Changes

a short story

by

William Barton

author’s preferred edition

8,800 words

This story is also available

in the collection

Shadows in the Sky

Copyright © 1996, 2012 William Barton

Originally published in Aboriginal Science Fiction, Summer 1996.

Public Domain Cover photo:

Saturn and its moons, courtesy NASA/JPL.

Previous Books by

by William Barton

Hunting On Kunderer

A Plague of All Cowards

Dark Sky Legion

Radio Silence

Yellow Matter

When Heaven Fell

The Transmigration of Souls

Acts of Conscience

When We Were Real

Moments of Inertia

Collaborations by

William Barton and

Michael Capobianco

Iris

Fellow Traveler

Alpha Centauri

White Light

For more information visit:

williambarton.com

Science Fiction in Search of a Lost Age

Table of Contents

Changes

List of eBooks

Changes

When the cramp finally let go, Harriet Severn fell back on her pillows, hating the way her skin felt, sticky sweat refusing to evaporate in the summer humidity. The sheets were damp, soaked right through, making her regret the decision to give birth at home instead of going to the hospital like a sensible modern woman. They’d never get the stains out of the mattress, probably have to buy a new one.

And so hot. But they didn’t have air conditioning in the town’s little hospital either. The only place they had air conditioning was in the movie theater. Harriet giggled. Maybe I should’ve gone there...

Dr. Noffzinger, sitting between her legs at the foot of the bed, smiled up at her. “Won’t be long now, Harriet. This is going to be easy.” He reached up and patted her belly, then looked back down at her “business end.” Smiled again. No problem at all...

Should have gone to the hospital, though. Cleaner. Safer. And Wilson wouldn’t be visibly lurking outside the door like some massive ghost. Poor Willy. He always felt so bad for her when it was happening. Third time now, trying for a boy because the first two were girls. Always felt so bad. But, in a couple of months, when the damage was healed, he’d be more interested in “getting things back to normal.”

Another cramp, making her bunch up, squint and grunt. God. Like turning inside out. One place pulling in, its neighbor popping out, hurting worse than stomach flu, and going on and on... Then done, falling back, panting hard. Right, no problem at all. Should have gone to the hospital, you little idiot...

But you didn’t want to leave Grandpa all alone and Willy wouldn’t hear of you going off to have the baby alone, as if he’d be any help. Poor Grandpa, lying in his room, listening to all this. Or maybe not listening. Seventy-eight years old and the pneumonia almost finished with him. “Old Man’s Friend.” Supposed to be an easy death, but Grandpa was making it hard, just not ready to go. Not quite yet. I’d’ve felt bad going off to the hospital, coming home in a week to find him gone...

He’ll see this one. Maybe he’ll smile.

Maybe...

Uhhhh...

The baby’s head felt like a padded boulder between her legs, suddenly right there, the doctor leaning forward, touching it with his clean hands, gently cooing, to her, to it? Pulling, “Come on now. There, there...” Harriet put her head back and squeaked, the cramp suddenly powerful and strange, her skin feeling as if it were being burnt by a thousand little cigarette coals...

Christ, get it over with... Now!

And the rest of the little body slithered out like the proverbial greased pig, right into old Noffzinger’s arms.

Owwww...

Afterechoes, pain and more pain, but already dying down.

Noffzinger, always the traditionalist, swung the nasty, bloody thing by its heels, one light slap, and SQUAAALLL! Alive. Cradling it then, grinning, calling out, “You can relax now, Willy. It’s a boy!”

Then he put it on her bare belly and Harriet reached down to cuddle the slick little body, smiling wider than she ever expected she could. Maybe in a little while, when the doctor was through fiddling around down there, she could get up and show the new baby to Grandpa. A boy. It would light up his fading eyes, just one last time.

o0o

Mark Severn, just past his ninth birthday, lay on the floor, doing his homework on the near-pileless maroon carpet. The rug could be a distraction sometimes, with all its patterns and border colors, bits of blue and burnt orange peeking out from behind the red... not behind it exactly, since the rug was essentially a two-dimensional surface, but... God. Distracted. Got to get this stuff done. “The Cisco Kid” coming on in... squint up at the big Nelsonic clock sitting on the old upright piano... ten minutes...

Mom, sitting in her chair, reading the current issue of Life, said, “What’re you squinting for, Mark?”

He shrugged, squinted at her, and said, “I dunno. I guess it makes the numbers easier to read.”

She stared at him for a minute, giving him that concerned look, then went back to her magazine. Mark went back to scribbling the English essay, hoping he wouldn’t lose too many points for legibility. Arithmetic had been easy, just problems intended as drill for kids who couldn’t seem to memorize the multiplication tables, couldn’t quite “get it” when it was time for long division. Science easy too, just not quite so... regular. This electricity business was pretty interesting anyway. English, though... Five hundred words... every one of them made up from scratch, without a clue as to what Mrs. Pennyman wanted. Oh, well. As long as I keep getting A’s in arithmetic, Dad won’t be too upset about the C’s in English and history...

Right now, Dad was sitting in his own chair, bigger than Mom’s, next to the heavy old bookcase, the one they’d gotten when Grandma died last year, head tipped toward the big Philco radio, sound turned down so the others wouldn’t be disturbed, listening to the war news. It was pretty interesting stuff, sometimes, today the subdued voice talking about some big battle in North Africa. Kasserine Pass. Dad’s face very serious. Troubled glance at me, then. Maybe he thinks the war will still be going on when I’m old enough. Ten years. Would the war still be raging in 1953?

Anyhow, maybe that was why dad let him do his homework out here on the floor, while Jill and Sandy sat together at the kitchen table. Mark sighed and put the essay in his notebook, threading the holes over the rings then snapping them shut, hoping what he’d done would be sufficient. Just a C, that’s all you need...

