to this woman again?
The passion
of the previous night had a
strong hold on him, and
yet it
was tinged with distaste, as if
it had
been something shameful and unclean.
Fletch caught his
glance, looked amused. "Not tonight,
boyo. You'll be stiff
enough in the morning as
it is."
Keith awoke
feeling crippled. Fletch had him
out on
the road before he was awake
enough to protest. They passed
bleak hours on tedious
roads that Fletch puzzled out
from a pre-Meltdown Geodesic
Survey map.
Once they had
to flee
the road
and hide
when a distant growl warned them
of an
approaching four-wheeler. They watched
it go
past, two of the Mummer
assassins in its seat. Still later
they were attacked by a
feral cat, a small orange-and-white animal whose
ancestors had been domestic pets. It ran at them
yowling when they had paused
for lunch, and Fletch had to
club it to death with
the stock
of her
rifle.
She turned over
the small
carcass with her boot. "See
right there?" she asked.
"That big sore on its
side? It must've made its lair
in a
hot spot.
It came
down with radiation sickness, and the pain made
it crazy
enough to attack us."
"Fletch," Keith said wearily, "when are we going to
be out of this hellish place? I don't
know how much more of
this I can take."
She gathered
him into
her arms,
gave him a hug. "There,
there. I've got friends
not far
from here. There's a small
community of Drifters I
know of. They're all outcasts
and vagabonds, but reliable
in their
own way.
When we get there we can
rest—maybe tonight, if we're lucky."
Two days
passed. A noontime sun was
shining when they reached the mouth
of a
small, shallow valley. A handful
of nineteenth-century buildings were
clustered below, two or three from
the mid-twentieth
anomalously mingled in. "There
it is,"
Fletch said. She began loading
needlelike projectiles into her rifle.
"What's its
name?"
"Nameless."
Keith couldn't tell
from her answer whether the
community was called Nameless or
simply lacked a name. But
he was weary and short-tempered from three days of
forced marches and sexless
nights, and he was damned
if he
was going to ask. "Not much
to look
at."
Fletch grunted,
flicked the safety on her
rifle.
It was a
short thing, the rifle, about
the length
of a
sawed-off shotgun. The stock was
carved to fit her forearm,
the trigger
was far
up along
its length,
and its
barrel, though of normal thickness, had a surprisingly small muzzle. Keith thought, not for the first
time, how handy it would
have been back in Philadelphia.
Fletch removed her
mask, stowed it in a
kaftan pocket. "This valley's
one of
the clean
spots I told you about,
but you should keep your mask
on anyway.
Just in case. When we go
inside, though, take it off.
These people are touchy. Say as litde as possible.
Don't criticize anything. Don't start
any fights."
"Some friends,"
Keith snorted.
Fletch raised the
rifle so that its barrel
rested against her shoulder and its
muzzle pointed skyward. She led
the way
down.
The cluster
of buildings
had once
been the industrial core of a
small mill town. Over the
years the outlying houses had
' been torn down, bit by
bit, for building supplies, for
firewood, sometimes just for the
sake of doing something. Now all that remained was
a miscellany
of old
factory buildings bordering a small, swift-running
river. Sheds and stone additions
choked the narrow streets, making
the whole
a combination
windbreak and maze.
There were flickers
of movement
in the
higher windows as they walked past,
faces that appeared and were
gone, like goldfish coming to the
fore of their bowls and
whisking away. "There must be a
hundred people in this warren,"
Keith whispered, awed. "What
do they
all do?"
"Whatever they
have to. Now shut up!"
They turned a
corner, came face to face
with an ancient gas station. Its
windows were boarded over, and
towers of old tires almost obscured
it from
view. Keith wondered what possible use anyone could have
for them,
did not
ask. A bell over the door
jangled as they went in.
The interior was
a packrat's
fantasy. Dimly lit by alcohol,
lamps were clutters and
tangles and piles of fishing
equipment, furniture, musical instruments, wood stoves—a thousand items,
all battered
and old,
all obviously
looted from homes abandoned during the
Meltdown. A pale, pockmarked face appeared in the
shadowy rear. "You after girls?" it asked.
