SPECULATIVE GLIMPSES AT FUTURE LIFESTYLES...
GALACTIC ESCAPADES... UNEARTHLY CONCEPTS...
All put together by one of
the most
respected editors in modern
science fiction—Terry Carr.
Teny Carr
is one of the most
respected editors in modern science fiction. He has been awarded seven Nebula
citations, and is also well known as a writer, historian, and lecturer on
science fiction.
UNIVERSE 9
Edited by TERRY CARR
FAWCETT POPULAR LIBRARY • NEW YORK
UNIVERSE 9
Published by Fawcett Popular Library, a
unit of CBS Publications, the Consumer Publishing Division of CBS Inc.,
by arrangement with Doubleday
& Company, Inc.
Copyright © 1979
by Terry
Carr
All Rights Reserved
All of the
characters in this book are
fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living
or dead,
is purely
coincidental.
ISBN: 0-445-04552-3
Printed in
the United
States of America
First Fawcett
Popular Library printing: April 1980
10 987654321
Contents
Frost Animals 11
BOB SHAW
Nuclear Fission 58
PAUL DAVID
NOVITSKI
Time Shards 88
GREGORY BENFORD
The Captain and the Kid 100
MARTA RANDALL
The Back Road 116
MARY C.
PANGBORN
Will the Chill 128
JOHN SHIRLEY
Chicken of the Tree 156
JULEEN BRANTINGHAM
The White Horse Child 164
GREG BEAR
Options 188
JOHN VARLEY
UNIVERSE 9
Bob Shaw has built an impressive reputation
as a writer of "traditional" science
fiction stories that have the additional virtue of featuring believable
characters with familiar human problems. He shows us the wonders of tomorrow
as colorfully as anyone, but the view is always through the eyes of a human
being who is strongly affected by postulated future changes. His short story
"Light of Other Days," which embodied these qualities in a notably moving way, became an instant classic when it appeared in 1966,
and caused many sf readers to regard this
"new" writer with surprise.
What most readers didn't realize Was that
Shaw had published half a dozen science fiction stories a decade before but
had then stopped writing—and even sold his typewriter—because he felt he didn't
know enough about people to write the kind of stories he wished. He spent years
working in non-literary fields and "studying the inhabitants of Sol
III" before he took up writing again. Such dedication is rare in any
field, but Shaw's success in the past dozen-plus years is proof that it was
worth it.
"Frost
Animals," Shaw's second story for Universe, provides a fine example of his abilities. It's a
fascinating narrative about a man newly returned from an interstellar trip who
must deal with the temporal dislocation of returning to Earth after thirteen
months of his own time while eighteen years have passed on Earth . . . and who
finds he must defend himself against a charge
of murder com-
mitted before his departure. The events in question
are relatively fresh in his mind, but possible witnesses have either died in
the meantime or have greatly changed.
Bob Shaw's novels include The Two-Timers, The Palace of Eternity, Orbitsville, and eight others. Two collections of his shorter stories have been
published.
\
FROST ANIMALS
Bob Shaw
The
period of weightlessness had been very brief, but its psychological aftermath
was profound. Hobart could see and hear the difference in his fellow officers
as they moved about the upper deck's rest room; and within himself he could
feel a mixture of emotions—relief, expectation, nostalgia—which were going to
make the remaining days of the voyage tedious. There was an irony in that fact,
he realized. After weeks of steady deceleration the ship had cut its speed to a
level at which the time dilation effect was negligible—but now his impatience
to reach home had intervened to slow down subjective time. He was pondering the
matter when the tall, angular figure of Harry Stiebel,
the day exec, came into the room with a pile of fax sheets curved over his arm.
"Earth
is still there, folks," Stiebel called in a
professionally jovial voice. "Still abiding away for all it's worth.
That's good to know, isn't it? Hands up everybody who thought the Earth
wouldn't still be there."
"Why wouldn't it still be there?"
said Os Milburn, the chief systems engineer, who was seated near the door.
"Eighteen years without your smart-assing around
has probably rejuvenated the place."
"Have
a reorientation kit, lover." Stiebel threw a fluttering bundle of paper into Milburn's lap and began working his way
around the room, distributing the sheets with unnecessary vigor and a
surprising amount of noise. Hobart watched his progress with affection and
respect Stiebel was completing his fifth trip to the Sirian system, which meant he was more than a hundred years
old in Earth chronology, yet he showed no symptoms of dislocation. Thin,
square-shouldered, invariably cheerful, he seemed determined to diffuse his
normal life span over as many centuries as company regulations and Albert Einstein
would allow. It was an ambition of which Hobart stood in awe.
"One for you, Denny," Stiebel said as he reached Hobart. "See what you've
been missing."
"Thanks." Hobart took the proffered
sheaf and began to flick through pages that clung together electrostatically.
Switching off the main impulsion torch for two minutes had, as well as given
the crew a warming glimpse of Earth, allowed communication to take place
between the ship and the company headquarters in Montana, and the reorientation
kits were part of the result. Their contents^—fired through in a ten-second
information bleep— were intended to familiarize the returning starmen with the major changes that had taken place during
their absence. This was Hobart's first voyage and as he glanced over the
section headings on politics, world events, fashion, science, and sport, he
tried to come to terms with the knowledge that in the past thirteen months of
his own life the world and everybody in it had grown older by eighteen years.
I've done it, he thought, bemusedly and proudly. I've traveled in space, and
I've traveled in time. . ..
"Before you delve in
there and start checking on skirt lengths ..." Stiebel paused long enough on
his rounds
to tap Hobart's shoulder. "Take a walk into George's
office, will you? He wants to
see you
about some little thing."
"George wants to see me?" Hobart
looked up at Stiebel in open
surprise. As the most junior
officer in the entire ship's complement, he had been
assigned a number of routine tasks, most of which
were connected with monitoring erosion of the hull.
There had been little enough
actual work for him
to do
during the two acceleration phases of the voyage, and
during retardation—when the ship
was shielded
against collisions with interstellar material by its
own drive
torch—there had been virtually no work at all. In
any case,
at no
stage in the journey would Hobart have expected an
individual summons from Captain George A.
Mercier, commander of the Longer Willow.
"What do you think George wants?"
he said
to Stiebel. "Did he say anything?"
For a reply, Stiebel
stared at him with slightly
raised eyebrows then passed
on his
way, performing a menial administrative duty with
gusto and an air of
importance, the picture of
the corporate
space traveler. Hoping the exchange
had not
been overheard, Hobart stood up and
glanced around him. He
was a
tall man with silver-blond hair and exceptionally clear skin,
and he
had always
found it difficult to
do things
without being noticed. Several of the
ship's senior technical staff were watching him with amused expressions.
There was no personal malice
in their
attitude, but he knew they
were of a breed that firmly believed in the
value of making life as
irksome and embarrassing as possible for
junior officers. Even if it
were traditional at this
stage of a trip for
the captain
to give a new man a
drink and a clap on the
back, nobody would have helped him
by divulging
the information
in advance. Hobart nodded to the
onlookers, left the rest room, and made his way
along narrow corridors to the
compartment Mercier used for
office work and rare conferences.
He tapped
the door
and immediately
was told
to enter.
"Sit down, Hobart," Mercier said, indicating
a chair
opposite the desk at
which he was seated.
"Thank you, sir." Hobart lowered himself
into the chair, noting as he
did so
that there was nobody else
in attendance and that Mercier's desk
was almost
completely clear, as if
die captain
had come
to the
room for no reason other
than the present interview. Hobart gazed at Mercier, wondering if such a
thing could be possible. The
captain was a strongly
built man of about fifty,
with conservative good looks which,
had he
been an actor, would have typecast him as a
judge or an insurance company
president. He examined Hobart
with frankly puzzled blue eyes and
then, unexpectedly and uncharacteristically, gave a deep
sigh.
Hobart shifted
in his
seat. "Sir?"
Mercier seemed
to reach
a decision.
"I contacted you through the day
executive, rather than the general
address system, because there's
something going on here that
I fail
to understand, and I
want to deal with it
as discreetly
as possible. Do you remember a
junior technical officer called
Craven? Wolf Craven?"
"Yes, sir." Hobart
suppressed his uneasiness. The sudden
mention of Craven's name had
aroused feelings of guilt, but they
were associated with a personal
matter, one which could hardly concern
his professional
life. "I know him quite well."
"
"Were you
friendly with him?"
"I wouldn't put it
as strongly
as that—we
just happened to be in
the same
intake at Langer Center and
went through our pre-ops course at
the same
time."
Mercier looked dissatisfied, the overhead light accentuating
ridges in his forehead. "Have
you ever
been to any parties at Colonel
Langer's house?"
"Yes, sir."
"Was Craven
at the
same parties?"
"Yes, but
. .
." Hobart developed a conviction
that somehow, against all the odds, the private
degradation he had experienced with Wolf Craven on that last night on Earth was
leading to unforeseen consequences. "Excuse me, sir—am I entitled to know
what this is all about?"
"I
never went to any functions at the Langer place," Mercier said
reflectively. "Made a point of staying away from that
sort of thing. Even in the old days."
Hobart
was reminded of the fact that, as a veteran star-man, Captain Mercier had a
memory which reached far back into the previous century. It was an incomplete
memory, a thinly dotted line composed of months-long periods on Earth interspersed
with decades in the rela-tivistic limbo of the space
traveler, but the span was there and it made Mercier different. Although the captain had lived some fifty
years of body time, little more than twice as much as Hobart, he had a
trick—possibly cultivated— of occasionally appearing to commune with eternity.
In spite of his growing sense of alarm, Hobart was constrained to withhold his
questions.
"I
believe there was a party the night before this voyage began," Mercier
said at length. "And that both you and Craven were
present."
"Yes,
but lots of company personnel were there." Hobart began to wonder if he
was making a mistake in going on the defensive before any charge had been made
against him, but he pressed on. "We were leaving the next day, and the Langer Rowan—that's Wolf Craven's ship—was going out the
day after that. It was"—he sought a form of words that might impress the
captain—"a fairly significant social occasion."
"You didn't speak to
Craven at all?"
"Well,
I'm bound to have spoken to him at some time, at some stage." Hobart tried
to fend off an intrusive memory of Craven's dark and cleft-chinned face, the
too-red lips lacquered with saliva, the eyes pleading and derisive at the same
time. "Sir, I'd like to know what's going on.
"So would I, Hobart, so would I." Mercier paused again, brooding. "We entered
the Solar System near the top end of our speed envelope, which is why we had to
resume deceleration so soon after the confirmation report. There was only a
minute or so, less the allowance for distance lag, for verbal
communication—and I could have used that time in more productive ways than
talking to the police."
"The police?" Hobart was both surprised and reassured, knowing there were no criminal
activities on his conscience. He made a show of relaxing visibly.
"Yes—the
police.
This is a serious matter, Hobart."
"I can't think why the
..."
"They
seem to be of the opinion that Wolf Craven was murdered during your fairly
significant social occasion." Mercier paused again, giving Hobart's own
phrase time to rebound on him. "And, from what was said, you appear to be
the chief suspect."
Hobart
suddenly became aware that the structure of the ship was alive, that stress
patterns and subtle harmonics were coursing through the walls of the room,
agitating the air which surrounded him, He
could hear it whispering in his ears.
"That's ridiculous," he said
forcibly, then secondary implications came to his
mind. "Is Wolf Craven really dead?"
"I presume the police wouldn't be
talking about murder otherwise."
"But I know nothing
about it."
"You'd
better not," Mercier said gravely. "You know my way of going by this
time, Hobart—if you're innocent 111 back
you all the way, and you'll get the same support I'd give to the most senior
member of my crew, but if it turns out that you really are involved you'll find
me a bigger enemy than the public prosecutor. The company cant afford this sort of thing."
"The
company can't afford it!" A lowering of the captain's
brow told Hobard he was failing to show proper
deference, but such considerations no longer seemed important. "Look, I'm
entitled to know exactly what was said."
"I've
already told you more than I should," Mercier replied, eying Hobart with
fresh appraisal, as though suspecting that insolence in a junior officer could
point to a capacity for more serious faults.
Hobart
shook his head. "Exactly what did the police say?"
"First
they checked that you were still alive and on the ship's roster, then they
requested me to put you in detention until we go into parking orbit."
"Detention?" The atmospheric whispering in Hobart's ears grew louder and more
malicious. "Are you going to do it?"
"I'm
obliged to." Mercier pressed a call button on his desk. "It will be
done discreetly, of course. All I expect of you is that you will remain in your
quarters until the parking maneuvers are completed. I'm not proposing to put a
guard on you."
"Thank
you, sir," Hobart said bitterly. "Will I be handcuffed to the
shuttle?"
"You'll no longer be my responsibility
at that stage." The puzzled look returned to Mercier's eyes as he got to
his feet, terminating the interview. "I don't know what you've got
yourself involved with, Hobart—but the police are going to the expense of
sending up a transit vehicle just to take you off my hands."
Investigator Charles Shimming was a
medium-sized, fit-looking man with a long face and intelligent, worried eyes.
During conversation he had a habit of lowering his chin onto his chest, as
though suppressing a series of belches, but continuing to speak anyway. This
had the effect of making every utterance sound weighty and deliberate, if
somewhat disjointed. It also had the effect of irritating Hobart, who wanted
his information delivered quickly and clearly.
"There are two ways we can handle this
thing," Shimming said in the privacy of Hobart's room. "If you are
reasonable and cooperative I won't even have to place you under arrest, and we
can walk—or should I say float?—out of here like two friends going off
somewhere to have a couple of beers. I think that would be the best way to do
it, but if you didn't want to be reasonable and cooperative I could hit you
with a spider, in which case..."
"Hit
me with a what?" Hobart scrutinized the policeman's neat
frame, looking for weapons.
"I
forgot you've been away eighteen years." Shimming opened his right hand,
revealing what looked like a silver golf ball. "This is a spider. If I
threw it at you it would explode on contact and wrap you up in metal ribbons—
same way some spiders truss up flies. It wouldn't hurt, but you'd have to be carried
off the ship all done up like a Thanksgiving turkey, and it would be bloody
undignified. It would be really embarrassing for you."
"I
see. Thanks for bringing me up to date." Hobart pretended not to notice
the threat which had been implicit in the description of the restraint system.
"I would have co-operated with you anyway."
"That's
good." Shimming made no move to put the silver ball away. "Shall we
go?"
"Don't I get to hear
what this is all about?"
"Not now, not in
here—it wouldn't be considerate."