Mom was looking at him again, smiling a little bit, kind of distant. Mom’s face was always full of sunshine when she smiled, even more so when she laughed. Like when she called Dad “Willy-boy” and Dad would smile and say, “Harry-me-Lad!” as if breathless with excitement. Like a game between them, like they were kids. They’d giggle and joke with each other then, sitting together on the couch, and sometimes they’d go to bed early, giggling off down the hallway.

Mark flipped through his homework one last time, making sure he’d really done everything. Omissions were embarrassing to explain in front of the class, even though you were never the only one, even though you could try to pretend it was funny. Close the books. Dad was reaching out toward the radio, twiddling the tuner dial, listening close, intent. I’m glad I’ve got nice parents. Not like Donnie across the street, whose parents would sometimes whip him with a leather strap. You could hear him cry all the way down the block when that happened...

The radio was getting old and hard to tune in, Dad promising in another year or two they’d replace it. No, not with one of the new little radios, but with a television set like the one Mike’s dad built from a kit last year. Three times the size of the old Philco, with a round screen the size of a saucer in the upper right-hand corner. Once, Dad’d let him stay up late, come over to watch a boxing match on TV with the men gathered in Mr. Carozza’s parlor. I fell asleep after an hour, Dad laughing when he carried me home, beer on his breath, very cheerful, bouncing me on his shoulders...

I’ll miss the old radio when it’s gone. Tall, peaked, made of ornate wood, scrollwork over cloth-covered speakers in the middle, two tall half-pillars on either side, like the pillars to either side of the stage in the theater down town, where Mom and Dad went once or twice a year. What was the word Mom told me? Proscenium. Like the radio was a stage, the voices from the speaker actors in a play, tiny figures before him, dressed in richly-colored costumes, striding back and forth before his eyes.

Maybe, someday, TV will be like that, instead of those watery gray mannequins. We’ll get it, though, and then I can watch old Cisco and Pancho...

Right now, though, Dad was smiling at him, beckoning, turning up the sound, and there was the announcer’s plummy voice, telling him all about “O. Henry’s famous Robin Hood of the Old West...”

o0o

Mark sat in his favorite chair, the spindly Danish Modern one with the blue nylon upholstery, pushing heavy, black-framed glasses back up his nose, staring at the front page of the Post. Two photographs, side by side, of two handsome but alien-looking young men in foreign military uniforms. Andrian G. Nikolaev, said one. Pavel R. Popovich, said the other. Orbited the Earth 64 times. Orbited the Earth 48 times. Vostok. East.

So much for good, old Project Mercury, whose long-term goal, sometime, some day, was to keep a man in space for a whole twenty-four hours. Four days. That’s enough time to reach the Moon and land. Kennedy’s going to look like a fool. I wonder how Glenn and Carpenter feel now. Ticker-tape parades, for God’s sake...

Hell. When our people touch down in 1970 these guys will have been there for five years. You are now entering the Lunovskaya Soviet Socialist Republic. Passports, please?

Dad was right. Remember watching the Berlin news with him in ‘49? Our grandchildren will be dead and gone before this is over, he said. We should’ve gone in and cleaned them out right after we finished with Hitler and Tojo. Right now, it sure looked like the Communists’ centrally-managed economies had something over good, old free enterprise, all right...

And whatever it was, it had made Khrushchev awfully damned bold. Stood up to them in Berlin, whipped them back in Korea; now this business with Castro and Russians down in the Caribbean, setting up shop ninety miles from Florida.

Suddenly, Mark felt very cold. A young father wanted to look forward, to plan for his children’s adulthood, help them get a good start. He put the paper aside and looked at the two of them on the floor, Billy getting to be a big boy now, starting first grade in a couple of weeks, Freddy old enough to sit up beside him, out of diapers and talking quite nicely, much to Bill’s aggravation...

You can smile about that at least... Dad. Funny to think of myself that way. Mom seems to like being called Grandma even though she’s still so young-looking. Well. Fifty-three is young. They’ll be young as long as they live. Memory of them from last Easter, Harriet sitting in Willy’s lap, messing up his thinning hair, kissing him in front of the kids. I don’t know why it upset Marian like that. Never bothered me when I was a kid. Just glad my parents seemed to like each other...

Poor Marian. Pregnant again, just so she can try for a daughter. Unhappy about two boys, have to make sure that never gets back to Fred. Me, though, born because Dad wanted a son... OK. It’s easy to understand. Marian was uncomfortable though, in her seventh month, feeling fat and horrible, wondering why she’d wanted to do such a thing to herself once again...

The two little boys were engrossed in watching the TV, unaware of the nasty adult world unraveling all around them. Rapt, wrapped up in the opening sequences of the last show before bedtime, listening to Fifties-style advertising singers tell them all about the “Modern Stone Age Fam-uh-Lee...” Pretty funny stuff, actually. Not like “Rocky and Bullwinkle,” making me put aside this grad-school homework long enough to watch with them, but... funny. That business about using animals in place of mechanical technology was a pretty good grade of science fiction when you thought about it. Maybe something engineers will really do someday...

Engineers. Right. Engineers build hydrogen bombs, if they’re lucky. Engineers blow up the world. And me with my little B.S. degree. What do I build? Right. I build blueprints. I help flesh out the work of better men. For now. Twenty-eight? Still a boy. The pile of books on the coffee table was tall, and they’d been expensive. Tough, going for your Masters at night after working all day. Tough on Marian and the kids, too. For them, though, make more money, give them a future. If...