"Hell no," Fletch
said. She slid the rifle
into its sheath, almost unbalancing
Keith with the sudden weight
in the
saddlebags he still carried. The
face advanced, became a tall,
vacant-eyed man with a
slouch belly. She threw him
a silver
nickel, and he snagged
it out
of the
air. "I want two beers
and whatever slop you're
serving today."
The man stared
at them
silendy. "Tables to the rear,"
he said, and was gone.
Fletch went back
to sit
down. Keith remained standing, poking through the mounds of
objects. He came across a mirror, wiped
the grime
from it. His reflection was grim. Mean lines around
the mouth,
a scowl
creasing his forehead. He blinked, trying
to erase
the wildness
in his
eyes. No good. A smile was
gobbled up by his mask.
He pushed
it down.
A red triangle of chafe marks
remained. He touched them lighdy with a fingertip, pushed the uncombed hair
back from his forehead. Still he
retained the look of a
hunted animal.
Keith took a
deep breath of air that
rushed into his lungs so
readily he felt momentarily
dizzy. To hell with it,
he decided;
he was not going to put
his mask
back on until they left.
"Susie!"
A gigantic,
black-bearded man exploded from the rear
of the
room. He rushed forward, flung
his arms
around Fletch, lifted her
into the air.
Keith had instinctively
grabbed for Fletch's rifle, but
drew back when he heard her
laugh happily. "Bear, you old
pirate!" She hugged
him, thumped his back vigorously.
They sat at
the table.
Keith drew up a chair
and joined
them. "But what are
you doing
here?" Fletch asked.
"Didn't you have business"—she
lowered her voice—"along the coast?"
"Haw! It was
a setup.
They've got a new administration
that's cracking down on
smuggling, much good it'll do
them. But I've got friends, yes,
and they
warned me away." He shifted his head toward Keith.
"He's okay, right?"
Fletch nodded, performed
introductions. Bear was
about Fletch's age, perhaps
a little
older, and he had a
bit of
a paunch that bulged over the
table whenever he leaned forward.
"We met when I was
covering the Northern Liberation Front," Fletch told Keith.
"The guerillas set up their
camps in the Drift
because the government troops wouldn't
go after them."
The pale man
brought their beers and two
bowls of watery-looking stew.
Bear waited for him to
leave, then said quiedy, "Listen, Susie. I can see
you're planning to rest here
a day or so, but I
think maybe you and your
young friend here should come stay
with me in my cabin
instead." A stray beam of
light glinted on a single
gold earring in his matted
hair.
Fletch was
all serious
attentiveness. "Why?"
"I was here
two days
ago, visiting the"—he looked embarrassed—"the girls in
back. And some men came
in, asking questions about you. So
I decided
to hang
around, in case you might need
some help maybe. But they
looked like killers to me. Six
or eight
of them.
Southern accents."
'' Philadelphia
accents?''
"Yeah, I think."
"Damn." Her finger
tapped the table. "Finish your beer, Keith. Bear, have
you still
got your
buggy?"
"Out back. I've
got my
own fuel
still, too. I'm a rich man!"
The buggy
was an
open-pit four-wheel drive, and Bear
drove it like a
madman. Huddled between Bear and
Fletch, Keith concentrated on keeping warm
and worried
for the
first time about frostbite.
The others
chattered happily over his head, ignoring
him and
his' misery.
"We're here!" Bear roared finally. He
drove the buggy along a nearly
nonexistent road, across a rough
stretch of meadow, and under a
stand of gnarled elms. While
Bear was covering the vehicle with
a tarp,
Keith looked about for the
cabin. He couldn't see
it.
"Back this way."
Bear led them up through
the trees
and gestured with a mittened hand.
"How do you like it?
Not much, but it's home, hey?"
The cabin was
built into the slope of
a steep
hillside. A log wall with one
window and a door and
a bit
of wood-shingled
roof were all that
showed.
Bear scooped an
armful of wood from a
stack beside the door, led them
inside. He talked rapidly, as
if trying
to make
a good appearance for a cabin
that looked like nothing much.