"Considerate?"
"Yes.
The ship has to remain officially sealed until I get you off, and it wouldn't
be fair to all the others if we caused unnecessary delays. They must be pretty
anxious to get their feet back on the ground after all this time."
"Okay."
Unable to shake off a feeling he was being manipulated, Hobart detached his holdall from the spring clip which prevented it from
drifting about the room. He glanced around the tiny compartment, scarcely able
to believe he would not be spending the night in its familiar confines, and
moved out into the corridor. It was a long time since he had walked in
zero-gravity conditions with the aid of suction soles, and at first he swayed
grotesquely as he made his way toward the transfer port. Shimming labored along
behind him, obviously ill at ease, allowing too much
suction to build up under his shoes and having to struggle to lift his feet
clear of the deck. His progress was punctuated by popping noises and occasional
bursts of subdued swearing.
The
pilot was already waiting in the blue-and-gray police transit vehicle, which
looked strangely unreal against the background of powdery green that was the
Langer Line's house color. The vehicle was smaller than the company transits,
too, making the cylindrical transfer port seem exceptionally roomy. Aware of
the curious stares of the lock technicians in the control chamber, Hobart
climbed aboard the shuttle and strapped himself into a deep chair in the midsection passenger compartment. When he looked out
through the transparencies at his side he found he was now on a level with the lock crew, all of whom were gazing back at him with
undisguised interest. Hobart's cheeks began to tingle. Suddenly angry, he
turned to Shimming, who was hauling himself down into the next seat.
"This is an imposition," he said.
"It's too muchl I ought to have a lawyer here."
Shimming frowned at the buckle on his seat
belt. "You're not being denied access to a lawyer—but think of the expense
of bringing one up here. And the delay."
"The company should take care of the
expense— they're supposed to look after the contract officers. I should have
spoken to Colonel Langer."
Shimming looked up from the buckle, which he
seemed to find as tricky as a Chinese puzzle, and an odd expression appeared
briefly on his long face. "How in hell do these things go together?"
"Like that." Hobart slid the metal connectors home across the other man's stomach. He thought
about the reaction his mention of Colonel Langer had produced, and it crossed
his mind that he might benefit by showing he had friends in high places.
"Yes,"
he said reflectively, striving for maximum effect, "I should have spoken
to the colonel. I'll call him as soon as we touch down."
"You'll
be wasting your time," Shimming said. "Colonel Langer died four
years ago.'
"But that's im—" Hobart broke off in the middle of
the word, gagging on his first real taste of what space travelers called
time-slip. As far as he was concerned, he had been away on a voyage lasting
thirteen months—but during that period a total of eighteen years had elapsed
on Earth, and the effect of those years was real. No longer was it an abstract idea in Hobart's mind, a textbook paradox
to be marveled at and dismissed from his thoughts. His world had run the gamut
of eighteen winters, been warmed by eighteen summers, and there had been lots
of time for old men to grow older still, and then to die....
". . . how you
guys do ft," Shimming was saying. "Skipping
ten or twenty years at a time would cut the feet out from under me—I'd be lost, if you know what I mean—but you can take it in your stride, calm as you
like. Something I really admire, that."
"How did the colonel die?"
"Some say it was
Bourbon, some say it was gin."
"I'm sorry to hear about that,"
Hobart said, deciding to pursue his original intent. "He was a good
friend."
Shimming snorted. "Some friend!"
"What do you
mean?"
Shimming
placed his finger tips together and lowered his chin to his chest a couple of
times as a preliminary to speaking. "It would be best for you, Dennis, if
you didn't try to palm off some story about you and old man Langer belonging to
the same social set, playing polo together, and that sort of thing. You were
one of the bunch of young rams that Mrs. Langer used to invite up to the house
to keep her amused, and I doubt if the colonel ever did more than say hello"and good-bye to you. Am I right?"
"Certainly not," Hobart snapped, appalled.
"Colonel Langer invited me to his place personally, several times, and
although we weren't all that close we had a good ..."
"Dennis,"
Shimming cut in, smiling apologetically, "it was Langer who started this
whole thing off. He was the one who said you killed Craven."
Hobart was unable to prevent his jaw from
sagging as a partial understanding of his predicament seared itself into his
mind like a spark tracing a message on chemically treated paper. The colonel
must have known what Wolf and I did, he thought in sudden panic. He must have
seen us, or been told—and this is his revenge.
He
became aware that Investigator Shimming was
scanning his face with eyes as intent as those of a gambler watching the
wheels of a chance machine shudder to a halt, and it came to him that he needed to protect himself. No doubt Shimming was highly skilled at reading expressions
and interpreting instinctive verbal responses—so what was he to say in his own
defense?
He
composed his features with an effort- and retreated into youthful pomposity.
"This is too ridiculous for words."
"That's
unfortunate, because words are the only tools I can use," Shimming replied.
"There's nothing . . ." He stopped speaking and glanced around him as
the shuttle's door sprang together with a pneumatic gasp. There was a diminishing hiss as the transfer dock was
bled of air, and a few seconds later the outer door slid open to reveal the
blackness of space. Because of the brightness within the dock the stars
appeared sparse and dim. The shuttle wallowed slightly as the berthing clamps
were released. Maneuvering jets sounded faintly and the vehicle began to slide
out into a boundless ocean of emptiness, forsaking the
homely environment of beams, panels, and pipe runs for one in which the mind
was lost for visual anchors.
Shimming gave a wan smile, and Hobart
realized the investigator was highly nervous. He repressed the sympathetic
grimace with which he would normally have reassured anyone who was new to
space and stared straight ahead, trying to assess the likelihood of his ending
up in the death chamber. A chill descended over him as he considered
the proposition that his life might terminate on Earth in a few months' time,
in the year 2131, instead of at some vague and postponable
date centuries ahead.
The
transit vehicle was moving clear of the immense bulk of the Longer Willow now, and the sunlit Earth came into view,
looking huge and mysterious as it curved away on all sides, comprising almost
half of the visible universe. Powerful jets began to hammer up front, reducing
the transit's orbital speed and putting it into a controlled fall. Hobart
watched the milky blue immensities tilt and turn, dismayed at the contrast
between actuality and his imagined homecoming at the end of his first voyage.
The only crumb of comfort he could find was that Shimming was too overawed and
wrapped up in space tyro's misgivings to continue the interrogation for the
present. He had time to get his thoughts in order....
Colonel
Langer's age and failing health had forced him to give up active participation
in space flight, but he had liked the company of junior officers who, because
of their lowly positions, made an ideal captive audience for his reminiscing.
For the most part he had kept himself occupied with his menagerie of frost
animals, but there had been days when that pursuit had proved too passive and
he had turned to other pastimes. One of them had been going into the strip of
rough terrain at the rear of his estate to blast at snakes with antique
firearms. Hobart, who had listed shooting as one of his interests, had been
brought along mainly as gun-bearer on a number of the mini-expeditions.
The
farewell party at the Langer house had been a rambling, multicentered
affair which he had attended for a number of ill-defined reasons. He had been
flattered at receiving the invitation from Colonel Langer, and inexperienced
enough to entertain hopes that it could bode well for his future in the
company; he had been lonely and scared on the eve of the departure for Sirius;
and, underlying and coloring all other considerations, had been the
possibility of sexual adventure.
The fables about Dorcie
Langer had inflamed Hobart's imagination, filling him with a curious blend of contempt and yearning. He had scarcely dared
meet her gaze during his previous visits to the house, and yet he had nourished
a conviction—one he would not have voiced—that she had been specially
aware of him, that she had singled him out as a prospect. For an unworldly and
slightly repressed youngster of twenty-two, those ambiguous glances had been
sufficient to trigger off lurid fantasies—none of which had correctly
anticipated the event. Even after a lapse of thirteen months, he could remember
the exact words with which Wolf Craven had greeted him in an upstairs corridor at the rear of the house.
I don't know how you did it, young Denny, but
you've connected with our good lady—she sent me to get you.
The
peremptory nature of the summons had shaken Hobart, as had the use of Craven as
a messenger, but his initial shock had been swamped by the discovery of what Dorcie Langer had in mind for him.
Come
on, Denny, Craven had pleaded, sinking his fingers into each of Hobart's
biceps. I'm not going to let you blow this out on me, not after I've worked on
her for weeks. What does it matter if. she wants both of us at once? Don't be such a kid, for
Christ's sake—it all adds to the fun.
"Fun,"
Hobart heard himself muttering as the shuttle began to sway, to come alive as
it dipped into the tenuous upper layers of the Earth's atmosphere.
Shimming leaned closer.
"What was that?"
"Nothing,"
Hobart said, shaking his head, wresting his mind away from the recurrent vision
of three bodies twined together, straining, sweating, laboring; of the languorous
opening and closing of the woman's mouth; of
Craven's eyes, watchful and derisive. The subsequent events were what he had to
think about and try to understand, because in them lay the source of his
present danger. Hobart reviewed the rest of the fateful night and found he had
nothing to work on, no memories of incidents which through hindsight had
acquired new significance: The trouble was that he simply did not have enough
information—while appearing to be friendly and communicative Investigator Shimming
had, in fact, told him very little.
For
the remainder of the brief flight Hobart forced himself to relax into his seat,
trying to synthesize the feelings of pleasure and nostalgia he should have
experienced on seeing familiar green horizons arise to enfold him.
It
was early in the afternoon when the shuttle dropped solidly onto a runway at
Langer Field. Instead of rolling the vehicle into one of the company's
operations bays, the pilot swung south and taxied into the section which the
city of Corona Falls rented for use as an airport.
They came to a halt beside a police car which was parked at a discreet distance
from the passenger terminal and the doors swung open even before the turbines
had growled into silence. Hobart had time for one glimpse of sharply etched
snowy peaks far beyond a line of curved hangar roofs, then he was in the rear
seat of the car beside Shimming, and the airport
gates were looming ahead. The uniformed driver, without speaking or being
spoken to, accelerated toward the city and in a few minutes they were entering
the suburbs.
Hobart studied the procession of store fronts
and small business premises, backed here and there by dwellings and tree-shaded
streets, looking for signs of change. He had only a sketchy knowledge of Corona
Falls, acquired during his period of training at the Langer Center, and to him
the lapse of eighteen years had created no striking differences in the place.
Even the automobiles seemed very much as he remembered them, the designers
having long ago surrendered to the dictates of aerodynamic efficiency. He
strove to reorient himself as they neared the city center, but the car abruptly
swerved down a ramp and stopped in an underground parking area. Shimming
escorted him from the car to an elevator, through a warren of
corridors, and suddenly the two men were alone in a windowless office whose
walls were painted the indeterminate green favored by bureaucrats everywhere.
The furniture consisted of a desk and four upright chairs. Hobart felt as
though he had been cornered and driven into a pen.
"You'll have to advise me what to do
next," he said firmly. "How do I contact a lawyer?"
Shimming sat down at the desk. "I told you
there's no need for that, Dennis. You're not under arrest."
"It feels like
it."
"I
hustled you down here in case there'd be any embarrassment with
reporters."
"Reporters?" Hobart selected a chair and sat down. "I didn't think there'd
be..."
"Local
TV, radio, and the Corona Falls Chronicle," Shimming
said. "The Langers had controlling interests in the lot. Old man
Langer died about four years ago, but this is still very much his show."
"But
why did he start gunning for me?" Hobart examined his hands as he spoke,
knowing the answer to his own question.
"That's
what I want to find out. I've just had this case dumped in my lap, long after
the whole thing has gone cold, but 111 sort
it out even if I have to read microrec-ords in
bed." Shimming continued ducking his chin, suppressing belches.
"The
Langer Line is the principal employer in this area, and the city couldn't get
on very well without it, but I'm damned if I'm going to be used as an
instrument for settling any of the Langers' personal
grievances. Now, if it turned out that Dorcie Langer
had given you a grapple or two . . . and that the colonel had found out . . .
that would incline me to suspect his motives . . . and it would incline me to
backpedal on this investigation."
"There
was nothing like that," Hobart said heatedly. "I hardly knew either of them."
Sliimming's lips twitched. "At least we're getting
that much straight. Eh, Dennis?"
Hobart
met his gaze squarely. "I demand to know why I'm here. For God's sake, I
don't even know how Wolf Craven was killed."
"That's just the
point—neither do I."
"But the body..."
"We haven't got a
body."
Hobart
shifted in his chair and gave an incredulous laugh. "Then what's going on?
Why did you send a transit vehicle up specially for
me7"
"That wasn't my idea. Somebody upstairs
is putting on a bit of a show for the benefit of the Langer board."
Shimming put his elbows on the desk and leaned forward with a look of concern.
"Listen, Dennis, think it over carefully before you answer—are you sure there was nothing between you and Mrs. Langer?"
Hobart
thought about his career ending in a single
blaze of sensationalism. "Nothing. Nothing at all."
"Okay,
okay." Shimming touched a button on the desk. "I'm going to record the rest of this
interview, for your benefit as well as mine. You'll be given a copy of the tape
on request."
"Suits me." Hobart crossed his legs, making a show of
relaxing. "Perhaps now you'll tell me why I'm here."
Shimming
nodded. "On the night of May 12, 2113, you—Dennis Hobart—were present at a
party in Colonel Nolan Langer's house on Silverstream
Heights. Also present was Wolf B. Craven, a junior engineering officer on a
ship of the Langer Line. During the course of the party, at approximately
midnight, you were seen by a number of witnesses having a heated argument with
Craven, following which the two of you withdrew from the rest of the guests.
Colonel Langer and other witnesses stated that you returned after approximately
one hour, and that you were pale and uncommunicative, as though under mental
stress."
"That's wrong," Hobart put in.
"That last bit is wrong—I talked to lots of people."
"None
of them remembers it. Anyway, do you admit to having an argument with
Craven?"
"Yes, but it was
nothing much. He was a bit drunk."
"What was the argument
about?"
"Well,
he wanted me to go out to the freezer house at the back and look at Colonel
Langer's collection of frost animals, and I didn't care for the idea."
Hobart heard the improvisation as though it were
coming from a stranger and he felt a pang of unease. Lies, he sensed, should be
kept simple and easy to manage.
"Were you afraid of
the animals?"
"No—as
far as I know they're harmless. It was just that I had seen them before and
wasn't interested in seeing them again."
"But you went with
Craven anyway?"
"Only part of the way, to humor him. As soon as we got outside in the dark I
slipped away from him."
"What did you do
then?"