That’s the word, all right. If. He glanced over at the bookcase. Been two years since I read it. Can’t forget it though. Words red, white and blue on a black spine, J.B. Lippincott’s edition of Alas, Babylon. I wonder how I managed to lose the dust-jacket? Very inspirational, trying to make a dead world carry on with human life... But it won’t be like that. I know. Anybody whose interested can know. Right here in the public library there’s a copy of The Prompt and Delayed Effects of Thermonuclear Weapons...

And the kids were sitting on the floor, watching Fred Flintstone sink his teeth into his new role as The Frog-Mouth, blah-blah-blah, making them giggle at comedy too sophisticated for two little boys, one just barely out of diapers. Just reacting to the laugh-track, that’s all.

Anyway, it looks nice on a color TV, glad we spent the money, almost enough for a new car...

o0o

Standing in the hot June sun, Mark took off his white hard-hat and wiped his brow on one tan sleeve, leaving a big dark splotch of moisture in the cloth. All right. Time for short sleeves. Tomorrow. It was a very nice day, not enough breeze really, but clear and cloudless, sky a lucid, vaulting blue overhead, the world bright green all around, falling away in waves of distant vegetation toward the horizon, blue mountains barely visible in the west.

Piedmont Plateau a pretty nice part of Virginia. A lot of work remaining to be done hereabouts. He looked down at the blueprint, weighted to the rough wooden table by chunks of broken concrete and pieces of cinderblock. Finishing it off. The bridge’s skeleton was done and now they were putting in the roadway, the expander joints, making sure the sewer- and water-pipe transit fittings were lined up OK. Be done in three more months, then move on.

Not so very far. And not for very long. The Interstate system that had kept him employed for more than a decade was almost done. Almost done and then, nothing. Should be work for people maintaining that expensive infrastructure, maybe they’d planned it that way in the beginning, but something dreadful seemed to be going wrong somewhere. Somewhere way up the line from here...

I talked to Dad about it, tried to get his spin on it. All he could do was rave about the Trilateral Commission, about Kissinger and Rockefeller and all the rest. Jesus. Well, he’s getting old now, almost retirement age. I guess we should expect something like this...

Don’t believe it. Old? Nonsense. Mark shook his head slowly, looking down the shallow hill at rumbling machinery, spitting little clouds of greasy diesel smoke, at gangs of toiling workers, bare-backed, sun-burned men sweating in the heat. Old? Hell. In just a few more weeks, I’ll be forty years old.

I’m getting too old for this, that’s for sure. So tired today...

Like to be in an office somewhere, be an indoor engineer, making up work for the younger folks to do. But this pays better. Made sixty-eight thousand before taxes last year. Billy in college, Freddy about to start, Alice in the ninth grade...

Be easier if the taxes were a little lower. Which is why you voted for Nixon in ‘72. Shows how much you know...

Be easier if Marian would get a job, too. If Marian could get a job. College degree, sure, but she’s been sitting home with the kids since 1956. And maybe she doesn’t like the idea anyway, what with all that nice, unpaid volunteer work. Hell...

Starting to turn away, get back to the business at hand, but jet noise, louder than usual, echoing around the hills, made him look up. Too bright. He fished the expensive prescription sunglasses out of his pocket and put them on, looked up again. Bright white arrowhead moving across the northern sky, leaving a tiny sliver of black smoke behind, too low to make a contrail. What... British Airways Concorde making its way to Dulles, thundering across the Northern Virginia suburbs.

And our SST, just blueprints in the trash. Good old Boeing. Good old politics. As usual. Build the interstates and then let them rot, bridges and all, this fine new thing we’re building now will be falling down in 1995...

And Skylab orbiting overhead the end of the space program. Spend billions to get to the Moon, get there, by God, then throw it all away. Hell, five years ago they said they’d have the shuttle flying in six or seven years. Now they say they’ll have it flying in only five or six years. I guess that’s something... Progress.

Momentary memory of watching Apollo 17 lift off on TV, watching it light up the waterway brilliant yellow and white, the sky turning blue around the edges of the square picture. Sudden realization that this was the last one, that he really should have taken the time to go down and see one take off for real...

Too late now, buddy boy.

The last echo faded, Mark looked back down at the blueprints on the table, at his scribbled notes in one margin. All right, this is why they pay you so much. Fixes. On the spot. He sat down on an upturned wire-spool and slid his fat Rockwell calculator out of its holster, set it on the tabletop and clicked the “on” switch. The display lit up, bright green, easier to read in daylight than standard red LEDs.

Sturdy little toy, this, many orders of magnitude more useful than the old K&E deci-trig log-log slide rule sitting home on his dresser. Expensive, too. Could have lived with less. So why did you buy it, then? Mark grinned at the little machine. That damned commercial, of course, so clever. Little radio play about the Rockwell advertising department, sleazy guys arguing about how they could make their pitch unique. How does our product differ from all the others? But... but... then the tacky little jingle about “...big, green numbers and little, rubber feet!”

Hell, I still remember the whole thing! “Oh, you can’t go wrong with Rockwell...”

o0o

April the 12th was the twentieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight. With bright morning sunshine flooding in through the sliding glass doors, Mark turned on the nineteen-inch Panasonic portable, still tuned to CBS, because they always had the best coverage, despite Uncle Walter’s unfortunate decision to retire, camera view out across mosquito inlet toward the launch pad. Brilliant, clear blue sky. After so many delays, today would be the day for sure, a pleasant enough coincidence.

The little one-bedroom apartment was nice enough, though way too cramped, but with Marian holding onto the house and Alice still in college, it was the best he could do. OK. I don’t really need a living room, it’s not like I entertain a lot. Bedroom lined with books, breakfast nook in the little kitchen, and use the living room as a den and office. Chair, TV, desk, light table... Might as well get something done...