"Built it myself," he said. "Dug it
into the hill, so the
earth kinda evens out
the temperature.
I scavenged
a lot
of styrofoam, packed it
between the walls and the
earth. Doesn't need much
heating wood. Leave it alone
and it
stays about thirteen-degrees C constant. Summer
and winter."
"Very nice,"
Keith said politely, not meaning
it.
Fletch studied the
cabin judiciously, thumping the walls
with her fist. She
came to an inside door,
raised an eyebrow. "Root cellar," Bear explained. Fletch smiled.
"So this is
your fabled cabin," she said
admiringly. "I never thought
I'd actually
be here."
She examined
the shelves crammed with boxes and
sacks that covered two walls, while Bear pulled out
prodigious amounts of bedding from several trunks.
He spilled a
final armful onto the floor,
then stopped and looked ruefully at
the mound
he'd created, as if seeing
it for
the first time. "That
may be
a bit
much," he mumbled embarrassedly.
"Do you really
think so?" Fletch asked innocently.
Their eyes met and they both
laughed in a warm and
comfortable way. Their laughter
died down, but they remained
staring into one another's eyes.
"Keith," Fletch
said. "Maybe you should run
outside."
"That's a good idea,"
Bear said. He thrust Fletch's
binoculars into Keith's hands. "Play
with these for a while."
He winked in a warm, conspiratorial
fashion, gently pushed Keith toward the
door.
Keith stumbled outside.
Someone kicked the door shut
behind him. He heard the
beginning of an intimate chuckle
and hastened away.
It was cold outside. A wisp
of smoke
rose from the cabin's flue and disappeared a few
feet up into the gray
sky. Keith wandered off to one
side and came up against
a bramble-choked
ravine. It was unpassable; he chunked a rock
down it, but didn't hear the
splash of water.
Choking with rage,
Keith slammed a fist against
a gnarled
tree trunk. Wood crumbled
away, leaving a bite-shaped gap in the tree. He
felt sick and confused. Could
he really
be jealous
of a
man twice
his age?
Not long
ago he
hadn't even been sure he wanted
to make
love with Fletch a second
time. They had made love only
once, and then under special
circumstances, with death
nipping at their heels; Fletch
had shown
no interest since. He
had told
himself repeatedly that she was
too weary or that
she had
a low
sex drive
and required
the spice of immediate danger to
arouse her. But the tryst
with Bear disproved both theories.
There was only
one answer:
Fletch had used him. He
held no sexual interest for her;
she's needed a way out
of Philadelphia,
and she
had bought
it.
Well grow up,
kid, he told himself. Welcome
to the
real world. But unbidden memories arose
in his
mind, of her flesh, of their
vigorous coupling, images that were
at once
compelling and newly repulsive.
Keith stumbled away
from the ravine, trying to
control his thoughts. He raised the
binoculars to his eyes, scanned
the horizon in an attempt to
distract himself. Beneath the amplified image of dead and
winter-barren trees, something moved.
A needle.
Set inside
the binoculars
was an
unmarked graduated scale, with
a small
red pointer
that sprang up when the glasses
were raised to the horizontal.
The needle pointed
to a
position barely on the scale.
Keith shifted the binoculars and the
reading held steady. Raise the
glasses to the sky,
lower them to the ground,
and the
needle sank below the scale. Hold
them steady and the position
was constant, wherever they were pointed,
at rock
or hillside,
at darkness or light.
The view through
the binoculars
misted over and was replaced
with an involuntary inner vision
of Fletch
and Bear
pleasuring each other on
the cabin
floor. Keith blinked angrily, shoved
the glasses
back into their case, stalked
on down
the slope a way.
His feet
were growing numb. He stamped
them against the ground,
wishing the two would hurry
up and get done.
Some time
later, Fletch appeared in the
doorway and waved him in. He
entered sullenly, made straight for
the wood stove, and hunched over
it, holding
his hands
to the
warmth and rubbing them
together. From the corner of
his eye he could not avoid
seeing Bear pulling his trousers
up. The man's pubic hair was
black against his pale skin,
and Keith had to admit inwardly
that Bear was better endowed
than himself. This helped
things not one bit.