"I
walked in the gardens for about an hour—it was a fine night—then I returned to
the house." "Was Wolf Craven there?" "No. Not that I
remember." "Did you ever see him again?"
"No."
It occurred to Hobart, for the first time, that it was strange that he had not
seen Craven during the rest of that night. He had noticed Dorcie
Langer more than once—drinking with friends, laughing a lot—but of Craven there
had been no sign. Hobart experienced a momentary coldness, small but very
real, like a single snow-flake dissolving on his skin.
"You'll
be interested to hear that two days after the party
Colonel LangeT visited the public prosecutor's office
and made a deposition," Shimming said
carefully. "In it
he
said that he went outside for a short time to check on his frost animals, at
about thirty minutes after midnight, and that on his way to the freezer house
he overheard you and Craven, still out in the garden, still arguing and apparently
having a fist fight."
"That's
wrong," Hobart countered, shocked. "That's a lie."
"Why would the colonel
have lied?"
"I don't know." A bizarre idea—in a
way more disconcerting than anything that had yet cropped up—began to stir in
the lower levels of Hobart's consciousness. "Why did he wait two days
before going to the police with his story?"
"I'm told he was ¿11—a touch of arthritis in his arms, something
like that." Shimming looked at Hobart with renewed interest, as though
trying to tune in on his thought processes. "Does the delay seem
significant to you?"
"If he thought
somebody had been killed ..."
'That
idea didn't get kicked around until it was discovered that Craven was
missing—and by that time the Longer Willow had
already departed, with you on board, and there's no way to communicate with a
ship on drive."
"Neat,"
Hobart said, nodding, wondering if it would be possible to encourage a certain
line of reasoning in Shim-ming's mind.
"Convenient."
"Not
for the police—we don't like eighteen-year delays in our enquiries."
"I
didn't mean convenient for the police. It seems to me that. . ." Hobart
stopped speaking as Shimming held up one hand in a theatrical gesture of
warning and at the same time touched the control button of his unseen recorder.
There was a moment of near silence dominated by the hum of the air conditioning
and a fizzling noise from the light fitment on the ceiling.
"As
you can see, I'm speaking off the record, as a friend," Shimming said. "It's to
give you a piece of advice."
"Which is ... ?"
"Don't
speculate on the record about who might have killed Wolf Craven."
"What
difference does it make when the colonel's dead?"
"He has an assortment of brothers,
cousins, nieces, and nephews. Old Nolan was something of an embarrassment to
the family, especially after he quit playing at exploring and settled down at
home, but that only makes them more sensitive than ever about anything
connected with him."
"I
see." Hobart considered the notion that Investigator Shimming might
actually be his friend. "Does this mean you think I'm innocent?"
"It
means I don't see how you could have disposed of the body in such a short time.
You were on foot that night and you didn't make use of any of the other guests'
cars. And we searched the whole area very thoroughly."
"Craven just vanished
off the face of the Earth?"
Shimming
almost smiled. "We considered that as a literal explanation. The hanger Rowan left the day after your ship, and for a long
time we hoped there had been a foul-up in its papers. If Craven had got away to
Alpha Centauras
on board it without being
properly signed on—as has happened in the past—that would have solved
everything. But the Rowan
got back two years ago and
we established that Craven had never reported for duty."
The
oppressive load began to lift from Hobart's mind. "But you're not even
sure that Craven is dead?"
"I don't think he ran
away to sea, do you?"
"Anything
could have happened to
him," Hobart said, gaining confidence. "Why, he could have decided to
quit the party and walk back to the Center. A drunk driver could have zapped him
and taken the body into the next state . .."
"Clever
theory, that. Not plausible—but clever." Shimming brandished the index
finger of his right hand to indicate he was about to start the recorder again.
"Just remember what I said about implicating Colonel Langer." He
pressed the button. "What were you going to say, Dennis? It seems to you
that..."
"It
seems to me that, even if you had proof that Wolf Craven had been killed,
there's practically no case against me. Some people saw us arguing, which I
admit and have explained. Colonel Langer says he heard me having a fight with Craven in the garden, which I deny. And that's
it!"
"But
why, out of twenty or so men who were present that night, did Colonel Langer
think it was you he heard with Craven?"
"If
he saw us arguing earlier he could have jumped to a wrong conclusion."
"Thank
you, Mr. Hobart—I have no more questions for you for the present."
Shimming stopped the recorder once more and sat back, eying Hobart with moody
satisfaction. "I was scared up there today. Could you tell?"
"Most people are uneasy first time
up," Hobart said, wondering how soon he
would be free to leave.
"I wasn't uneasy—I was scared
stiff." Shimming paused to make a ruminative movement with his chin.
"I could be psychologically marked for life, just so that the commissioner
can make a political grandstand play. We could have picked you up at Langer
Field and got the same useless piece of tape."
"Useless?" Hobart spoke with a kind
of pleasurable indignation. "You can't call it useless if it clears up an
eighteen-year-old case."
"Who said the case was
cleared up?"
"But you practically ..."
Shimming shook his head. "Craven was
murdered, all right. I don't know who, how, or why—but I know he got himself
snipped."
"Look, when can I leave here?"
Hobart said, his sense of unease returning in full
force.
"Any time you like," Shimming
replied, getting to his feet, "but don't leave the city until you get
clearance. And don't forget to let me know where you're staying."
"I
imagine I'll be at the junior officers' hostel at the Center."
"You
imagine that, do you?" Shimming gave Hobart a wry look. "I'll see you
around, Dennis."
The Langer Line personnel manager was called
Toby Martyn. He was about thirty years old, but had
adopted the dress and mannerisms of a middle-aged man, possibly with the
intention of showing the staid and nepotic Langer
board that he was director material. His eyes, behind gold-rimmed flakes of
glass, were blue and unsympathetic as he selected various slips of paper from
his desk and dropped them into an envelope bearing Hobart's name and citizen
number.
"As
you are no doubt aware," he said primly, "junior officers are
assigned very few duties on their first interstellar voyage. Its main purpose
is to determine how well they stand up to the psychological stresses of both
the journey itself and the associated calendaric
displacement."
There's no such word as calendaric,
you gasbrain, Hobart thought. He was shocked and
angry, yet a detached part of his mind had noted a curious fact. With one round
trip completed, he had seventeen years of timeslip
under his belt and—although it was a paltry score compared to that of a veteran
starman—it was already affecting his relationships
with Earth-bound individuals. Martyn was about seven
years his senior in actual body time, and therefore in experience, but Hobart
had been bom a decade, before the other man, and on that account felt himself to be somehow the more
complete of the two. He began to get an inkling of how he, as a junior officer, must have seemed to a man like Captain
Mercier, and his yearning to bestride the centuries in a like manner suddenly
intensified itself.
"I
felt fine throughout the trip," he said. "I feel fine now."
"That's not what it says on your
psychometric profile," Martyn replied, sealing
the large envelope. "Take my advice, Mr. Hobart. You're a young man, with
your whole life ahead of you—forget about space flying and take up some other
occupation. With your engineering qualifications you should have no trouble
getting into—"
"I'm
not interested in other work," Hobart interrupted. "I'm doing the
only thing I want to do."
"Well... perhaps with some other line."
"Some other line!" Hobart found he was almost shouting, but was
past caring about propriety. "That psych report was cooked up to prevent
me working anywhere."
Martyn's face underwent a subtle change.
"Careful what you're saying, Mr. Hobart."
"I'm
saying my assessment was faked. Do you think I don't know the real reason I'm
being booted out?"
Martyn slid the envelope across to the front of his
desk. "The references you have here will enable you to obtain another type
of position. They contain no mention of the fact that you are suspected of
having murdered a fellow officer, and that's something for which you should be
grateful."
Hobart
drove forward and caught Martyn's wrist. Martyn flinched back, obviously afraid, but at the same
time a look of furtive triumph appeared in his eyes,
and it was that which enabled Hobart to regain his mental poise. A starship was
an emotional pressure cooker, an autoclave in which certain kinds of character
defect tended to trigger explosions, and no operator employed people with
records of violence. The phrase "physically assaulted a company
executive" appearing on his sheet, regardless of the circumstances, would
be an ironclad guarantee that he would never again serve on an interstellar
vessel. Hobart released Martyn's wrist, drew his lips
into a numb smile, and stood up, searching for words which would make him seem
cool and dignified.
"You haven't heard the
last of this," he said, resorting to a formula he remembered from
historical novels. Mar-tyn adjusted his glasses and
stared up at him without speaking. Hobart picked up his envelope, left the
office, and made his way out of the building to the plaza, where late afternoon
sunlight glowed on the alloy statues and islands of shrubbery. It was a
perfect spring day, exactly the sort he had visualized for his homecoming, but
that fact served only to aggravate the turmoil behind his eyes. He entered a
dark-seeming side street and found an even darker bar. The place was empty,
engulfed in a musty stillness which preceded the rush of customers at the end
of the working day.
Hobart bought a glass of beer, carried it to
a table which had a small peach-colored light, and sat down to examine the
contents of his envelope. The pay slip told him he had been credited with close
to a hundred thousand dollars, a sum which at first seemed too much. Interstellar
travel and its time anomalies had alarmed the world's bankers in the early
years, and they had been quick to reach agreement that interest on any star
traveler's funds should be computed on his body time and not according to
Earth calendars. However, starship operators usually factorized crew salaries
to compensate for inflation and timeslip, and when
Hobart took that into account— along with tax refunds and severance pay—he
found he had received no more than his due. He had no immediate money problems,
but that was of little comfort when his career had been ruined, deliberately
and with malice aforethought, by a man who had escaped into the grave after having ...
The
colonel murdered Wolf Craven! The thought, which had been swamped by other
considerations, struck Hobart with sudden force, awing him with its
strangeness. On that night, on that fairly significant social occasion, Nolan
Langer—probably driven by jealousy or hurt pride—must have killed Craven and
disposed of the body. And, being a man who never did things by halves, he had
rounded out the act of revenge by shifting the blame onto
Hobart, a move which would have increased his satisfaction and diverted
the police investigation away from himself.
Hobart sipped his beer, reluctantly
impressed. He could remember the colonel on the night of the party—tall, iron
gray, limping, militarily correct—welcoming his guests, and . . . and . . .
Hobart frowned as he realized he had no other recollections of the colonel on
that night. Langer had absented himself at quite an early stage, which tied in
with the theory that he was getting rid of cumbersome evidence, but there was
an inconsistency somewhere. His memories of the party itself were all
compatible, now that he understood what had been going on beneath the surface,
so the discordant note must have originated during his talk with Investigator Shimming Hobart stared into the peachy orb of the
table lamp, unable to pin down the vagrant idea which was tantalizing him, then
he recalled Shimming's promise
that he could have a record of the interview. He pushed his beer glass away,
crammed the envelope into an inner pocket of his tunic, and left the bar.
The street outside was more crowded now as
the city's stores and offices began to close down for the day. Hobart walked
one block south to the Lewis Hotel and checked into an expensive second-floor
suite with a balcony overlooking colorful tulip beds. As soon as he was alone
he went to the living room's infomat, and put a call
through to police headquarters, praying that Shimming would still be on duty.
He relaxed somewhat as the investigator's long, serious face appeared on the
screen. "I'm glad I caught you," he said. Shimming nodded. "No
panic. I'm usually patched into the system—even in bed."
"Oh! I'm staying at the Lewis, by the
way." "Thanks tor letting me know,
Dennis.'' Shimming lowered his chin, conducting one of his silent battles
against internal pressures, but his eyes remained fixed on Ho-bart's. "You decided against the Langer Center?"
Hobart gave a rueful
grimace. "How did you know they were going to dump me?" "It
wasn't hard to figure out."
"Well, I'm not leaving it like that. I'd
like the tape you promised me earlier." "You want it now?"
"Yes."
Hobart checked to make sure there was a cassette of lateral-imprinting tape in
the console's bulk information receiver and pressed the intake button. On the
screen he saw Shimming looking down at his own terminal as he fired through an
information bleep in which the entire interview was compressed into a signal
lasting a fraction of a second. A green light appeared above the bulk receiver.
"Got it," Hobart
said. "Thanks."
"This
sort of thing never works," Shimming commented.
"Not in real life, anyway. Amateur investigators
never turn up anything the police didn't know about all along."
"Is
that a fact?" Hobart suppressed an impulse to issue some kind of enigmatic
challenge. "You don't mind if I go over the tape a few times, do
you?"
"Be
my guest," Shimming
said, fading himself out.
Hobart took the cassette out of the receiver and dropped it into a playback
slot, all at once convinced that Shimming was
right, that he was only play-acting. The idea which had seemed so close to the
surface of his mind in the bar had retreated to deep tiers of consciousness
populated only by unremembered dreams. Voices suddenly pervaded the room, his
own the strangest of the two, and he began pacing the
floor to work off his tensions. In that mood he had no expectation of success
and consequently he was surprised to find his attention instantly caught by a
single fragment
".
. . the two of you withdrew from the rest of the
guests. Colonel Langer and other witnesses stated that you returned after
approximately one..."
And
the point was that Langer had not been around when Hobart returned to the
party. Hobart was certain of his ground because, with Dorcie
Langer's perfume still in his nostrils, he had been supercharged with guilt,
abnormally keyed up for the first encounter with the colonel. It had never
occurred.
The
fact was not very important in itself, but it could be used to prove to
Shimming that Colonel Langer had lied when making his deposition—and if one
part of his testimony was shown to be fake the remainder could perhaps be
written off. Hobart strode to the infomat, but paused
before making a call. As the matter stood, it was a case of his word against
the sworn statement of a member of the city's most influential family—and he had an idea Shimming was likely to be unimpressed. After a few moments of thought, Hobart
asked the machine for a communications code and put a call through to Joe Armitage, a dentist who did much of the contract work for
the training center. He had become friendly with Hobart when they found
themselves attending the same concerts, and as youngsters with like interests
they had seen each other at least once a week throughout Hobart's pre-ops
course. The screen came to life almost immediately, showing a square-faced,
ruddy-complexioned man in his forties against a background of antique books.
Hobart stared at him in silence, filled with a curious timidity. I have traveled
in space, and I have traveled in time....
"This
is Joe Armitage," the stranger said. "My
daughter isn't at home right now, if that's what. . ."
Hobart
shook his head. "Joe! This is Denny. Denny Hobart."
Armitage frowned, his eyes taking in details of Hobart's
tunic and service emblems. "I'm afraid I . . . Wait a minute—you went off
on the Oak, didn't you?"