But he sat rooted in the chair, staring at the TV. Too damned tired to work just yet. Feel so old... Right. And when did 46 start being old? The guy piloting that thing is just about your age. Reading glasses in space, for God’s sake...

Just feeling sorry for yourself, old man. Married twenty-seven years and the judge puts your poor old butt in the street, because women have to be “taken care of.” So what? Stop whining and get on with the rest of your life. There was a sharp pang in his chest then, one of those pretend “heart attacks” that used to send him scurrying to the hospital.

Just anxiety. I can give you something for it if you’d like...

No thanks, Doc.

Thought you were going to have a real heart attack when Dad died, sudden like that, Mom on the phone, bawling her grief in your ear, crying steadily at the funeral, talking about how badly she wanted to die now and go with him. No way to comfort her, not with all those memories of Mom sitting in Dad’s lap, smiling at him, happy with him, memory repeated over and over again, Mom and Dad just getting a little older in each and every snapshot. Then Mom standing by his fresh-dug grave, silent, not smiling any more.

Christ, Mom. You had a good trip. Not a damned thing to complain about. At least Dad got to see his great-grandson before he went. Billy the proud poppa, beaming down at brand new Jerry Severn. Hilarious to slap a name like that on some squalling, wrinkled red thing.

Not long after that, Marian broke the news.

And here I sit, in an apartment all my own...

Another glance at the bright TV picture. Well, going pretty good this morning. Fifty-nine minutes on the countdown clock, so I might as well get something done while I wait.

The box on the desk was waiting too, right beside the brand-new thirteen-inch color monitor. Went the extra mile there. Could’ve bought a color TV and gotten away with it. Too fuzzy though, hard on my eyes since I had to start wearing these damn bifocals...

Open the box and look down at the thing. Putty-colored, with high profile keys and the familiar Commodore logo, familiar because they had a couple of PETs at the office. He set it on the desktop and started hooking up wires, plugging things in. Even bought a disk drive instead of a tape deck. Do it right, if it’s going to mean anything at all. The Commodore 64 looked good set up, not as “professional” as the old PETs, but pretty nice. Not metallic like the TI-99/4a he’d looked at, but a whole lot nicer than Billy’s big, boxy Apple II. Probably a good choice. Math not as good as the TI, but more RAM for less money, a lot greater likelihood it’ll still be supported after Texas Instruments goes belly-up...

He hit the “on” switches in sequence and waited. Screen alight. Operating system, available RAM space, and READY. Cursor blinking beside the word. “Ready.” Jesus. You had to laugh at the thought of all those people taken in by colorful TV ads, bar-chart histograms rising like magic on the screen, rushing out to buy a real computer. Be the first person in your neighborhood to own a computer? Well, buy one of our computers and maybe you can own the neighborhood. Imagine them now, sitting dumbfounded, wondering, “Ready for what?”

Movement on the TV...

The nine minute built-in hold was over and the clock was counting down again, electric feeling in the air, as if this was it. Well, maybe. Anything can happen now. Last time, just a couple of days ago, they’d aborted at T-39 seconds, newspeople standing in long, silent rows, cameras ready...

But today is the twentieth anniversary of Vostok 1...

Then it went down and down and down, Mark dragging the old hassock Marian let him have up in front of the TV, leaning in close so he could watch it without glasses. Make it real. As if the naked TV screen, were, somehow, something real...

Down past twelve, plumes of steam coming out of the turbine vents, splash of sparks, yellow fire turning blue then clear. Main engine start... camera pulling back to show the cloud of smoke, then the solids lit, much heavier smoke with fire boiling crazily in its depths...

Columbia bounced off the pad, clearing the tower, climbing on a dense column of smoke, fire barely visible, while the camera pulled back so you could see it go, climbing over the heads of the newsmen and women. Two guys in the foreground, standing near the countdown sign, one fat, holding a camera, the other less so, holding binoculars, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet, rather strange looking...

Moment of intense regret. I wish I’d just gone on down. I could be standing with those guys right now, feeling what they’re feeling...

In a little while, the rocket was up in space.

o0o

Mark sat back from the AppleStar Touchvoice III+, unclipping the microphone from his collar, reading the last words of the article, lips moving slightly. Well. Pretty good. Another few thousand bucks in the can, at any rate. He reached out and touched the SAVE/EXIT icon on the right hand side of the screen and watched the file explode out of the picture, system desktop reappearing.

Hell of a way for an old man to make a living, really, but the outdoor engineering days are long gone. Not much civil tech going on anymore anyway. Not much of anything, these days, younger engineers going overseas, if they could. Even Billy, talking about taking his wife and kids out of the country, maybe get a decent-paying job in Serbia or Kazakhstan, where there was new infrastructure abuilding.

I’ll miss Jerry though. Of course the boy was getting too old to have much interest in his grandfather, finishing up high school, slim, handsome, fresh-faced...

Mark shut off the computer and was suddenly aware of his reflection in the screen. Not too damned bad. Still slim, though I don’t work hard any more. Still got all my hair, even if it is white. If this was a mirror, I could see the corneal rings... and the little scars where my glasses used to sit. Glasses. I wonder where I put them? He grinned at his reflection. Good riddance, after fifty years!

He pushed back from the desk and turned the chair around, looking out the window into sunset. Nice fall colors in the sky, clouds turning brown in the fading light, blue turning to vermilion, dark red over the horizon. The weather’d been good all week. A sunny day when we buried Mom in the spot she reserved beside Dad. I wish I could imagine them together right now...

No. Nothing. Gone. Hard times, though. I thought about giving her an Alcor burial, just silliness, but a sliver of hope for the rest of us. She wouldn’t have wanted it though, not with Dad Purina Worm Chow all these years...