For the rest
of the
afternoon and on through the
evening, Bear and Fletch talked avidly
of politics
in the
Greenstate Alliance up north and
of goings-on
within the Drift. Keith listened
quietly, having nothing to contribute.
He learned
a little, but, for the most
part, the dialogue relied on
knowledge of previous events that
he lacked
and was
absolutely meaningless to him.
He feel
asleep to their bright, relaxed
chatter.
Something roared
at the
foot of the hill, a
great bass noise that peaked and
fell and slowly grew less
as it
became more distant. Keith's eyes flew
open. It was late night,
and the
Cabin was flooded with
gray shadow. "Fletch?"
he said.
"Bear?" The cabin was
empty.
Keith went to
the door,
stood shivering in the cold.
Downslope there was no
shadow where Bear's buggy had
been. The distant noise
dwindled, faded away. He had
been abandoned.
Stunned, he went
back inside, built up the
fire, lit an alcohol lamp.
What did he do now?
He was
somewhere within the Drift, with not
the foggiest
idea of what roads led
out and
an unknown number of Mummer assassins
scouring the countryside looking for
him. His eye was suddenly
caught by a square of something
white.
It was a
sheet of paper. Fletch had
left her saddlebags behind, open
and partially
emptied, with a note atop
them. The inner seam of one
bag had
been ripped open and something—it must have been thin
and flat
and slightly
flexible to be hidden there—removed.
The rifle
was gone
too. Keith picked up the note.
It began
without preamble.
Heading
for coast—Bear thinks he can get me on a ship for Boston. Suggest you keep
heading north. Am leaving you most of my supplies & yr partner's gun.
Binocs contain ionization meter—don't sleep anywhere that registers over halfway
mark. I put a checkmark on map where Nameless is. If you can't figure it out, Bear should be back
in a day or two & can help.
Angrily, he
crumpled the note and threw
it on
the floor.
"God damn you to
hell, Suzette Fletcher,"
he said
aloud. The words seemed foolish and
childlishly spiteful even as he
said them. He took
a deep
breath and tried to calm
himself.
To his surprise,
it was
not all
that difficult. There was a
certain grim satisfaction in knowing the worst:
that he had been used and
then discarded, that Fletch felt
no more
than a passing affection for him
at best,
of the
sort one might bestow on a
stray dog without the least
intention of bringing it home.
In a way, the knowledge was
easier to handle than the
sullen suspicion of it
had been.
He knelt
to take
inventory of the saddlebags.
He worked
briskly, shoving back inside those
items he might need and tossing
aside those he saw no
use for.
He lacked a knife and plundered
Bear's possessions until he found one—an
Arkansas toothpick with a leather
sheath— and clipped it to his
belt. The ionization counter would
come in handy. He set the
binoculars carefully beside the bags
and began studying the map.
Keith had about
decided he could make his
way out
of the
Drift if only he
could retrace his way back
to Nameless,
when he heard another noise. Dousing
the lamp,
he picked
up his
pistol and went outside.
There was a
deep growling beyond the hills,
a changing
chord of four bass
lines that rose and fell
independent of each other, one growl
significantly louder than the rest.
Crouching in the cold, Keith
tried to place its direction.
East? West? It echoed and rebounded,
rose and fell, so that
there was no hope of getting
a fix
on it.
A pale
moon floated high in the
sky, visible at rare
intervals through gaps in the
clouds. The noise grew.
Below and to
his left
a stretch
of road
was visible
through a break in the trees.
A shadow
slid across it. Keith shifted
position, moving behind an outcropping
boulder, and waited.
A buggy careened
to a
halt below, and two figures
jumped out. They were immediately running up the slope,
one with
long graceful strides, and
the other
lumbering after.
Three gray shadows
slipped across the distant roadway.
The roar of engines
peaked briefly, treble notes coming
together in a high, angry
whine.
Keith drew a
bead on the leader of
the two
coming up the hill, wondered whether
he'd actually be able to
shoot, to kill a human being
in cold
blood.