"The Langer Willow."
"That's
right! I heard a ship had just come in, but I wasn't sure which one it was. I'm in private
practice these days and I don't have much to do with the Langer organization."
"Neither do I,"
Hobart said. "I was wondering..."
"I'm sorry I didn't recognize you,"
Armitage cut in. "I knew so many of the Langer
boys in my old hell-raising days, and . . . It's a funny thing, but when people
look the same as they did eighteen or twenty years ago you can't recognize
them. I have no trouble with acquaintances who've been on Earth all along and
who have changed. It's as if the old brain keeps a
model of them and updates it year by year, putting in the sags and bags and
wrinkles and so forth, so that when I see them I know who they are, even if
they don't look much like they used to. Know what I mean?"
"I
think so." Hobart felt a pang of sadness at having been classed as an
acquaintance rather than a friend, but he put it out of his mind. "Listen,
Joe, I'm sorry about springing this on you, but I'm in a bit of trouble with
the police and I need somebody to back up my statement to them."
Armitage looked interested. "Ill
help you all I can."
"Thanks.
It's about that party the night before I left. Colonel Langer walked out in the
middle of it and didn't come back, but he swore that he did. All I need is somebody
to..."
"Hold
on," Armitage protested, smiling. "What
party are you talking about? I don't think I was even there."
"You were," Hobart
said, shocked.
"Sorry—I think you're
wrong, Denny."
"But
. . ." Hobart searched his memory. "Remember you spent most of the
night playing poker with Mexy Gomez."
"Did I? Gomez? Was that the character
with the blue chin and all the muscles?"
"Yes. Do you remember
now?"
"I'm
trying." Armitage gazed back at Hobart, his eyes
slowly clouding, then he shook his head. "I went
to quite a few of the colonel's parties in the old days, but they've all run
together in my mind. That was nearly twenty years ago, Denny."
"I know," Hobart said, learning
something about timeslip and the nature of
loneliness. He spoke to Armitage for another minute,
fending off questions about his problems, and ended the call after making an
insincere promise to get in touch again. The room seemed abnormally quiet when
the screen went dead. He brooded for a moment, then took a pen fron his pocket and made a list of twelve other men and
women who had been guests at Colonel Langer's house on the crucial night. Seven
of these were operations personnel and a series of enquiries revealed that they
were all away on the Procyon run and would not be
seen on Earth for another eight years or more. Of the remaining five, residents
of Corona Falls, two had died of natural causes, and the others—far from being
able to help—were unable even to remember knowing Hobart or having been in his
company. After nearly an hour of awkwardness and embarrassment, he turned away
from the infomat, went into the bedroom, and lay
down.
It
was growing dark outside, the sky turning a peacock blue above the varicolored
glitter of the city beyond his balcony, and it came to him that by this
time—had his dreams of homecoming materialized properly—he should have been
bedding down with a woman. He had an intense yearning for the comfort and
companionship of love. Hobart turned restlessly on the bed's pliant surface for
a minute, then lay still, his eyes widening, as the idea which had lain dormant
in his mind heaved upward and began to dominate all thought.
There
was one person who had cause to remember the night of the party as clearlv as he did, despite the passage of time, and as far
as he knew there was nothing to prevent him from contacting Dorcie Langer without further delay.
Hobart was surprised to find that the big
house was in comparative darkness. Subconsciously, having previously been there
only when a party was in full swing or when the colonel was organizing a foray,
he had it fixed in his mind as a place where such things were the norm, and the
terse instruction from Mrs. Langer's personal secretary had in an obscure way
reinforced his preconceptions. As he parked his rented car in the driveway he
admitted to himself that more than a year in the confines of the ship had
disposed him toward a therapeutic blowout, garnished with excesses of every
kind, and the insight was a disturbing one. His current troubles all stemmed
from one shameful debauch, yet part of him had been ready to flirt with similar
temptations and perhaps still was. The id, he suddenly realized, could be a
dangerous encumbrance.
He
slammed the car door and examined the house, wishing he were a smoker so that
he could indulge in the ritual of lighting a cigarette. The two-story building,
with its stone mullions and complex roof, looked imposingly ancient. In the
gardens at the rear he could see the outlines of the freezer house where Nolan
Langer had kept his menagerie of frost animals, and he was further surprised
to note a bluish glow from the windows, which indicated that the refrigeration
system was still functioning. The enigmatic creatures, inhabitants of Sirius
VII, were troublesome to support and he would have expected the colonel's
widow—whose interests were more earthly—to have rid herself of the
responsibility at the earliest possible moment.
Hobart
walked to the house's main entrance and- ascended the curving steps. A control
system, responding to the identity code emitted by his citizenship tag, swung
the door open for him and he went through into a dimly lit, spacious hall which
seemed not to have altered since his last visit, The same pictures of
extraterrestrial scenes— souvenirs of the colonel's travels—hung on the walls,
and the same photon-sculptures glowed in the comers and recesses. He was still
getting his bearings when a door on the right opened and a woman he took to be Dorcie Langer's secretary appeared in a rectangle of pink
light and beckoned to him. Hobart had almost reached her before he realized his
mistake.
His talk with Armitage
had alerted him to the effects of timeslip and he had
steeled himself to find the young Dor-cie Langer
transformed into a woman in her forties, but other forces had been at work—and
the person before him had an apparent age closer to sixty. She was dressed in
salmon-colored silks revealing a round-shouldered figure in which the torso
had plumped out while the legs had grown thin, giving her an odd sparrow-like
aspect. Her face, in the flattering light, was much as he remembered it, except
for a waxy, unnatural sheen. Hobart, in spite of his naivet6 in such matters, sensed that a cosmetician
had all but erased the real face and used it as a canvas upon which to paint
the woman who had used to be. His stride faltered.
"Hello,
Dennv," she said in a burry voice. "Don't
stand there gawking, Come in!"
"Of course." Hobart entered the room behind her and
closed the door. "Hello, Mrs. Langer."
"Mrs. Langer he says! Vou don't need to be formal with me, Denny." She threw him a brilliant smile as she went toward a liquor
cabinet. "What are you d"rinking?"
"Ah
... anything."
"Good for you. Still game for anything,
eh?" She splashed two glasses of clear liquid from a decanter, came back
and handed one to him. She looked closely into his face as their fingers
touched, and her smile vanished. "Just as a matter of interest—what age
are you?"
"Twenty-three,"
Hobart replied, too nonplused to avoid a direct answer which carried a whiff of
danger.
"My God," Dorcie
said, walking around him as though inspecting a statue. "My
God! It isn't fair—you're still just a kid. How can you still be just a
kid?"
Hobart strove to be
diplomatic. "Age isn't important."
"Not important!" Dorcie drained her glass, wetting the side of her chin in
the process. "Not important, he says. "Of course it isn't important for somebody who doesn't change in eighteen
years."
"For me it's only been one year,"
Hobart said soothingly. "The time dilation effect—"
"Don't
give me any of that scientific crap," she shouted, shilling Hobart
with the abrupt contortion of her face into a mask of fury. "Time is time,
for God's sakel It's the
same everywhere. Nobody will ever convince me .. ." She stopped speaking,
glanced around like someone who had just heard a stealthy footfall, and her
smile returned in full force. "Let's have another drink."
Hobart
held up his still brimming glass. "I suppose you can guess why I came to
see you."
"I
can guess, all right—you young spacers are all the same," Dorcie said coquettishly, appalling Hobart even further.
She refilled her glass and sat down on a low-backed couch. "Don't stand
around, Denny—we're old friends, aren't we?"
"Yes,
indeed." Hobart sat down near her and sipped his drink, which proved to be
a cloying almond-flavored liqueur. "Look, Dorcie,
you don't believe I killed Wolf Craven, do you?"
"You? That's hardly your style."
"Have
you any idea why Colonel Langer told the Police I did it?"
"I
know exactly why." Dorcie gave a sharp laugh.
"Don't you know? It's because he was a bastard. Through
and through. He tried to keep me shut up as if I was a goddamn Sister of
Mercy or something—but it didn't work."
"That's not what I'm
getting at."
"Funny
thing is, he was able to do it better after he was
dead. I'm not allowed to give up the house, you know. I'm tied to this
mausoleum and that damned ice box out in back, otherwise I lose three fourths
of my lousy income."
Hobart
shook his head impatiently. "Do you remember the party the night before I
left?"
"Do
I?" Dorcie rolled her eyes, put a hand on his
knee, and leaned closer. "Are you trying to get me going?"
"In his deposition to the police,"
Hobart said steadily, repressing the urge to shrink away, "the colonel
said he rejoined the party soon after midnight, but you must remember that he
didn't. Nobody saw him for the rest of the—"
"I
don't want to talk about that old goat," Dorcie
cut in, setting her glass aside. "All right, Denny—let's go upstairs."
Hobart's mouth went dry.
"Upstairs?"
"Don't
act so innocent." She slid her hand along his
thigh. "You've been stripping me with your eyes ever since you came in
here."
Hobart
disengaged by jumping to his feet. "You're the only one who can help me.
Think back, please.
Can you remember exactly
what the colonel did that night?"
Dorcie made as if to come after him, then a slow
smile appeared on her face and she settled back on the couch, spreading her
legs a little. "I probably could remember— given the right sort of
encouragement."
"He was missing for
the rest of the night, wasn't he?"
"Down on your knees," she commanded, eyes bleak and
threatening. "Down on your knees, boy."
Hobart
backed away, shaking his head. "You're sick," he whispered.
"Crazy."
"Crazy?"
Dorcie Langer seemed to savor the word while she kneaded the flesh of her thighs. "Perhaps I am. I
could be crazy enough to remember anything I wanted—good or bad. It's up to you, Denny, my
love."
Hobart
turned and fled the room, running with the leaden-footed ponderousness that
characterizes nightmares.
Later that night Hobart experienced a real
nightmare. He dreamed it was the night of the party again, the location in
time and space convincingly established by a shifting montage of images and
impressions—large rooms with minimal lighting; a sense of imminence—the
dreadful starship waiting; trays of drinks, tables of food; intermingled wisps
of music and distant laughter; the choking press of bodies in slithering nakedness.
. . . Suddenly Hobart was in a silver room—it was the freezer house— watching
in mute terror as the tall figure of Colonel Lan-ger
stood over Wolf Craven and methodically destroyed him with an ice pick. Craven was lying on the floor, twitching and flinching under the
blows, each of which added to and elaborated the pattern of blood-red,
dark-centered flowers covering his body from neck to groin. His mouth was open,
but the horror of the scene was increased by the fact that he did not scream.
Instead, there came from his lips a thin, sad keening, a plaintive note like
the beat of insect wings in summer pastures....
Hobart
awoke with the sound ringing in his ears and sat up immediately, unwilling to
risk failing asleep again and sinking back into the same nightmare. He checked
the time, saw that it was almost six in the morning, and decided to get up.
While taking a hot shower he pondered over the dream, marveling at the ways of
the subconscious mind. He had a nodding acquaintance with the Faraday theory,
which stated that the overt content of dreams—which psychologists had once
dismissed as mere "day residue"—was more significant than the
Freudian and post-Freudian interpretation of symbols and could be treated as
genuine attempts at communication between different levels of the mind. But
what might his subconscious be trying to say? He had already deduced that Lan-ger had killed Craven, probably in or around the
freezer house, so that part was no help to him—and the strange wliining sound seemed no more than a grotesque incidental
detail. Was the message simply that Craven's body was hidden in the
refrigerated building, where it would be immune from decay?
Hobart
considered the idea later while eating breakfast in his room and decided it was
of little merit. Investigator Slumming had told him the entire area had been
searched by the police, and the freezer house and associated workshop were
among the first places anybody would think of checking. He was pouring a third
cup of coffee when the infomat buzzed to anounce a call and Shimming's
long face appeared on the screen, looking professionally impassive while he
waited for two-way communication. Hobart pressed a button to accept the call.
"I
was wrong about you, Dennis," the investigator said without preamble.
"I had an idea you'd go up to Silver-stream last night, and I expected
that you'd be totally ineffective—but I was way off the beam. You really managed
to churn things
up."
"Really?" Hobart kept his voice level. "In what way?"
"One
of Mrs. Langer's tame lawyers spoke to the commissioner this morning. It
appears that she too remembers your having a fist fight with Wolf Craven in her
garden on the night he disappeared."
Hobart
shook his head emphatically. 'The woman's insane. You might have warned me
about that."
"Rich
people don't go insane, Dennis—at most they become eccentric. In any case, we
now have a second statement corroborating what Colonel Langer told us, and that
makes things worse for you."
"You're
not going to take it seriously, are you?" Hobart was unable to read Shimming's eyes. "I mean, why did she wait eighteen
years before coming out with this?"
"The
line they're taking is that she saw no point in getting involved until you
were back on Earth, that nothing could be done until now."
"Garbage,"
Hobart snapped. "Specious garbage at that."
"Nevertheless,"
Shimming said, dipping his chin, "it increases
the pressure on me within the department. What did you do up there last night,
anyway?"
"It-was
what I wouldn't do," Hobart muttered, and was instantly sorry he had
spoken.
"Oh? Gone off her,
have you?"
"I
was never . . . Look, we've been through all that already." Hobart sought
a way to wrest the conversation onto a new track. "When you were searching
for Wolf Craven's body did you go through the freezer house?"
"Me? I was in my second year in the
police academy in 2113."
"You know what I mean," Hobart
said, refusing to think about timeslip. "Did
they check the freezer house?"
"Naturally." Shimming glanced down at something on his desk. "It's all here in
the report. The investigating officers—with Colonel Langer's full
co-operation, by the way—went all through the workshop and the cold area itself.
They looked under the refrigeration machinery housings, behind all movable
wall, ceiling, and floor panels, underneath the salt storage unit..."
"What storage
unit?"
Shimming
inspected his records again. "It seems that those things the colonel
brought back from Sirius way, the frost animals, need trays of mineral salts to
keep them alive."
"I
know that—but when I was in the freezer house those trays just sat around on
the floor." As a synaes-thetic background to his
own voice, Hobart heard the curious sound from his nightmare, and memories
began to stir.
"So what?" Shimming gave an elaborate shrug. "It wouldn't have been too tidy
that way, so Colonel Langer had a special unit built."
"Correction! He built it himself."
"All
right—he built it himself. I'm told he liked doing things like that."
"You
don't understand," Hobart said quickly, above the pounding in his chest.