He sighed and stood up, stretching. Morbid thoughts, all right. Useless. Ow. The twinge in his shoulder was back, making him worry. I’m just a few years short of how old Dad was when he died. Maybe... Christ. More morbidity. Also useless. Dad had thirty years of cheeseburgers on me. I’ve got another twenty years to go, maybe more. A whole generation. Practically another whole life...

o0o

The big, flat box of the HDTV, dominating one wall of the living room, was already set to CNN-4, Endeavour on the launchpad, outlined by darkening sunset colors, T-60 minutes and counting. It would, just barely, be dark by the time the thing went. Something familiar...

Oh, Hell. Apollo 17. Another “last time.” Hard little ball of regret in his throat. Well, at least the TV keeps getting better and better. But the ship would fly to orbit with its nine-man crew, primary mission to attach a de-orbiting rocket to the little bit of Freedom that had been built, just so it could fall harmlessly into the sea, avoiding the hysteria that had accompanied the fall of Skylab, of Salyut 7, of Mir.

All over. Like everything else in my life. America entering its senescence after a short, brilliant youth. No more moonshots. No more Voyagers. No space station at all. After this, no more Man in Space. Childhood dreams finished. Russians gone. Chinese and Japanese never went. Europeans just couldn’t seem to get their act together...

Gina came out of the kitchen, smiling, carrying two tumblers of liquor, her own Old Fashioned, his Black Russian. She put the drinks down on the coffee table and stood looking down on him, hands on slim hips. Look of concern. “You all right, Mark?”

He sighed, then shook his head. “Sure. I just get tangled up in old memories sometimes...”

She sat in his lap, pulled her legs up, put her arms around his neck and leaned close. “Yeah. I guess... I didn’t expect to feel this way when I got old...”

“Old, Hell!”

That made her smile, lean in closer, nuzzling her face against his. She was pretty damned nice looking for a woman pushing sixty. Still slim, not too many lines in her face. Let her hair go gray though, unlike Marian, who’d been dying hers for decades.

Kids didn’t like seeing her in his lap like this, especially in front of the younger grandchildren, so it was just as well they’d ignored his invitation to come over for an Endeavour party. They’d’ve brought Marian anyway, bitter Marian, with all her acid little remarks, eliciting his usual muttered response.

Well, dear, you didn’t have to throw me away...

He rubbed his hands up and down Gina’s back, feeling her smooth muscles through the thin blouse, just a faint hint of loose skin here and there, spine a well-defined ridge.

Murmuring into his neck, she said, “You keep that up, we’ll miss the launch...”

Smiling back at her, feeling her solid, comfortable weight on his lap, Mark dismissed yet another little pang: I could’ve had this all my life if only... Hell, boy. Forget about that. You’ve got it now. That’s all that matters.

“Maybe,” he said, hands drifting down past her hips, “it isn’t worth watching.”

o0o

Mark sat at his desk in the spacious, glass-walled office, nine floors above the street, higher than most of the other buildings in this part of town, staring into space. Nice day out there. Sunny. Cloudless. Probably a bit of a breeze ameliorating the August heat. Nice day for a walk. No smog. Not any more. Car exhaust diminishing as emission standards tightened, more and more people going for quiet electrics, long-haul trucks running on low-residue, stack-scrubbed synfuel...

Nice day for a walk. And you should be happy you can go for a walk on your seventy-sixth birthday, old man, no cane, no pain, not a problem in the world.

It’s just that you’re all done. Finished again.

Mark sighed and leaned back, staring at the low, flat black box of the Toshiba Vortex transmedia system sitting on the corner of his desk, spidery headset crumpled in a pile next to it. No, you just don’t want to do this. It’s only been eight years since you started Future Life, eight years in which you built it up into the twenty-first century’s premier technophile vidmag. Eight years in which you built what felt like a whole new career. And careers are supposed to last a lifetime...

OK. So this one did last a lifetime. You just don’t have a whole lot left. Twenty years? In twenty years, I’ll be under the ground. Not a clean thought. Alcor and its competitors out of business, proto-corpsicles thawed and buried. That nice insurance policy just one more pile of cash, insignificant compared to what the magazine made you. Ten years? Maybe. If I’m lucky. Ten years in which to grow frail and sick and very, very old...

Hah. Maudlin. Morbid. Get on with it. Retire and hand it over to the people you trained. Go sit in the sunshine. Finish those ten years in comfort. Owe it to Gina, at least...

He picked up the headset and slipped it on, watched admiringly as the virtual office formed up around him. All right. Point at the imaginary voicewriter and see its blue LED blink, acknowledging your presence, sheet of paper forming in the air above it, column of icons like magic in the air beside you. Reach up and grasp the NOTE icon. “Editorial Number 96,” he muttered. Tap the CENTER icon, then tap ITALICS. “Ave. Atque. Vale.”

Hmh. Very nice looking. Now if only the software engineers would come up with subroutines that were really good at recognizing global context-sensitive stylesheets, external to the local setup-universe. Give it time. If you live long enough, you’ll see it happen. Hmmm... All right, that’s what I’ll talk about, then...

o0o

Later, at home, he sat on the couch, Gina curled against his side, watching TV, dinner a warm lump just to the left of center. Holding onto me. Worried that I’ll be upset, feeling a little guilty. Retired, by God. All over. And in six weeks we’ll move to a nice little house in Cocoa Beach...

Someplace for the kids to visit. Astonishing thought: my children are getting old! Billy’s hair iron gray now, even baby Alice nearing the end of her forties... Grandkids then. Most of them don’t really know me. Jerry, though, a fine strapping young man, just about ready to turn thirty, happy with that young wife, what’s-her-name... Lisa! Right. How could I forget? Not that old. Jerry and Lisa, proudly showing off their new baby boy, name of Matthew Severn. Little red Matt. What a marvel. Great-grandchildren now. Something I didn’t expect, but I guess I just wasn’t thinking...