"You'd better have
some damn fine weapons up
there," the lead figure
called over her shoulder. Fletch.
Keith lowered his pistol.
"Weapons I got,"
Bear shouted back. "Miracles I'm fresh out of.''
"We'll make
our own."
They ran past
him, Fletch sparing a single
cool glance in passing, and into
the cabin.
Shoving the gun into his
belt, Keith followed.
Bear was wresding
a large
chest from one of the
shelves. "I'm pretty sure
I nailed
that fink from back in
town," he grunted. "You can bet
they wouldn't've been waiting for
us without his help. Bastard! If
he got
away, I'll go back and
finish him."
Keith smiled
sardonically. "Welcome back, Fletch." "Later. What've you
got?"
Bear rummaged through
the box,
yanking things out and tossing them across the floor.
"Incendiary grenades. Bando-
Hers. One of
those Israeli machine guns from—what
was the
war again?"
"Before my
time."
"It's a museum
piece, anyway. But it's in
perfect working order, so maybe I'll
use it."
"Got into
a Hide
trouble, did you?"
"Give me that,"
Fletch said, reaching for a
new weapon
Bear had uncovered. "I'm pretty good with
those."
Keith's coolness faded
as the
two armed
themselves, stead-fasdy paying him no
attention. He was not at
all sure
that he was on Bear's and
Fletch's side, but he knew
that the Mummers would consider
him so.
The growl of
approaching vehicles died. Bear grabbed
his weaponry, bolted for the door.
"I'll take the
left," he threw over his
shoulder. "Tell the kid how to
provide some distraction, and take
the right."
"Gotcha." Fletch took her
rifle and thrust it into
Keith's hands. It felt
odd. He realized that he
didn't even know how to fire
it. She
flipped something on the side
of the
stock. "Okay, now the
safety's off The rifle's ready.
I want
you to
lie down flat in
the back
of the
cabin—they're shooting uphill, so they'll probably
fire over you. Shoot at
the sky,
understand? Don't try to take
any of
them out when I'm somewhere
in front
of you—just
provide distraction."
"Dammit, I can fight
too!" Keith said.
"Like hell. Now,
this thing's a compression launcher. The projectiles
are small
rockets; they ignite about halfway
up the
barrel, so the thing
has a
hell of a kick, remember
that. The needles hit at supersonic
velocities, and the shock wave
ruptures every internal organ in
the body.
If you
have to, don't shoot fancy, aim
at the
middle of the body. Anywhere
you hit
is lethal. You've got
a hundred
shots, and don't forgot to
save the last for
yourself. You stick the muzzle
in your
mouth and aim up. Got all
that?"
"Yeah, sure,"
he mumbled.
"Sure you
do." She tousled his hair,
ran for
the door,
paused just behind it.
A needle of
red light,
so brief
it almost
wasn't there, lanced through the cabin,
leaving a small charred hole
in the
front wall, and another at an
angle to it in the
back.
"Laser pistols," Fletch snorted. "Kiddie weapons!" She was gone.
Three more needles
of light
laced the cabin. Keith threw
himself to the floor
to the
rear, as directed. Whatever weird
weapon Fletch was handling
made high, almost whistling shrieks. There was a small
explosion, followed by the chatter
of Bear's machine gun.
Keith suddenly remembered
the rifle,
lifted it, pointing its muzzle up and through the
window. He squeezed the trigger
and the window exploded
outward, in a fountain of
glass and casement splinters. There was
a deafening
boom as the projectile went supersonic,
and the
stock slammed into Keith's shoulder, numbing
it, half
rolling him over. He fired
again, sending a shot
through the roof. Another incredible
roar.
Plaster, earth, bits
of wood
showered down. There was a
hole the size of
a giant's
fist in the ceiling.
Four threads of
laser light winked in and
out of
existence, one after the
other. Keith's eyes flooded with
tears as he realized how
right Bear and Fletch had
been to leave him behind.
He was confused, almost panicked, of
no use
in a
battle that required keeping one's wits.
Somewhere both Fletch
and Bear
were running, shouting. Their
weapons clattered high and low.