"I was in that freezer house only three days, or it might have been two,
before the party—and at that time the trays of salts were still sitting around
the floor."
Shimming
pulled in his chin and looked puzzled. "What do you think you're getting
at?"
"He built it the nieht of the party. During the party."
"You haven't any proof
of that. It could have been . .
"I
do have proof," Hobart put in, telling the lie which might not have been a
lie had his conscious memory been perfect. "I remember going near the back
of the house two or three hours after midnight and hearing somebody outside
using a valency saw. You know that weird droning
noise they make—you can't mistake it."
"It
doesn't matter exactly when the unit was built," Shimming said through a silent gulp, showing his disapproval of Hobart's
excitement. "The point is that the officers looked at it after Craven
disappeared."
"They
didn't look well enough," Hobart asserted. "That's where Craven's
body has to be."
Shimming
turned his gaze toward the ceiling for a few seconds, then
gave Hobart a wry smile. "It says in your file that you were born way back
in 2091, and that makes me forget you're just a kid."
"Kid
nothing," Hobart said angrily. "I'm able to think."
"Yes,
but you think the way a kid does. You think a team of trained police officers,
could search a room and fail to find an object as large as a human body; you
think crimes are solved by a Great Detective sucking on a pipe and making
deductions—but that's not the way it is, sonny. The police success rate is very
high these days, but it's because we get information. There are too many systems
for acquiring data, and storing it, and processing it. That's what gives us the
edge."
"What about the information I've just
given you?" Hobart demanded. "Aren't you even going to ... 7" He broke off as someone knocked
heavily on the door leading out to the corridor.
"That'll
be my men," Shimming said. "The way the situation has developed, I
have to bring you in. I'm sorry about this."
'Tm sorry, too." Hobart allowed his shoulders to droop as the
pounding on the door grew more insistent. "I'll let them in." He left
the informat, walked straight out to the balcony
and—praying the flower beds were no further down than he remembered—vaulted
over the railing.
It was growing dark when Hobart left the
cover of the timber plantation and approached Silverstream
Heights from the west, picking his way through the
swathe of gullies and sheared ground that helped protect the big houses
against intruders.
His main concern throughout the day had been
that of keeping well away from store entrance scanners and any other devices
which could read the signals from his citizenship tag. He might have thrown
the tag away altogether, but many commercial security systems could sense the
nearness of a human body and when it was not accompanied by appropriately coded
radiation they tended to react loudly. Less embarrassing, but more dangerous
from his point of view, was the type that remained
silent and sent a microwave call to the nearest police station. Hobart's
strategy had been to leave the city on foot and go into hiding at the first
good opportunity, and although his day-long wait in the sanctuary of the trees
had been uncomfortable and boring he had successfully retained his freedom.
He
followed a track up to the fence which marked the western edge of the Langer
estate and, his progress now hampered by darkness, located the gate the colonel
had installed to facilitate his snake hunts. Its rails were covered with
spirals of barbed wire and, predictably, it was locked. Hobart took off his
tunic, wrapped it around the top bar and managed to climb over without
incurring any injury. He began to retrieve the garment and then, recalling
that he might need to make a rapid exit, changed his mind and knotted the
jacket in place by the sleeves. An ivory-colored moon, horizontally striped
with cloud, was lifting clear of the distant hills, but its luminance was weak
and Hobart had to move cautiously as he went toward the house. After five
minutes the exterior lamps came into view, interfering with his night vision
and creating the illusion that he was nearing the edge of a black and dangerous
pit. He continued to feel his way forward and it was with a considerable sense
of gratitude that he reached the smooth turf of
the gardens
and was
able to pick out the sloping
roof of the freezer house
and workshop.
A blue glow from the square
high-set windows told him the
environment necessary for the
survival of the frost animals
was still
being maintained.
Hobart felt strangely uneasy and uncertain
as he
approached the freezer house door.
The notion
of taking
direct action to solve
a murder
mystery had seemed both logical and attractive during the
day, but the reality—involving illegal night entry and,
for all
he knew,
a risk
of getting himself shot—was a different matter. He looked
up at the dark bulk of
the house,
wondering if Dorcie Langer was
in it
at that
very moment, and he was
gripped by a desire to complete
his mission
as quickly
as possible
and slip away before
his situation
deteriorated in some unforeseen manner. Moving
with self-conscious stealth,
he opened the door, stepped inside,
and stood
for a
moment in the small, square lobby.
On his
left was the insulated door of the refrigerated area, with its single
viewing aperture; on the right
was the
workshop, with a cone of
yellow light illuminating one of
the workbenches.
Did that
mean he had been
unlucky and that a maintenance
engineer was actually on the
premises?
He cleared
his throat
loudly and strode into the
workshop, his mind working on
a passable cover story, and found it deserted.
Aware of the need for
haste, he gathered up several types
of screwdrivers
and a
hammer and carried them out to
the lobby.
He slid
back the bolt on the insulated
door and went through it
into the menagerie itself. The
door closed behind him with
a pneumatic
sigh. For a brief moment,
while his clothing retained a protective
layer of air, he had
the impression
the temperature in the
room was quite moderate—then the coldness closed with him,
grappling and clawing like an
invisible enemy. Pain flared in
his nostrils
and throat.
Hobart looked around, breathing
in shallow
gasps, and saw one of the
captive animals on the wall
at his
side. It resembled a beautifully symmetrical array of frost
ferns, almost a meter in diameter.
As he
watched, its crystalline patterns
began to alter—a seething of
diamonds—and the flower shape grew smaller.
In the
space of a few seconds
the creature had vanished
altogether. Hobart turned nervously and saw that the
alien had re-formed on the
wall behind him. At the edge
of his
vision he saw others blossoming
or shrinking
on every
flat surface, like glassy lichens.
Reminding himself that the
frost creatures had never been known to settle on
a human,
he went
further into the room, past the
refrigerator housing, and immediately saw the fabricated unit of
which Shimming had spoken. Basically, it was a squat pyramid fringed with
silver laminate-covered shelves
on which
sat trays
of the
mineral salts commonly found in the
deserts of Sirius VII. The
structure was screwed to
the floor,
and Hobart's
pulse quickened as he
noted that the central pyramid
was large
enough to contain two
or three
bodies if required. Wishing he
had retained
his tunic
to help
ward off the cold, he
began lifting the wide
trays from the shelves and
placing them on the floor. It
seemed to him as he
did so
that the migratory activity of the
frost animals increased slightly, but he dismissed the idea.
Xenologists
had been
studying the creatures for some years
and still
had not
managed to classify them or produce
any behavioral
responses, so it would have been
fanciful for him to suppose
they were reacting to his
presence.
When he had disposed of the
trays he lifted the heavy
shelves off the brackets,
stood them against a wall,
and began taking up the screws
which secured the pyramid to
the floor. By this
time he was shivering so
violently that he had to use
both hands to guide the
screwdriver into the slots, and he
realized he could remain in
the subzero
environment for only a few
more minutes. He removed the
last screw with trembling
hands, slid the screwdriver under the base of
the pyramid,
and tilted
the structure
onto its side.
The interior
was completely
empty.
Unable to accept the evidence of his eyes,
Hobart sank to his knees and tapped the laminated boards, looking for
dimensional or angular discrepancies which would have betrayed a hidden
compartment. Cracks of light glimmering between the boards told him the quest
was hopeless—even a master magician would have found it impossible to conceal a
rabbit within the simple structure. Hobart, sick with disappointment, sank back
onto his heels and pressed a hand to his jaw to dampen its vibrations. He
looked around the featureless wall of the room, heedless now of the transient
flat rosettes of the frost animals, and cursed himself for the senseless
egotism that had led him to go against a professional like Shimming. The best
thing he could do now was to put things back as he had found them, in the hope
his trespass would remain undetected, then go back into the city and give
himself up to the police.
He
got to his feet and was trying for a good grip on the toppled pyramid when
there was a sharp metallic sound from the direction of the door.
Hobart
froze in the act of lifting, certain he was about to be apprehended. He
remained in the same attitude for a few seconds—then a more disquieting idea
entered his mind.
Letting
the pyramid fall, he ran to the door—seeing a pale face flicker and vanish in
the dark rectangle of the viewing aperture—and tugged on the handle. As his premonition
had told him it would, the metal-sheathed door refused to move.
"Dorcie!" he shouted. "It's Denny. Don't do this. Let me out!"
There was total,
black-velvet silence.
He
turned away from the door and cast about wildly, his breath pluming in the
gelid air. The hammer he had taken from the workshop was lying on the floor. He
picked it up in stiffened hands, went to the nearest window, and struck it
with all his force. The head of the hammer rebounded from the toughened glass
without
marking it in
any way.
Hobart tried again and this
time the hammer spun from his
grasp and fell behind him He dropped to his knees and was
going after the tool that
represented his hope of
salvation when a silent voice;—
perhaps that of his
superego, perhaps of the wise,
worldly, and dispassionate Denny Hobart he
had always
hoped to become—spoke to him, commanding
his attention.
He listened
for a
moment and rose to his
feet, smiling apologetically
with one hand on his
forehead, then gathered up the screwdrivers
and went
to the
true source of his peril—the flanged and louvered mass
of the
refrigeration plant.
The main side panel was held
in place
by six
spring-loaded screws requiring only a
half-turn each. Using his two-handed technique, Hobart was able
to remove
the screws in a matter of
seconds and to lift the
sheet of metal out of his
way, exposing the machinery itself.
The type and its operating principle
were unfamiliar to him, but he
had no
difficulty in identifying a thermostat
which had a slide control on
a scale
nmning from —
40° to
+ 30° Centigrade, which meant the system could
double up as a heater. Grunting
with relief, he reached for
the control,
then jerked
his hand
back as the entire thermostat
housing became enveloped in
a thick
coating of frost. The white crystalline
layer continued to thicken and
exhibit patterns, diamond petals
furling out on diamond petals
with bewDdering
rapidity, until quite suddenly the
thermostat was locked inside a
shell of ice.
Hobart gaped at it, dumbfounded, then raised his head to look
around the room. Most of
the elaborate,
jeweled rosettes of the
frost animals had disappeared from the walls and ceiling.
He looked
back at the refrigeration machinery and saw
that no part of it
had been
affected by the encrustation except the
control he had been about
to operate. Hugging himself to ease
the growing
pain in his chest, Hobart rocked
backward and forward as he
tried to make sense of what
was happening.
The only
conclusion he could reach was that
somehow, by some process he could not even begin to understand, the
alien beings had divined his intention. Switching off the refrigeration would
save his life, but as a consequence the frost animals would be destroyed—the
temperature in the room had never been allowed to rise above —20° Centigrade in the decades of its existence—and it appeared they had
taken preventative action.
Questions
began to clamor in his mind. Had he, Denny Hobart, accidentally made the first
intellectual contact with an extraterrestrial race? Had no xenologjcal
researcher thought of testing for motivation by threatening a frost animal
with death? Or, unknown to him, had progress been made in
that field during his eighteen years of absence in space?
The
stabbing sensation in his lungs grew worse and he realized that, at this stage,
questions and answers were without relevance. His very life was at stake—and
there were more ways than one of stopping a machine. He turned to reach for the
fallen hammer and in that moment became aware of another phenomenon, one of
silent but flurried movement. The shelves he had removed from the storage unit
were still leaning against the nearest wall, and all over their sloping
surfaces a number of frost animals were forming, fading away to nothingness and
re-forming in a kind of regimented dance, creating fantastic, shifting,
geometrical designs.
Wondering
why he was squandering the short time left to him, Hobart rose painfully to his
feet and approached the shelves. The activity of the beautiful enigmatic beings
reached a frenzied climax, dazzling his eyes.
I
can learn from you, he thought, numbly, as though his brain cells were turning
to ice. The same lesson that old man Langer learned. Rigid bodies make rigid
minds make rigid thinking ...
He
watched his hands reach out like servomechanisms, the blue-knuckled fingers
crooking in preparation, and in that moment the frost animals vanished from the
shelf he was about to touch. Hobart dug his nails under the top edge of
the plank's
silvery laminate and slowly peeled
it downward, revealing the core material,
which appeared to be a red
semitransparent plastic, variegated
here and there by whitish spots
and areas
of blue
and black
and brown.
Thunderous seconds passed before
his mind
came to grips with the mosaic
of lines
and chamel-house colors, imposing
a pattern
on them,
letting him know he was looking at a longitudinal
section cut through a human
body. He turned away,
retching, and went back to
the refrigeration
plant
'Tm sorry,"
he said
aloud. "You've given me what
I
wanted, but
I'm not
going to die. Not in
this century. Not
in the next___ "
He knelt at the machine, grasped
a slim
feed pipe, and tugged on it
with what remained of his
strength. The pipe began to bend,
but in
that instant his breath was
cut off.
He fell sideways to
the floor
in the
grip of a searing coldness unlike anything he could
have imagined as the frost animals
attacked, suffocating him beneath a
mask of sparkling ice.
Investigator Shimming
paused for a moment, nuzzling
his chin down onto
his chest.
He remained
in that
attitude for a short time—perhaps coping with gastric explosions,
perhaps ordering his thoughts—then
activated the recorder in his
desk.
"It is now obvious," he said,
settling back in his chair,
"that having unlawfully killed Wolf Craven, Colonel
Lan-ger placed the
body of the deceased in
an oblong
box, filled the box up with
water and put it in
the refrigerated
room he used as
an extraterrestrial
menagerie. Forensic reports will reveal whether
or not
he added
any chemicals
to the water to accelerate the freezing process. As
soon as the contents of the
box had
frozen solid he took a
cutting implement—almost certainly a
valency saw, which
is quick in operation and generates
no heat—and
sliced the resultant block into longitudinal
planks about three centimeters in thickness. An engineering
consultant from the University of Montana has already confirmed that ordinary
ice has quite good structural properties below a certain temperature, and in
this case we are talking about ice which was reinforced with bone and strips of
clothing.
"Colonel
Langer then covered the planks with metallic laminate, to disguise their
nature, and used them to build the shelf unit I referred to earlier in this report. Evidence suggests that this work was
begun on the night of 12 May 2113, while
the party was still in progress, and was completed late the following day—by
which time Dennis Ho-bart had already departed on the
Langer Willow. Having disposed of Craven's body in a manner
he was confident would escape detection, Colonel Langer went to the office of
the public prosecutor and made a deposition in which he attached the blame for
Craven's death to Hobart.