Gina shifted position, stretching out her legs with a faint murmur of protest, rubbing her hand across his stomach then straightening up, stretching. “Good grief,” she muttered, “stiff already...”

Mark laughed, signaling to the TV with his free hand, dumping the dull old movie they’d been watching, switching over to the global newsnet, hugging her tight with the other.

“Oof. God,” she said, and, “I can’t believe I’m so stiff just from sitting here...”

Old joints, creaking here, creaking there. “You’re lucky, damn you. I’ve been stiffening up for the past thirty years.”

She smiled up at him, long lines from the corners of bright blue eyes, patted him on the thigh, and said, “Longer than that, I think...”

Laughter just a puff of air from his nostrils. “Hmh.” He snuggled down, lips rubbing on her forehead, waited while she tipped her head back for a real kiss.

When it was over, she sighed, delicate, a soft, young sound, head against his chest. “Fifteenth anniversary coming up. I can hardly believe it...”

Fifteen years. Another ten and she’ll have been with me longer than Marian. Jesus. Marian. Dead two years already? Kids not too happy when you didn’t go to the funeral... Stop it. Happy now. He hugged her gently. “Fifteen years. No regrets.”

Her arms were around his chest, squeezing him close.

On TV, the newshead was talking about something... Several men in expensive-looking suits, sitting around a conference table. Representatives of the American Aerospace Consortium. The commerce secretary. The vice president. Artist’s conception of the various competitors for the NNLS, New National Launch System, mostly single-stage very high energy concepts, unmanned but mannable, part of the Third Millennium Infrastructure Initiative. SynchroNet Platform. Man-tended...

Other stuff, but Gina was pulling his head down, closing out that imagery, pulling him into her world, more immediate, much more certain, just a tiny slice of regret left behind, caption beginning, If only...

o0o

Mark lay back on their comfortable bed, watching Gina get undressed. She was facing away from him, over by the caddy where his own clothes already sprawled, more fastidious, draping pieces carefully, though wrinkles were a thing of the past.

Not too many wrinkles at that...

Blouse sliding over her head, back very smooth in the shadowy light, hips flaring just so... Little pouches of flesh just above them, where her little bit of fat had drained away, skin not elastic enough to take up the slack. Maybe a vain woman would have it cut away. Maybe she would, but she’d said nothing...

Arm, still limber, reaching back, unhooking the brassiere, shrugging it off, and you could see by the movement of skin on her ribs that she was sagging just a little more with every passing month, tissue shriveling, making her once-fine breasts look empty indeed. Maybe she looks at herself in the mirror, handles them perhaps, and is sorry she never had children...

Slipping the bikini briefs down, bending over to step out of them, Mark’s breath catching slightly as desire kindled here and there...

She turned to face him, hands on hips, posed just so, watching him look at her, eyes wandering, face and form and back again.

What one word will tell her how I feel right now? “Beautiful...” he told her.

Gina looked down at him, eyes bright, smiling. “Well,” she said, “looks like that famous ‘male climateric’ we’ve all heard so much about is just another old wives’ tale...”

He beckoned to her. “Just bring that old wife’s tail over here and we’ll see how many myths we can manage to debunk...”

o0o

Toward the end of one long evening, shadows lengthening as the sun set inland, Mark sat alone on his porch, waiting for the rocket to go up. Not quite a night launch, but close enough. He glanced at his watch, then down at the screen of the little TV sitting on the table beside him. Ten minutes. Well, you could go inside and watch it in comfort, get away from the bugs for a while, get a better view too, plugged into the RealWorld 3-D Entertainment Center, maybe blend newsnet footage with unedited NASA Select In-house Video shots...

Nonsense. Watch it live. That’s why you moved here when you know Gina would’ve been happier over in Clearwater...

Tiny pang, deep inside his chest, hardly able to form. I keep expecting her to come out through the door, laughing, maybe even sit in my decrepit old lap... Has she really been gone for three whole years? Seems like only a few days have gone by. Making love in the dark one fine night, laughing together, falling asleep in each other’s arms... Waking up in gray light of morning, finding her so cold and unusually still...

Oh, back out of that one... Jesus. How the Hell did I get to be eighty-four years old...

The people on the little TV were counting down now, voices excited, 3... 2... 1... Static from the TV and a bright light forming in the distance, silent, Cape Canaveral just ten miles away. Brighter. Brighter... The light detached from the horizon, ball as bright as the sun blotting out reddening background sky, long tongue of flame seeming to flicker, climbing... Distant thunder, growing louder.

Watching it go, hydrogen burning in the sky, Mark thought, First flight. In three years, they leave for Mars, just about forty years behind schedule. If I’m lucky, I may still be alive...

o0o

A few days later, Mark was sitting on the porch again, facing into the warm morning sunshine, when Jerry and his family rolled up in their brand new BMW Comet II, electric/turbine drive system a barely audible whine, tires crunching softly in the gravel driveway. He opened his eyes, smiling, but was, momentarily, too tired to get up out of the chair. For the last few months, the swivel mount had been difficult to manage. Cold chill. Old, boy. Getting very old...

Car doors clunking, people getting out, Jerry tall and tanned, graying at the temples, but still young and handsome at thirty-nine, Lisa a slim and pretty redhead, lovely in a bright, patterned sundress. Matt dodged around them suddenly, popping through the gate, running toward him across the lawn, all freckles and dark red hair and bright blue eyes, feet clattering on the steps, flopping across his lap with a hug. “Hiya, Gramps!”