An incendiary
grenade went off, turning night
to day
for an
instant, and there was a hideous,
garbled scream.
Blindly Keith fired
shot after shot, just barely
remembering to aim above the
horizon. A laser burst struck
the hanging alcohol lamp, exploding it,
spilling a gout of alcohol
over the wood stove.
With a whoomp, the alcohol was
ignited by the hot iron
stove. Flames reached up
toward the ceiling, licked against
the wall. A dribble
of alcohol
running across the wooden floor went up and Keith
tried futilely to beat it
out with
slaps of his jacketed arm. The
flames grew and spread.
Time and again
laser bursts pierced the walls
but, as promised, they were always
too high.
The cabin
was heating
up now, and smoke
gathering below the ceiling. Some
of it
slipped out the hole
in the
roof, but more was generated
than left. The cabin was filling
with smoke. Keith gasped and
choked. Assassins or no,
he had
to get
out.
He crawled to
the door,
peeked out at floor level.
He could
see nothing. It was
quieter outside now. There was
a short
burst of weapons fire,
then silence. Sweat beaded on
his forehead.
He drew
himself into a crouch, and
ran.
The front wall
was burning
now. As the cool night
air hit
him, Keith was involuntarily
reminded of a time from
his childhood, when a
bunch of neighborhood kids had
torched a house in an abandoned
section of Philadelphia. They'd ringed the building, standing with
sticks and old baseball bats, waiting for the rats
to come
out. Then, when the rats
were forced out, maddened
with pain, their fur ablaze,
they'd methodically clubbed the
animals to death.
Keith ran downslope,
flung himself to the ground.
He peered into the darkness, circles
swimming in front of his
eyes as they adjusted.
He thought
he detected
motion there and down there.
He snapped his
rifle toward a sudden bulking
of shadow
downslope, and almost fired
before he recognized the silhouette
as Bear.
A sliver
of light
passed neatly through Bear's head, and he fell. At
that same instant, an incendiary
grenade went off, briefly illuminating
a Mummer
assassin. He was on his feet,
running, and he twisted in
surprise at its sudden glare.
Awkwardly he fell on his
gun hand,
the laser
pistol skittering into the
night.
Keith shot at
the man,
not taking
time to aim. It made
a hell of a noise, and
probably hit nothing. His nerves
crawled, but there was no answering
fire.
Something hulked
to one
side. "Kid ..."
He whirled and
made a snap shot, almost
from instinct. The projectile
went supersonic with a shattering
crash, and the moon broke free
of the
clouds, briefly flooding the hillside
with dim light. He
saw Fletch.
He saw her
mouth open and neck arch
back, as if in the
throes of sexual agony.
Her blond
hair flew forward, back, lashed her face. Her arms
thrashed like a rag doll's,
impossibly fluid, each broken in
several places. She toppled over
backward, and he knew
even before he fell to
his knees
beside her body that she was
dead.
He reached out
gropingly, touched her face with
his fingers.
They came away warm and
sticky with blood. Fletch had another—final—nosebleed. Keith
squeezed his eyes shut, let them
fall open again. There were
no tears.
What kind of cold monster have
I become?
he asked
himself. He felt vacant, disbelieving—totally without emotion.
Fletch was
dead.
One pocket
of her
kaftan bulged, the corner of
a leather
case sticking out of
it. For
no reason
at all
he picked
up the
case, leaving bloody fingerprints
across its surface, and opened it. Her binoculars. For whatever purpose, perhaps
unconsciously, she had scooped
them up in the cabin.
Holding them in his hand,
he felt
strangely moved by the binoculars.
They affected him in a
way that
her corpse
could not. They had been hers. She had touched
them and used them and left
them briefly to his care.
Her spirit
was in
them.
Keith broke down
in great,
racking sobs, his tears totally
out of control. He threw back
his head
and gasped
for air,
greatly salty drops of
warm fluid running down his
cheeks, and along the seal of
his nucleopore.
The tears came
in a
gust, and when he fought
them down he was empty again,
cold and dry inside. You killed her, he told himself harshly. You shot her because she ditched you
and ran off with
Bear. Because you felt rejected
and spiteful.