"I
have not been able to establish any motive for his desire to mcriminate Hobart, and am of the opinion that Hobart was
chosen fortuitously, simply because he had been seen arguing with the deceased.
That concludes my interim report on this case."
Shimming
switched off the recorder, surveyed the drab green walls of his office, then allowed his gaze to settle on Hobart, who was sitting
opposite him. "As you'll have gathered, I'm letting you off the
hook," he said. "You know, I don't think I've ever met anybody so
lucky."
"Lucky!"
Pain caused Hobart's face
to twist spasmodically beneath the surgical dressings and he fell silent,
wishing he had not reacted so violently.
"That's
what I said. You're alive when you ought to be dead, and you're getting your
job back. The Langers didn't have to reinstate
you."
"Didn't they? Can you think of a better
way to remove an embarrassment?"
"Perhaps not." Shimming took a roll of white tablets from a drawer and began to suck
one, rolling it about his mouth as though tasting a rare wine. "All the
same, Dor-cie Langer could have blackballed
you."
"She ought to be put
away for trying to kill me."
"We have no proof of that, Dennis. She
says she locked the door on an intruder, which is what any normal woman might
have done in the same circumstances."
"Normal?" Hobart winced and gingerly pressed both palms to his cheeks. "The
frost animals are more normal than she is."
"Could be. Have you thought about how we must appear to them? Perhaps we're the
real frost animals."
Hobart
nodded, waiting for the pain in his face to subside. The creatures from Sirius
VJJ no longer seemed quite so
enigmatic since it had been established that they were life-oriented, reacting
as positively as they could against any form of killing. It was due to that
facet of their nature that he was still alive—because eighteen years earlier
they had attacked Nolan Langer. Nobody would ever know the precise details of
what had happened that night, but it seemed that Langer had lured Craven into
the freezer house to kill him, and that the frost animals had attacked their
owner during the crime. The colonel had not been forestalled—he was good at
killing—but he had been obliged to seek medical treatment for frostbite.
And it had been Shimming's
belated discovery of this fact, hidden in a computerized medical report, which
had set him wondering about the veracity of the long-dead colonel's deposition.
It chastened Hobart to realize he had been allowed to get away from his hotel,
and that he had actually been under long-range surveillance right up to the
moment he entered the freezer house, even though the final outcome had been in
his favor.
"I ought to thank you," he said, getting
to his feet. "If it hadn't been for you..."
"Forget it" SUmming
extended his hand. 'Tve had the pleasure of putting a
couple of department politicians in their places. Come back and see me any
time."
"Thanks." Hobart shook hands and
paused awkwardly. "I'd like to come back, but they've assigned me to the
Longer
Maple—on the Sigma Draconis run—which means..."
"A three- or four-year round trip for you, but forty years for me on
Earth.
I'll most likely be dead when you get back."
"I wasn't going to put
it like that."
"Don't
worry about it." Shimming laughed, almost brutally, and for an
instant his eyes resembled those of Dor-cie
Langer—suspicious, resentful, hostile. "If I'm
not worried about it, why should you be?"
Hobart
nodded, his sense of alienation complete, then turned and left the office,
already wondering how he was going to get through the month that lay ahead
before he could rejoin his own kind and take flight among the stars.
Speculations
about future life styles have become a frequent and rewarding format for
science fiction in recent years: the opportunity to write about how we or our
children might live decades hence is irresistible. Here Paul David Novitski, a comparatively new writer, projects a number of social and scientific trends into the
future and shows us that despite our current problems we may yet achieve a
semi-Utopia. (In fact, we may be forced to, in order to survive.)
But
even a near-flawless society will leave individuals with problems, and Novitski pinpoints one in a novelette that's both
convincing and thought-provoking.
NUCLEAR FISSION
Paul David Novitski
As
dark hills rolled beneath the zeppelin,
the sun rose behind it to
cast pale, gold tendrils up the ridges of the coast range ahead. Spider lay
curled in a hammock in the port cabin, watching through the wide window as the
Willamette landscape began to appear beneath the fading stars. Somewhere in
the folds of the foothills ahead lay the cluster of domes that was her home,
nestled in fir and rhododendron. She stretched out in the sling and yawned.
Her brother Fuchsia would probably be the only one up this early—he always got
up before dawn, trudged up the hill to the pottery to throw a few before
breakfast. But the others would still be asleep.
Spider
yawned again. For her it was too late at night—or too early in the morning—to
be fully awake or asleep. These annual transcontinental flights always threw
off her circadian rhythms. When she had boarded the zeppelin in Pennsylvania it had been nine at night; during the flight the sun had
risen behind them, arced overhead, and
set in their eyes. Now it was rising again, and
although she had caught one full night's sleep during the thirty-hour trip, she
felt exhausted.
She turned and slipped quietly out of the
hammock, flexing her shoulders in the cool, dark air. Several other hammocks in
the long cabin bulged with softly snoring shapes. Spider moved along the
sleepers to the hatch.
She stopped in the head, to squat, for a
minute, over the toilet set into the floor. Stood, threw cold water from the
tap onto her face. With long fingers she brushed back her shaggy white Afro,
and contemplated her flat, thick features in the mirror. In the pale light from
the bathroom's tiny window she seemed to float in the mirror like a ghost, like
the afterimage of someone who has suddenly disappeared. She shivered, dried
herself quickly with the rough towel, and stepped back into the corridor.
The
first hatch on the left opened to her push to reveal the pilot and console
silhouetted against the dawn-lit mountains. She could hear the burr of the engines
more clearly here. She slid into the empty co-pilot's couch and sighed.
The pilot glanced over.
"Howdy. Up already?"
"Still,
you mean. Never really got to sleep. I'm your
passenger for Noti."
"Oh,
right." The pilot's face was serene in the dilute glow of dawn.
"Well, you haven't got long to wait. We're due to touch down in about
forty minutes."
"Eugene?"
The
pilot shook her head. Her hair was so short it looked like fur. "No, yours
is the on'v stop till we turn up the coast. I've got
time to take you right to your door."
"Great!
I wasn't looking forward to that three-hour bike ride."
The
pilot snapped a finger against the radio mike. "Yep, it's been a real
quiet night. No one to pick up till we get to Astoria.
F^k" don't travel much th's time of the year. They're all at home, putting
in gardens, pruning trees—"
Spider groaned. "Don't remind me! I've
been gone three weeks to that G.R.C. conference in the East, and I just know
that no one in my household will have gotten around to pruning my dwarf
apples."
The
pilot laughed. "Yeah, I know what you mean. After I'm done with this circuit I'm going to stay home for the
summer. I miss my folks."
Spider
put one foot up on the edge of the console, crossed it with the other.
"Where's that?"
"Place
in the Cumberlands. We've got a big old farm out
there, sheep, chickens, soy, hemp. About twenty of us
live there full time, sixteen wives and four daughters."
Spider
looked over at the pilot with surprise. "You're married?"
"You
bet. I like that commitment. We've got the best ten-year contract this side of
the ocean." She threw a row of switches with her toes. "And
yourself?"
Spider
waved vaguely. "Oh, just a small extended family. My
son, his father, his mother, me, my brother, his
lover, his daughter. We've never wanted
to get married. A few years ago we all changed names" together, but we
haven't wanted anything more formal than that."
The pilot sniffed.
"Sounds like a pretty tight little clan."
Spider
frowned, picked at a button on her shirt. "I guess."
"You don't sound so
sure."
Spider
shrugged. "People change. Right now I'm closer to someone in another
household." She was silent for a while. The world outside was getting
lighter, the hills steeper and greener. The white peaks of the coast range were
visible in the distance, where they melded with the clouds. She glanced over at
the pilot. "You have any kids?"
"Hm? Yeah, like I said, we've got four on the
farm—" "No, I mean—"
"Oh."
The pilot frowned, adjusted
a lever and snapped a switch. "Since you ask, yes, I do. Had a couple of them, years ago." She glanced up. "Boys."
"Where are they
now?"
"Who knows? Wherever their father is, most likely."
Spider
ran her hand across the flat of her stomach. "I
got tied after Sparrow was born."
"Really?" The pilot shook her head. "Not me, sister; I don't want nobody poking around in my insides."
Spider
gaped. "You mean you've had two kids and you're not tied? Godsl If you could only see the
global starvation figures I have to work with every day I"
The
pilot turned in her couch and cupped Spider's cheek with her hand.
"Lady," she smiled wryly, "there's no way I'm going to get pregnant where I am now."
"Oh."
Spider felt her face get hot, swallowed hard. "Sorry, that was stupid of—"
"Forget it." The
pilot turned back to her board.
Spider
searched for a way to reconnect. "My lover is pregnant," she said at
last
"You don't say."
"That's why Fm coming back early from
the conference. She wanted me to be there."
The pilot shrugged. "Why didn't she just
postpone it?"
"No, she decided on the date more than a
year ago. Today's the cusp."
The pilot snorted. "I never paid much
attention to that astro stuff in school. When I had
my two boys, I just went about my business and let my body handle the whole
thing." She shifted several toggles on the board and Spider felt a slight
descent. The hum of the distant engines rose in pitch.
"Actually," said Spider, "I feel the same way. I had my boy
naturally. Walker still hasn't convinced me that controlling the gestation
period doesn't harm the fetus." The pilot did not reply, and Spider sat
back to watch the details appear in the landscape as they descended.
"Tell
me where you live exactly," said the pilot, "so I can put this thing
down."
Spider blinked, then
rummaged in her shirt pocket for a pen and a scrap of
paper. "Come to think of
it," she said, "I'd like to
ask you
the same
thing."
Sunlight spilled
the warm
syrup over Sparrow's face, blood-red through his eyelids as
he squirmed
on the
mat. Reluctant to waken,
he grasped
at the
melting splinters of recent dreams, but
those visions, touches, and smells
trickled only more swiftly
between his mental fingers, leaving him beached, finally, on
the broad
round morning.
He blinked and rubbed
his face,
shifted across the mat so that
the sun,
shining through the eastern window,
was out of his eyes. A
cool morning breeze swept smells
of tree blossoms gendy
through the room. With dawn,
the top of the little dome
had opened
like a flower, spreading back petals from the sun's
warmth. That old familiar branch snaked across his circle
of sky,
shaking clusters of pinky-white
blossoms in the morning breeze.
Sparrow took a deep breath of
the cool
mixture of smells and let it
slowly sigh away. Way up
in the
sky, a solitary black speck drifted
amid the blue. He squinted one eye. What was
that bird seeing way up
there? A shaggy beard of woods,
most likely, spread across the
mountains' face, creased by
veins of streams and road.
And here, in a
patch of morning sun, a
handful of domes like warts.
Sparrow giggled to think
he was
living in a wart. Was
the world really like
a face,
like the face of the
moon? When Spider used to let
him sit
in her
lap, he liked to run
his finger tip across
that bump below her left
ear that
sprouted three thick, white
hairs like cats' whiskers. He
shook his head to
clear away the memory. Thinking
about Spider made him feel too
lonely. The world was like
Coyote's face, but with a
green beard, not red.
He sat
up, shivering
as the
sheet fell from his brown
chest, round belly. He
brushed the long squiggles of
hair from his face, let his
head fall back, and froze
in mid-yawn.
That wasn't a bird up
therel The speck had
grown to a blob, and now he could make out its
shape, long and rounded.
Spider was home!
He
jumped up from the mat and padded down the short tunnel that connected his room
with the main one of the house. He flung aside his flannel door and stepped
into the wide, cool room. The cozy smell of carob permeated the air. Prints
and paintings, familiar pillows, and shelves stuffed with ragged books lined
the main dome's wall. The thick round rug that hugged the floor was shaggy with
forest colors. All the doorways that led to the other domelets
wore different cloth doors, emblems of their occupants. Only three were tied
back with thongs—: Coyote's spare landscape in black brush, Swann's
ancient psychedelic prints, and Fuchsia's brown fuzzy rug. The others must
still be asleep. Fuchsia always got up first— he'd be up in the pottery—but
Coyote and Swann...
Sparrow
circled the room toward the kitchen alcove, taking the longer way around to
stop in the toilet to pee. His narrow yellow stream fell away into the darkness
of the composter. He remembered to close the lid after himself, rinsed his
hands briefly under the tap, and shook them dry on his way to the kitchen.
He crept the last few steps and peeked around the fireplace.
Swann lounged at the kitchen table sipping carob, engrossed in a book, while
Coyote knelt at the garden bin peeling breakfast. He glanced up, saw Sparrow,
and waved.
Sparrow
walked over and plopped down on a pillow at the low table. Swann, wrapped in a
thin green robe, looked up from her book and murmured something, the branching
lines of her face congealing in a smile. Sparrow grinned back, savoring his
secret, and poured a mug of orange juice without spilling much. The cool, thick
lip of the mug met his mouth. Sweet juice.
Coyote
put a bowl of sectioned fruit on the table and sat across from Sparrow. His
lips moved behind his bushy red mustache: "What's new?"
Sparrow signed with his
hands: / know
a secret!
Coyote
gaped in mock astonishment. "Well, don't keep us in suspense!"
Swann put her book down.
"What is it?"
Sparrow
jumped up from the table and ran a circle around the room, head down, cheeks
puffed, arms straight at his sides. One quick circuit
of the kitchen and he sat down again, grabbed a handful of fruit, and looked slyly
at Coyote and Swann as he sucked on a piece.
Swann
and Coyote looked at each other in bewilderment.
"Let's see," said Coyote
thoughtfully. "You saw a bee!"
Sparrow shook his head.
"The bull in the
meadow," said Swann.
Wrong again, he signed.
Then Swann leaned over and laid her hand on
Coyote's shoulder. He cocked his head, frowned, then
broke into a grin. "That must be the ship!" He got to his feet and
went to the window, the sunlight electrifying his bush of red hair. Swann
joined him, and a sudden shadow fell across the room, turning off Coyote's
hair. A low, fluttery feeling was happening in Sparrow's stomach. Coyote turned
around and abruptly stopped grinning.
You
cheated! Sparrow's
hand jerked in the air. You didn't guess, you cheated!
"Oh,
come on," said Coyote, kneeling in front of him. "Don't be like that.
I can't help it if I can—" He blinked, tried to grin again. "Hey,
Sparrow," he said, "let's go outside and
see it land!"
Sparrow
set his jaw and turned away. His secret excitement had drained away, leaving
him sad and tired. He wanted to see Spider land, but not with dumb old Coyote
and Swann and Rabbit and the others all crowding around. His eyes started to
hurt and he brushed away wetness. He tore a ragged piece of fruitflesh
with his teeth and chewed it hard. When he finally looked around, both Swann
and Coyote were gone.