Mark squeezed him close. “Hiya, Mattie. How’s it going?” Gramps. I wonder what he calls Bill? Christ, my grandson is a middle-aged man!

Jerry and Lisa were on the porch now, looking down at them, smiling. “Hey, Grandpa. How’ve you been?”

Mark sat up a little straighter and shrugged. “Oh, all right. Enjoying the view at least.” He nodded to the car. “That a new one?”

Jerry looked at the sleek, silver and black thing and nodded. “Got it in the spring. Eleven thousand.”

Moment of surprise. German cars haven’t been that cheap in forty years. Balance of payments must be pretty good. Not to mention... “Magazine doing OK?”

Jerry nodded. “With the start you gave it?” Not only Future Life, of course, but its far less techie companion, Global Life.

Mark slid the boy off his lap and looked at him, young, bright-eyed. Eyes that’ll still be here when this century slides to a close. Maybe remember today, remember me, sitting with great-grandchildren of his own... He reached under the chair suddenly, trying not to wince from the too-sudden movement, pulled out a flat, gaily wrapped package. “What do you think, Mattie?”

Though he must have been anticipating a gift, the boy’s eyes widened with surprised pleasure, took it, hands on the ribbon, paused, smiling at him. “Thanks...” then ripped it open. “Wow...” Holding the black box at arms length.

“What is it? “said Lisa, stepping forward, unaccountably concerned.

Jerry looked over the boy’s shoulder and frowned. “Well. An MBB Spielraum hypergame deck. With nerve-induction interface clips.” He looked at the old man. “That must’ve set you back a pretty penny.”

It had, in fact, cost a little more than the new car. Mark looked up at him. “At my age, what else am I going to do with my money?” He gestured. “Just make a boy smile, that’s all.”

Matt slid up the unit’s SynchroNet antenna, then opened the storage compartment and picked up one of the radiosonde stickum tabs, turning it over in his fingers. “Can it run PlanetQuest 5?”

“Let’s find out.”

o0o

Walking along the beach, wind blowing in his hair, Jerry liked the way his wife’s body felt, pressed against his side, shoulder not quite tucked under his arm, her arm around his back, thumb tucked through a belt-loop. Familiar. Comfortable. Like we belong together. They’d been married for twelve years now and seldom had a difficult moment. Thanks, in part, to the old man’s monetary legacy. But...

Her words of concern as they wandered the beach. I know he means well, Jer. I just don’t know if this is a good idea. Matt’s a bright boy. I don’t want him distracted by something like this...

The new gaming devices could be hypnotic indeed, projecting their fantasy world directly into the minds of the players, and had caused some outcry, filled Future Life’s letters column for issue after issue...

Created a new psychological fad, brought business to a new generation of ill-trained, cultish therapists...

It’ll be all right, he said. Matt is a bright boy. Too bright to be seduced by mere fantasy, no matter how real it may seem...

But then they walked over the hill, back toward the house, and there the two of them sat, side by side on the divan, swinging gently, eyes shut, machine between them, inductabs on temple and forehead. Silent. Still. Then the old man’s eyes opened, eerie and bright. “My God, Jerry,” he’d whispered. “You oughta try this...”

And Matt, “Get back in, Gramps! Hurry. Mr. Vorhees is ready...”

They’d watched a while, then, reluctant, went back out on the beach.

Lisa stopped after a while and turned toward him, face pressed into his chest. Not knowing what to say, finally, “I think we’re going to have to...”

Jerry squeezed her close, and said, “Look. We’re only going to be here a few days. Once we leave we’ll talk it over with Matt and see how he feels. He’s our son. We can make sure nothing happens...” He kissed her on top of the head. “I haven’t seen Grandpa smile like that since Gina died, for God’s sake. I don’t want to take it away just now.”

She looked up at him, eyes serious, and said, “No. I guess not.”

“It’ll be OK.” Because nothing lasts forever.

o0o

Three years later, Jerry and Lisa stood on Mark’s lawn, shading their eyes from bright sunshine, waiting along with a few billion other people, for the crew transport of the Mars 1 expedition to lift off. Not really anything out of the ordinary. There’d been dozens of these over the past thirty-six months as the ship had been built in Earth orbit. This one was, however, the last one. When this crew took off, they’d be gone for a long time. Only three months to Mars and touchdown, hopefully on the north rim of Coprates, but the surface stay was two years long...

Lisa kept looking over her shoulder, back up at the porch, where Matt, tall and tan now at eleven, sat with the old man, the two of them tied together through yet another induction unit, the third one they’d bought since that first eerie day. Nothing untoward, of course, a lot of people used them, and Matt seldom touched the deck otherwise. Still...

The old man looked awful now, sunken-cheeked, eyes seeming to bulge from their sockets, painfully thin with his skin hanging away in long, loose flaps, mottled and dry, like some old-time cancer victim. Still in his right mind, though, bright-eyed and full of life. Maybe that was the worst part, that he could sit there, year after year, and watch himself die. Sometimes, the abolition of things like Alzheimer’s seemed like a mixed blessing. Well, Mark seemed happy enough, so long as he and the boy could net up once in a while, through SynchroNet every couple of weeks, live like this two or three times a year.

“I wish Matt would come off the porch and watch this for real...”

Jerry glanced back at them and nodded. “Yeah. Well. I guess I feel that way too, but...” He shrugged. “This morning Grandpa told me he’d arranged a netfeed from NASA, cost him around thirty-thousand bucks just for one channel-track. They’re going to watch the launch from a chase plane, then switch over to an old military satellite that’s scheduled to be passing overhead. Ought to be quite a view...”