But he couldn't gauge the emotional
truth of the words. It
might have been pure
reflex, nerves drawn out to
the point
of panic and no more. Honesty
forced him to admit that
he did
not know.
Downslope he heard
a coughing,
mechanical noise—the sound of an engine
starting up. Keith was on
his feet
instantly. He ran down through
the trees
in long,
rapid strides, heedless of the risk
of falling.
Branches whipped across his face, leaving
raw welts,
and he
did not
notice.
Keith burst through
the trees
and was
beside the buggies just as the
engine caught. A short spring
brought him beside the right vehicle,
and he
was shoving
his rifle
into the frightened face of
a Mummer
assassin.
"Cut it
off," he said quietly. The
Mummer obeyed. Up close Keith could
see that
the assassin
was just
a kid—twenty
or twenty-two at most,
no older
than Keith himself. Thin-faced and very, very ordinary.
Keith couldn't fix the features
in his mind. His subconscious demanded a gargoyle, an
ogre, and reality refused
to provide.
If I
closed my eyes, Keith thought, I
wouldn't recognize him when they
opened again.
"How many of
you are
left?" Keith asked. He held
the rifle's
muzzle directly on the kid's
face. Scared eyes tried to
focus on it.
"None, mister, just
me," the kid babbled. "I'm
the only
one." Keith said nothing.
Unnerved, the kid began again.
"You killed all them.
I can
show you the bodies. You
killed the captain ..." He broke
off when
Keith moved the rifle gently, massaging the boy's cheek
in a
small circular motion.
"Good." His voice
was still
quiet, preternaturally so. A part of
his mind
was occupied
pushing thought of Fletch's death aside. Like shoveling back
the ocean.
"Now we come to the good
question. Why?"
The kid
blinked. Sweat covered his forehead.
"Why?" he echoed, bleakly.
"Yes," Keith said
sweetly. "Why? Why did you
and your
friends kill Bear and
Suzette Fletcher? Why were you
trying to kUl me?"
"I don't
know," he said feebly.
"That's
not good enough, Jocko!" Keith's voice rose to a scream, and
he jerked
back his rifle. He lifted
it as
if he
were about to club the boy
in his
face, and only controlled the motion at the last
instant. "You don't kill people
just for the hell of it,
you have
a reason.^You
have a god damned good reason! And I . . .
want ... to know." He punctuated the last sentence
with short, angry jabs of
the rifle.
The Mummer,
sure he was going to
die, began to cry, small
quiet tears that squeezed out of
the corners
of his
eyes and slid silently down his cheeks.
"Honest, mister,
I don't
know. The captain knew. But
he didn't tell us. He just
said we had to bang
the woman.
He said to get anyone that
was with
her, but that the woman
was the dangerous one, and we
had to
bang her."
"Kill her," Keith said. "The word
is 'kill.'
Let's hear you say it."
"Kill her," the kid choked out.
"But that was all we
were told, mister, that was all
I knew."
"You didn't kill
her, though," Keith said. The
kid looked
at him. "I did."
The kid
said nothing.
Keith still held
Fletch's binoculars in his left
hand. He dumped them on the
Mummer's lap. "Tell that to
your owners. Give them her
glasses for proof, and tell
them I did your dirty work for you." He stood back two
paces, said, "Well? What are you
waiting for?"
The kid's hands
fumbled with the ignition. The
motor caught and he pulled out
onto the road like a
bat out
of Hell.
Keith stood watching him,
his eyes
filling with tears again. He wrapped
an arm
around a pine tree to
keep from falling and once again
wept uncontrollably.
By dawn
he had
dragged both Bear's and Fletch's
bodies up to the smoldering remains of the cabin.
He laid
them side by side, then hesitated.
It seemed
like a violation of the
dead.
But he
had to
have an answer.
Keith opened Fletch's
robe and deftly undid the
buttons of her shirt. The flesh
underneath was an ugly black,
massive bruising that had
followed her death. Tucked into
her belt,
protruding over her stomach,
was a
leather portfolio. He lifted it out,
flipped her robe shut.