He jumped up and ran from the kitchen, then
froze for one agonizing minute in the main dome. The tremor in his stomach was
stronger now, a low, pulsing vibration. He ran, then, not outside, but back
through his own flannel door, down the short tunnel to his room.
His
mouth fell open, slowly closed. Filling nearly half the sky was the gigantic
bulge of the zeppelin, dark red in the morning light. He climbed onto his
clothes trunk and stood on tiptoe, peered over the edge of the open dome. The
zeppelin hovered above the meadow next to the house, two tiny figures standing
underneath—that was Coyote's rusty bush of hair, Swarm's gray shag—as a bubble
descended on a long cable from the shadow of the ship's belly. Sparrow caught
sight of Fuchsia's dark body moving down the hill from the pottery, and Rose appeared
beyond the curve of the main dome with Rabbit in his arms, strolling out to
join the others.
The
bubble, which had been tiny beneath the bulk of the airship, turned out to be
much larger than the people standing below. It swung gently on its cable and
touched down on the grass. A doorway appeared and Spider's familiar white cloud
of hair popped out. She swung onto the lawn and reached back in for her bags.
The bubble rose quickly into the air as everyone crowded around Spider.
Sparrow chewed his lip, flexed his cramping feet. Everybody was hugging
everybody else, then they turned and started back
toward the house.
The
zeppelin was already rising, moving away. The rumbling in Sparrow's gut began
to lessen. He stepped down from the trunk and stood wavering in the middle of
his room, then lunged for the window, jerked it open, and scrambled outside.
Coyote paced across the main dome rug, rubbed
his palms together, and paced back again. Where had Sparrow run off to now?
"Hey,"
said Spider from across the room. "Will you sit down and stop worrying?
He'll be okay." She sat against the wall beneath the blue Picasso print,
Swann beside her and Rabbit on her lap. Rose and Fuchsia had long since gone, Rose to work in the village garden and Fuchsia back up
the hill to work on his pots.
Coyote
turned and recrossed the room. "It's really my
fault," he said. "If I hadn't come out with that stupid remark about
being able to hear, he would have gone out with us to meet you and this whole
dismal business—"
"Coyote!"
He stopped.
Spider
looked weary. "Come on, would you please just sit down and be quiet for a
while? You're making me nervous, and I've only been home an hour. Sparrow has
to work out his own problems, that's why he's not
here. He's got to learn sometime that people who can hear have certain
advantages over him, and hell be
lucky if the lessons are only as harsh as losing guessing games. Don't be
over-protective."
Coyote folded his arms and pursed his lips.
"You would call it overprotectiveness, wouldn't
you? Sometimes I think you don't care about Sparrow one way or the other."
Spider looked away with a tight jaw.
"Now, Coyote," said Swann quietly,
"keep in mind what the doctors said about—"
"The doctors can go
rape themselves!" he yelled.
Rabbit screwed up her face and began to wail.
Spider hugged her saying, "There, Rabbit, it's okay," and giving
Coyote an angry look over the little girl's shoulder. Swann, startled, said
nothing.
Coyote took a deep breath and tried to speak
more calmly. "I'm sorry I shouted, I'm just
worried about Sparrow. Swann, those doctors didn't know the boy. They were
just bumbling behaviorists, trying to juggle their statistics to come up with
something meaningful. Professionals are all alike."
Spider made a choking noise, looked
incredulous.
"The doctors did say," said Swann,
"to go easy, not to push."
"Push!" Coyote shook his head. "You think I'm pushing? I'm just trying to
help my child grow up emotionally balanced."
"Then you're trying
too hard," said Spider.
"Don't you think I
love that boy?"
"Shh!"
"You—"
He turned away, turned back. "You make it seem like I'm on some kind of an
ego trip." Spider looked startled, and laughed. He walked to the door.
"It's hard," came
Swann's low voice behind him. He gripped the molding around the doorway, slowly
inhaled. "What?" he said.
"Love," said his
mother. "It's hard to share."
Coyote
grunted and pushed himself outside. The sun was already halfway up the sky,
scattering small clouds before its brilliance. It was going to be a warm day.
Hands thrust deep in the pockets of his skirt, he
shuffled around the curve of the dome. Why did he have so much trouble talking
to Spider? It had been like this for months. She was distant, critical, argumentative. She ignored him; worst of all she ignored her
own son.
It
wasn't, he decided, that he minded taking most of the responsibility for
Sparrow. After all, the boy was his son, too. And he admitted that Spider's
work was demanding and liable to make her touchy, preoccupied. But . . . well,
hell, just look at her now. She found lots of time to snuggle with Swann for
long, intimate conversations, and she spent hours with Rabbit every week that she could have been spending with Sparrow.
Coyote was sure he had caught jealous looks in Sparrow's eyes when he saw his
mother and Rabbit together. And wasn't that just what an extended family was
supposed to prevent— jealousy? If the cultural revolution
had one major flaw, he thought, it was that it had to use the people of
yesterday's world. Coyote kicked at a dirt clod and shook his head.
And then there was Walker. Wasn't there
something a little perverse about Spider's relationship with her? No, not the
sex—Coyote was an adult, he'd had his quota of homosexual flings in the past,
there was nothing wrong with that. No, it had to do with the emotional
intensity of Spider and Walker's affair. There was something unhealthy, he
felt, something adolescent
about their lovey-dovey
manner. Their relationship was too exclusive. He felt completely and utterly
left out of their lives, and was sure the others felt that way, too. It wasn't
that he was jealous—Gods, it had been months since he and Spider
had coupled, longer than that since they had really been friends. It wasn't his
problem, it was theirs—
He
rounded the side of the main dome and headed toward the garden. It was good to
see it sprouting so soon. He had designed and built the garden that very first
autumn after he and Spider had moved here, replacing the traditional flat
garden plot that Swann had used for years. Coyote's garden rose in a slow shape
of earth from the surrounding lawn, the shape, as it happened, of Spider's left
breast when she slept, though he had never told her that. She would just
criticize him for perpetuating some fertility goddess myth or other. Whatever
the image, it was a good, functional design. Where the nipple would be, a pool
of water slowly crested, fed from the household well by a windmill not far
away. The water trickled through a network of stoneware pipes that fed the
plants. The planting rows spiraled down from the pool, cut by several radial
paths that ran straight down from the peak. Coyote mounted the shallow slope,
choosing the longer, spiral route to the top. As he rounded the curve of the
garden he saw Sparrow, crouched low, playing in the dirt on the other side. He
paused to take three deep breaths before approaching.
Was that a weed? Sparrow leaned over the
mound of dirt to study the tiny sprout. Its leaves were sharper and more jagged than the tomato leaves popping up along the row.
His fingers reached out to pluck it, then paused, stroked the litde plant instead. Even dandelions were good in salads,
and good for making wishes later in the year. Why was a particular plant good
in some places and bad in others? Why did they call them weeds? Poor little dandelion, thought Sparrow, you're not really bad, you're just growing in the wrong place, is all. And
that's not your fault. Weeds don't decide to be weeds!
A
sudden shadow fell across the dirt and Sparrow jerked away. Coyote loomed over
him, smiling, leaning down. Sparrow caught his breath, then glanced down again
and saw that he had accidentally gouged the little weed out of the dirt with
his fingers. He began to cry, and Coyote's arm came around his shoulders, but
he moved out of reach and picked up the dandelion sprout carefully. Its hairlike roots held a few crumbs of dirt; already it looked
like it was wilting.
He
glanced reproachfully at Coyote, who looked concerned and said, "It's okay, we can plant it back again."
Sparrow shook his head and held the plant up
for Coyote to see.
"Ah,"
said Coyote. He looked around, then pointed toward the
meadow. "Let's transplant it over there."
Together they walked down the garden slope ana" across the bright green clover and grass. Coyote knelt and dug into the soft earth
with his thick, stubby fingers. Carefully they filled crumbs of dirt in around
the fragile roots until the sprout looked just as safe and sound as it had in
the garden.
Sparrow
nudged Coyote's shoulder and made signs with his hands. Will it be okay now?
Coyote
smiled. "I think so. Weeds are pretty tough critters."
Sparrow
sighed and sat back on his heels. This little patch of dirt, not much wider
than his hand, with its single sprout, was his very own garden. He decided he
preferred it to the big family plot. He would come out and water it every day,
make sure his dandelion grew big leaves and a bright yellow flower. And then in
the fall—
Coyote
took his hand. "Come on," he said, "it's time to get cleaned
up."
Sparrow frowned, signed with
his free hand: What
for?
Coyote
pretended to swoon with amazement, making Sparrow laugh. "Have you
forgotten already? This is the day of Walker's big surprise!"
Spider
pulled a bicycle off the rack and wheeled it out of the shed into bright
sunshine, where Fuchsia stood holding Rabbit in his arms. Spatters of slip had
dried white against the rich brown flesh of his face, clung in tiny hard
droplets in the hair of his chest and arms.
"Hey,"
he said to her, "thanks again. Rose said he wouldn't mind taking her if
you changed your mind."
Spider
shook her and smiled. "No, really, I'd like to. It'll be fun." She
laughed, adjusted her sunglasses. "Rabbit's too young to give me any flak.
Aren'tcha,
girl?" She lifted Rabbit from her brother's arms, the white of her
hands stark against even Rabbit's pink skin, and sat her in the babybasket between the handle bars. "Okeedoke?"
Rabbit gurgled. Fuchsia waved and started
back toward the house.
"Hey!"
she called. He turned his head. "You," she said, grinning, "are
the only man in the world I can really get along with." Fuchsia laughed, then faltered, his dark eyes caught on something behind her.
She turned and found Sparrow and Coyote walking up, hand in hand. Coyote's
cheeks were sucked in, but he was smiling—she glanced back at Fuchsia, but he
was gone around the curve of the dome. She blew a long breath between her
teeth, attempted a smile and turned back.
"Well, hi there, Sparrow, how's my man?"
Sparrow
smiled back, glanced once at Coyote, and ran the last few steps. Spider leaned
down to hug him, but the top-heavy bike began to tip and she had to stagger on
one foot to keep from falling. With the jolt her sunglasses fell off—she swore
and clenched her eyes against the glare —and Rabbit started to cry. "Hey,
Rabbit, hey," she said, hugging the little girl, then, "Sparrow,
could you hand me those—oh, thanks." She took the glasses that were
slipped into her hand and put them on, blinked. Coyote stood beside her, biting
his lip.
"Oh, thanks," she
said again. "Where's Sparrow?"
"Ran
off.
What do you expect? Want me to—?"
"No,
no, that's okay, Til talk to
him later." Gods, she thought, I'd rather he screamed at me than looked like that. She tried to smile,
and immediately wished she hadn't. "Hey, look," she said. "I'm going on ahead to spend some time with
Walker. The rest of you catch up later, okay?" She pushed off quickly,
wasn't sure if she heard a reply, pedaled past the
domes and across the meadow into the woods. As soon as she felt securely out of
sight she sat back on the bike seat and coasted, trying to take deep, slow
breaths. She could feel her shoulders trembling. Gods above, why did Coyote
affect her like that? Rape that man anyway! she
snarled to herself, and waited for the instant remorse. Nothing came. She just
felt tired and relieved to be alone. At least little Rabbit wouldn't yank her
into some ugly scene.
She
began to pump again along the narrow paved path, sailing quietly through the
soft, scattered light and sounds of the forest. Beneath the trees, the sunshine
wasn't nearly so painful. The thick pine-needle bed of the woods absorbed
almost all sound, exuding in return a rich, exhilarating smell, a sexual
smell, a smell of lazy combustion as the acidic needles turned to warm earth.
She could make out four species of bird by their calls. As she picked up speed,
the breeze washed across her face and through her cloud of hair, and tired
though she was laughed and put some muscle into the bike.
Rabbit
was happy in her basket, swinging her legs, waving her arms in some private
dance, singing to herself in minor keys. Spider topped
a short rise and coasted down the other side, letting go the handle bars and
spreading her arms like wings. She sang some lines from an old, sad song that
Swann liked to play on her guitar. / wish I had a river soooo long, I would spread
my wings and ffy-yyyy ...
At
the bottom of the hill, the pavement forked at a thick, craggy-barked old fur
that everyone called Douglas, the oldest in the forest. One way led to the
community center where Swann and Coyote and Rose worked part time to fulfill
their household's community quota. Spider took the other path, that circuitous
route that passed by every other homestead on this side of the valley. From
here it would be a good fiifteen-minute ride to
Walker's farm.
All told, there were forty-seven households
in the village of Noti, some as large as twenty or
thirty people, a few triples, couples, and solitaires. Their homesteads were
sprinkled over six square kilos of the valley, separated by woods and fields,
joined by the bike paths and the loose, co-operative anarchy with which they
conducted community affairs. Noti had been one of
the first rural ghost towns repopulated with the dissolution of cities in the
techno-cultural revolution, and though from time to time some of the
inhabitants had fallen short of manifesting the revolution in their own lives,
the community as a whole had been functioning successfully for nearly a decade.
Each
of the households was self-sufficient in survival needs—food, clothing,
shelter, and affection—but large groups of people can accomplish things that
handfuls cannot. Not, at least, so enjoyably. The Noti
neighbors came together for dome-raising, harvesting, path-paving, and
well-digging, for the collective purchase of raw goods, for dances and for
theater. While the majority made their living by household craft and labor,
trading their surpluses within the village population, a few such as Spider
worked at outside jobs.
Spider
was a programmer for Global Relief, an international government corporation
that designed food distribution systems and agricultural prescriptions for places
hard hit by the tum-of-the-century droughts. Spider's
current project was the Midwest American Desert Reclamation Project.She had a remote console at home, through which she
did most of her work. The only physical manifestation of the corporation was
its annual conference.
As she rode the bicycle farther down the
valley, Spider left the forest and glided through the rye fields that surrounded
Walker's home. She passed one or two old frame houses, relics of the early
nineteen hundreds, now unusea-bly rotten and left to
compost at their own easy pace. She swerved to avoid a couple of pedestrians,
waved back to them, and shortly pulled up front of the main house of the farm,
a tall, tetrahedral barn of rough cedar shakes. She parked the bike with the
jungle of others and carried Rabbit through the cool, refreshing light of the
grape arbor and into the kitchen. Several folks lounged around a table in
conversation. Some looked up, waved.