No more, then. Sudden brilliant light, north along the coast, and you could hear people shouting down on the beach, crowds all along A1A, arms lifted, pointing, shading their eyes. The light began its climb then, thunder rolling across the sea, back in over the land, fire in the sky, going upward, tipping away into the east, slowly getting farther away, twenty-six men and women on their way into the future.

When the light and thunder were over, crew transport just a bright spark far out over the sea, they turned back toward the porch. Lisa took a sudden step back, scream strangling in her throat. Sitting on the couch beside the boy, the old man’s head was thrown back, vacant eyes staring at the sky, mouth open, chest still.

“Dear God...” Jerry ran forward then, up onto the porch, and kneeled before his son, reaching out, shaking him. “Matt. Matt!”

The boy’s eyes opened and focused on him. “Dad?”

“Are you all right?”

The boy seemed to shrug, very distant as he looked over at the corpse beside him, staring at it, quite calm. Long moment, somber, then he looked back up at his parents, eyes brightening, full of... something.

“Sure,” he said. “Everything’s fine.” Another look at the old body. Everything’s fine, he thought, remembering a lovely evening twenty years before, when Gina’d smiled into his eyes and told him just how she felt. And now, everything seems so clean and new...

As he slowly picked the inductabs off his head, Matt said, “The view was tremendous. It made him happy again.” His parents helped him to his feet then, and, walking away, he glanced over his shoulder at Mark, thinking, You’re not gone so long as anyone remembers who you were.

The old man, lost in a distant dream, could only agree.

List of eBooks

These eBooks are available, or soon to be available, in various formats, from various on-line sources. For signed paper first edition pricing and availability, please visit williambarton.com, or email spambot@williambarton.com. Please note individual short stories and novelettes are also available in collections, a better bargain if you want them all.

The Starover Universe

Hunting On Kunderer, 1972 novella.

A Plague of All Cowards, 1976 novella.

This Dog/Rat World,  978 novella.

Acts of Conscience, 1997 novel. Signed, unread copies available in Warner Aspect trade first edition and mass-market paperback.

A Last War for the Oriflamme, 2011 novella.

Loci of the Starover Universe, 2012 nonfiction.

The Portmanteau Universe

The Venusians, with Michael Capobianco, 1964 novella.

Under Twilight, with Michael Capobianco, 1978 novel.

The Silvergirl Universe

In the Cavern of the Night, five reprints and one new story.

When We Were Real, 1999 novel. Signed, unread copies available in Warner Aspect mass-market paperback first edition.

The Engine of Desire, 2002 novella.

Other Novels

Iris, with Michael Capobianco, 1990 novel. Signed, unread copies are available in Doubleday hardcover first edition and mass-market paperback for both Bantam and Avon editions. Limited availability of Doubleday trade paperback edition.

Fellow Traveler, with Michael Capobianco, 1991 novel. Signed, unread copies are available in Bantam mass-market paperback first edition.

Dark Sky Legion, 1992 novel. Signed, unread copies are available in Bantam mass-market paperback first edition.

Radio Silence, 1992 novel.

When Heaven Fell, 1995 novel. Signed, unread copies are available in Warner Aspect mass-market paperback first edition.

The Transmigration of Souls, 1996 novel. Signed, unread copies are available in Warner Aspect mass-market paperback first edition.

Alpha Centauri, with Michael Capobianco, 1997 novel. Signed, unread copies are available in Avon Eos hardcover first edition and mass-market paperback. Limited availability of trade paperback edition.

White Light, with Michael Capobianco, 1998 novel. Signed, unread Avon Eos trade paperback first edition and mass-market paperback.

Moments of Inertia, 2000 novel, parts serialized in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Urban Hiker, and The North Carolina Literary Review, with a related article, “Gold from Your Novel” in Writer’s Digest.

Other Novellas

Almost Forever, 1993 reprint.

Yellow Matter, 1993 reprint. Numbered and signed, unread copies of TAL chapbook first edition are available.

Age of Aquarius, 1996 reprint.

The Man Who Counts, 2003 reprint.

Off on a Starship, 2003 reprint.

Down to the Earth Below, 2006 reprint.

The Sea of Dreams, 2009 reprint.

In Search of a Lost Age, 2011 new

General Collections

Ambient Light, complete short fiction from the 1980s and 1990s.

Coronal Light, complete short fiction from the 2000s.

Zodiacal Light, short fiction from the 2010s and beyond, should I live so long. We’ll see!

Shadows in the Sky, tales of the very near future and the exploration of space.

Under the Simple Stars, odds and sods of science fiction, too short to be novellas, and don’t fit anywhere else.

Tales to Dishearten, short fiction from the 1960s and 1970s, including some Starover stories.

Melting in the Sun, a collection of memoir stories, true in spirit, if not in fact.

Shambles, a nonfiction assortment, articles on writing, software design, space exploration, and more.

Roaming in the Gloaming, with Michael Capobianco. Collaborative fiction and nonfiction.

We Are the Hollow Men, a sampler of short fiction, essays, and magazine articles on space exploration and computer programming.

Short Stories and Novelettes:

The Abyss Looks Back.

Cast a Cold Eye.

Changes.

The Devil in Drag.

Down in the Dark.

The Girl in the Golden Halo.

The Gods of a Lesser Creation.

Happy, Competent Men.

Harvest Moon.

Heart of Glass.

In Saturn Time.

In the Age of the Quiet Sun.

Me & Nicky Find an Elephant.

Melting in the Sun.

On the Beach.

Right to Life.

The Rocket into Planetary Space.

Slowly Comes a Hungry People.

Soldiers Home.

Though I Sang in My Chains Like the Sea.

Three Soldiers.

Tommy.

When a Man’s an Empty Kettle.

The Woman in the Door.

Table of Contents

Changes

List of eBooks

Table of Contents

Changes

List of eBooks