Standing away from
the corpses,
his back
not quite
turned to them, he examined the
portfolio's contents. They were handwritten manuscripts, clearly stories Fletch
had been
working on, cluttered with
marginal notes and corrections. They were wrinkled from being
carried under Fletch's belt and sewn
into the lining of her
saddlebags before that, but readable nonetheless.
Keith riffled through
thin bundles of paper labeled
"Reac-torville," "Mutations/Disease," "Mutagenic Offspr." and the like. Halfway
through, he hit pay dirt:
a bundle
labeled "Phila/Drift."
He returned
the other
papers to their sheath, and began
reading.
It's
the best-kept secret in Philadelphia. The infant mortality rate is not a matter
ot public record. People disappear into the
hospitals and theyword filters out that they died of "pneumonia" or
"flu" or "superflu." Not a person in a thousand suspects
that Philadelphia lies within the Drift.
Keith stopped
reading. Here was his answer
and it
didn't make him any happier knowing
it. Philadelphia
within the Drift! It was the
kiss of death for the
city, once the word got
out. Philadelphians had a
deep, almost superstitious fear of
the Drift, and had
imbued their home city with
mystic faith in its ability to
protect them.
A single,
thicker piece of paper was
enclosed in the bundle. Keith thumbed it out idly.
It was
a copy
of the
map of
the Drift that had been drawn
up almost
a century
ago for
the first official reports on the
Meltdown. Long, curving oblongs had been drawn around the
reactor site, the outermost just
barely grazing Philadelphia. Fletch had jotted a
dozen radiation counts onto the
map and
redrawn the outermost line. There was no doubt that
she had
done her homework, no chance of
her being
mistaken.
Keith tried
to imagine
the damage
this article could do. There were
over a million people in
Philadelphia—it would be
the biggest
panic evacuation since the Meltdown.
He tried
to picture a million
people, most of them on
foot, streaming out of Philadelphia, clogging the bridges to
New Jersey,
swooping on the lands
beyond like a plague of
locusts. The United States was not
a rich
country the way it had
been. It had lost a third
of its
territory in the turbulent post-Melt-down
years. There wouldn't be refugee
camps set up for the
survivors. There would be,
instead, men with guns to
mow down the new threat to
their economic stability.
It was literally
unimaginable. Better to concentrate on matters at hand. Keith
checked his rifle, paced thirty
yards downhill, and raised
it to
his shoulder.
He aimed
at the
hillside just above the ruins
of the
cabin. One after the other
he shot the projectiles into the
earth, until the clip was
emptied, and the hillside—whether from
the projectiles
themselves or from their thundering reverberations—collapsed over the bodies of his former
companions.
He dropped
the papers
on the
ground, started to trudge down past the corpses of
the fallen
Mummer assassins. He hadn't gone far
before a thought occurred to
him, and he returned to
scoop up the stories again.
He weighed
them in his hand. There
was power
here if he knew how to
use them.
He didn't
kid himself.
Politics and the acquisition of power
were total unknowns to him.
But he
could learn.
As he started
the buggy,
Keith became aware again of
the irritation his nucleopore
caused. He pulled it off,
dropped it on the seat beside
him. It hardly mattered now.
He shifted gears,
began the long trip home
to Philadelphia.
* * *
Mummers Day
was sunny
and blue-skied.
Keith stood in the crowd, slapping
his arms
against his jacket from time
to time to keep warm. He
was not
surprised when the Center City Fancy band stopped in
front of him, not at
all anxious
when King Clown strode
straight at him.
The Clown's gloved
hands rested on his shoulders,
and Keith looked straight into the
man's bloodshot eyes. There was a
still instant, then whapwhapa>A<z/)/ he had
been tapped out, and King Clown
was striding
away. The crowd cheered.
He joined the
ragtag band in mufti strutting
happily after the troupe. He was
a Mummer
now.
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CARR SELECTS NINE MORE FANTASTIC, ORIGINAL
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IN
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JEAN SANDWICH, THE SPONSOR AND I Ian Watson
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MUMMER
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007126800295201143