"Howdy,"
said Spider, setting down Rabbit, who crawled away toward other children. "Hi, Walker." She bent to hug her friend. Walker's
belly was huge and warm between them.
"Hey, lover, I'm glad you made it
back." Walker ran her fingers over Spider's eyes, her cheeks, across the
broad flat nostrils of her nose to her mouth. They kissed, tongue caressing
tongue, and parted. "Until I heard the ship this morning," murmured
Walker, "I'd nearly decided to wait another day."
Spider
laughed. "Silly, I told you I'd be back in time. You've had your heart set
on the cusp for months now." Spider stood. "Hey. I want you for
myself for a while."
Walker
grinned. "Twist my arm, will you!" She eased herself to her feet,
brushed back her short hair, and found Spider's hand. "Be back in a
while!" she called back as they walked out the door.
They
crossed the stubbly lawn and stretched out beneath a cherry tree's shimmering
white masses. Spider plucked a thick
blade of grass and nibbled its tip, watching the subtle changes of color in
Walker's eyes, cloudy as agate.
"So when's the big
event?"
"I
finally decided on three forty-two," said Walker. "I started the
contractions this morning. I had been planning for seven this evening but I
changed my mind. This way I'll lose that conjunction of Venus and Mars, but
I'll get a beautiful trine, and it puts the Moon in
Cancer, which is all right with me."
Spider
had to laugh. "You know, I haven't the foggiest idea what you're talking
about."
Walker's
bushy eyebrows rose. "You should at least be aware that your Moon's in
Cancer, too!"
"Great,"
said Spider. "We'll start a club." She leaned over to kiss Walker's
cheek. "But don't you think you ought to have consulted you-know-who about
the time?"
Walker
frowned—"Who? Oh!"—and laughed, saying, "Silly, that's the whole
point; I decided what would be the right time by tuning in on what's happening
inside. I wouldn't try to force anything! This will be the most important day
in this new life." She ran her hand across the fabric on her belly.
Spider bit a lip. "Hey, Walker?"
"Hmm?" Walker turned her head toward her, though her eyes seemed to look
somewhere over Spider's left shoulder (Spider resisted the urge to glance
back). "What is it?"
"I wanted to say... to ask...
well..
Walker's
finger tips found Spider's lips and pressed against them gently.
"Yes," she said softly, "I've already started asking the others.
I think it will be fine."
Spider
kissed her palm. "You haven't read my thoughts completely."
Walker's
eyebrows came together into one long, thick hedge. "I thought—I mean—don't
you want to move here?"
Spider took a deep breath
and let it sigh away.
"Oh," said Walker
finally. "Oh. Of course." She lifted her
head off the grass. "Do they bother you so much?" "Yes,"
said Spider at length.
"Oh,
I love you dearly, but you have to understand that I can't leave my family
now."
"Your
family per se doesn't bother me," said Spider. "It's just the
men."
"I know that's what
you mean. But why?"
Spider
blew out a breath, sat up, pulling at her hair and rubbing her forehead.
"I don't know. I mean I do, I know the feeling inside and out; it's been
getting stronger and stronger for the past year or two. Why it's come to me, that I can't say, unless it's the particular men I've
been around. They just don't . . . connect, you know? With anything that's me.
Call it a lack of common experience. All I know is that I don't want to live
with them any more." She glanced down at Walker
and shifted slightly to intersect with Walker's gaze.
"But
Spider, you have to understand, here I feel like I can finally relax. I have a
home for the first time in years. I would love for you to join us, I know
you're not happy with Coyote and the rest, but please don't ask me to trade my
family for you. Because I would have to say no."
Her finger tips moved up Spider's face, the lines of her mouth, her eyes, the ridges of her brows. "Don't be sad," said
Walker. "Lover, people are never happy as commodities."
Spider
ripped a tuft of grass, threw it on the breeze. She felt that terrible
weariness wash over her again. "But it's not as if I wanted you all for
myself," she said, hearing her voice quaver. "I want a big
household, I do. I'd just like it to be all women...."
Walker's
finger tip on her cheek abruptly left a wet track. "Oh, Spider, Spider. .
. . Look, what if my baby is a boy? Would you refuse to live with him? Spider—
lover—my commitment is stronger than that. I'm settled here. That's why I
decided, to have this child. I have a home. I need that."
Spider moved away slightly.
"So it's settled."
"Settled! Spider, I'm settled."
She
felt the muscles of her chin tug down, those above her
eyes pull back. She wiped one cheek with the back of her hand, swallowed.
"God damn it." Her fingers clutched cool grass. "If only I'd
found you a couple years ago. If only you weren't into this pregnancy mode ..."
Walker's
eyebrows arched. She shook her head slowly. "Spider,
just listen to yourself! Do you realize how you'd react if any man made
a crack like that? Now, come on. Be my sister today. I want you to be with me."
Spider sobbed so hard it hurt her throat,
pulled Walker to her chest and held her tight.
"Hey!" cried
Coyote. "I'm for a shower! Who's with?"
"Me," said
Fuchsia, flecked with clay.
"Sure," said
Swann, coming in dusty.
Sparrow grabbed Coyote's
hand and led the way.
Water
fell, like heavy light, in cold, thick blue drops. Coyote and Sparrow and
Fuchsia and Swann jumped and danced in the indoor rain, rubbing each other with
sponges and flinging wet hair.
"Who will scrub my
back?" asked Fuchsia.
"I
will," said Swann and Coyote at the same time. They laughed and set to
work on either side.
"Ahhh,"
said Fuchsia, "you two do a heavy job."
Sparrow
caught their attention with a flutter of hands. Fuchsia's peeing in the shower!
"Huh?" said
Fuchsia. He blinked and looked down.
Coyote
laughed and tapped Sparrow's shoulder. "Look again," he said.
"That's just water running down."
Sparrow looked confused.
"Just look at me. Just
look at yourself!"
Sparrow
peered down across his rounded belly, then giggled
delightedly. The water ran down his sleek brown skin, coursed around his navel,
and dribbled off his penis, arcing through the air to the slatted floor.
Swann
bent down to rub shampoo into Sparrow's frizzy hair. "Occupational
hazard," she said. Like her face, her body ran with wrinkles. Her breasts
hung low and bobbled in the wet light.
I didn't see that word, signed Sparrow.
"Occupational
hazard," enunciated Swann. "It's an old expression that means, well,
that there are certain things that happen to you as a result of what you do for
a living."
What kinds of
things?
Swann cleared her throat and frowned. Fuchsia
knelt beside her and poked Sparrow in the belly, eliciting a giggle. "For
example," he said, "you were born with knees, so
whenever you fall down on something rough and hard, you skin them. That's the
occupational hazard of having knees."
Swann was shaking her head. "That's the
occupational hazard of running around!"
Coyote
squatted, too. "And we," he said, "have peruses because we were
born male, so it looks like we're peeing in the shower. Even
when we're not!"
Sparrow
laughed, then looked at Coyote's groin, at Fuchsia's,
at Swann's, then at his own small stub.
"All done?" said
Swann, rinsing under the shower.
Fuchsia
stepped to the wall and turned off the water with a wisk.
"I'll
get the towels," said Coyote, but Swann caught his arm.
"Not for me," she said. "It's
quite warm enough outside for me to dry off." "Same here," said
Fuchsia. Me, too,
signed Sparrow.
Coyote
shrugged. "Me, too." As a group they
strolled outside, picked clothes off the line, at length chose bicycles from
the rack in the shed, and pushed off down the trail.
Sparrow parked his bike with the others and
wandered off alone to explore the farm. He had been here only once or twice
before, never with so many people around. The largest building of the homestead
was a huge pyramid made of wood. Its windows, and sections of its walls, were
thrown open like so many tongues to lap up the day. Sparrow avoided the crowd
of kids on the lawn and circled the house, peering into open rooms. In one,
about ten people sat in a circle holding hands. They all had their eyes closed, and he guessed they must have been omming. Fuchsia had taught him to do that last fall. It
made him feel good, especially when he felt it through his hands from the
people next to him.
He
slipped through a low arch in the hedge and came out in the garden. Flowers of
all colors spread beneath the bright sun. Beyond some bushes, a thick cherry
tree gnarled its way into the sky where it burst with a cloud of white
blossoms. Several pairs of legs dangled down, and higher up a section shook,
releasing a minor snowstorm to the breeze. Sparrow padded carefully through the
bushes past the tree, grinning gleefully at the thrill of secrecy that shivered
up his spine.
He
ran around a corner of hedge and found himself abruptly in the middle of a
group of people lounging on the grass. Several looked up at him. He couldn't
move. One woman flailed at a guitar and everyone swayed, openmouthed. He
couldn't make out the words: their lips didn't move enough. With an effort he
jerked away and ran in another direction.
Some
secrecy! He found a large bush and crawled inside, crouched in the flat, dry
space surrounded by leaves. This was more like it.
He
really wondered, sometimes, what it must be like to know about things you
couldn't see. He could feel some things, like drums, and omming,
and the zeppelin that morning. He felt those things in his stomach and with his
finger tips, and when he laid his hand across the throat of someone who talked
or sang. But what was it like to feel someone whose back was turned talking
across the room? What was it like to feel a bird's throat ripple in the trees? To feel the wind shiver through the branches of a tree?
Could other people really feel these things from far away?
His attention was caught by movement through
the leaves. He leaned forward and peered out. Everyone was walking in one
direction—toward the house. It must be time! But how did they know?
The kitchen was crowded and noisy when the
bell began to ring, high in the apex of the house. For the space of one
breath, everyone around Coyote fell silent, then began to talk again, but
softly now, with a different tone. They started to move toward the door that
led to the commons. Coyote set his cup of tea on the table and followed,
feeling socially detached and at the same time somehow clear, inside, riveted
to the moment. He smiled and nodded when his eyes met those of friends, but he
didn't feel like talking to anybody, and no one tried to talk to him. The
grandfather clock in the hall read three-fifteen, its long pendulum tocking slowly back and forth behind the window in its
case.
-The
commons was a two-story-high pointed space. Walker sat in lotus in the middle
of the floor as her friends filled up the room around her, children toward the
center and the tallest adults lining the three walls. Coyote sat near the
middle with people his own height. It looked to him like nearly a
hundred people. Some of them he recognized as members of this household. He
caught sight of Swann and Fuchsia sitting together over to his right, their
backs against the wall, but neither of them glanced his way. In fact, nearly
everyone was facing Walker now. Coyote turned back, shifted his legs into a
comfortable half-lotus, and noticed Sparrow's skinny silhouette in a doorway across the room. He wished the boy would look his way....
The
group began to breathe with Walker. Her diaphragm pulled in, relaxed, her
nostrils flared visibly with each inhale. The only sounds were the unison
breathing and a handful of children and dogs yelping outside.
Walker's vast belly shuddered. A low, whispered chant began to grow among the
members of the gathering, in time with her breathing, in time with the
contractions of her uterus. Coyote cleared his throat and added his own murmur
to the group. They were like an ocean to Walker's moon, he thought, and tucked
the conceit away in a safe place where he might find it the next time he worked
on his poetry.
Like
an incoming tide, the chanting rose and fell in successively stronger waves.
One of the three midwives held a wristwatch in his hand and murmured occasional
cues to Walker, though all of her attention seemed to be focused inward. Her
eyelids were closed, her mouth half open. Several times she changed position,
working into progressively higher stances till she squatted, her buttocks clear
of the floor. The hands of another midwife (Coyote recognized her from the
community garden—her name was Gael) rested on Walker's shoulders for balance,
while a third lay on the sheet to massage Walker's belly, her groin, her
enlarging vagina. The chanting reached its final peak as Walker made the sharp,
high noises of ecstasy and pain, and with surprising suddenness the red, wet
bulge of the baby's head appeared between Walker's thighs. Walker leaned back
into Gael's arms, while the third midwife cradled the emerging baby in her
hands. The hips, the knees, the tiny feet came out, and the woman brought the
infant up and laid it on Walker's stomach. Walker's hand groped and found the
little hands and head and briefly she smiled. Coyote thought she looked
exhausted. Gael had slipped a pillow under her head. The room was quiet,
remained so until after some minutes the baby began to use its lungs—a small
cry escaped to mark that moment—and people began to murmur, began to talk,
began to cry and laugh.
Coyote
didn't stay to see the cutting of the cord or the afterbirth rite. He rose
stiffly to his feet and joined several others outside. No one said very much,
just smiled, or looked serene. Someone over by the garden was getting sick,
helped by friends. One man Coyote didn't know laughed loud with wet cheeks and
spread his arms to the sun.
Coyote began to look around
for Sparrow.
"But just look at the eyes! Hey, there, little
one!" Spider stroked one tiny palm with her finger tip, and the
hand closed around her knuckle, the little eyes tracked, and tracked again.
Spider grinned down at Walker. "See that?" She took Walker's right
hand and folded it gently around the baby's hand holding her finger. "See?
I mean, feel? That's an instinctive mechanism left over from when we all had
hair on our bellies and backs that babies clung to."
Walker's
marbled eyes were wet, seemed to look somewhere near the ceiling. "I do
see," she said.
Spider
grinned and kissed the woman's fingers. "You did all right for yourself,
lady, you did okay! She's even a she."
Walker
smiled wearily and shook her head. "You know, my love, I have long
maintained that birthing is not so much a woman thing to do as a human thing.
It's only to be regretted that nearly half our population are incapable of
experiencing this god-awful exhaustion."
Spider
laughed. "Hush, we'll talk politics later." And felt suddenly sad.
The commons was nearly empty now, the sun was falling
in the sky. Or rather, Spider thought, the earth is rolling up. And felt a
trickle course down her cheek. "Walker?" She fumbled in her pocket
till she found the scrap of paper.
"Mmm?" Walker looked almost asleep.
"I'll see you later,
huh?"
She nodded dreamily.
"Say... in about a year?"
Walker opened her sightless
eyes.
"I'm
going," Spider said with an effort. "I don't know, East, I think. I
want to see Virginia. I want to get some dust between my toes, try some other
styles." She waited for Walker to say something, but no reply came.
"I'll come back next spring, I promise. Just think! This little lady will
be running the place by then."
Walker laughed then, with
tears. "I really doubt that!"
"I love you,"
said Spider.
"I love you,
too."
Spider bent down to kiss her cheek, her lips.
She nuzzled the infant, rose, and quickly walked away.
Bike? No, walk. Leave the asphalt path and take
the deer trail through the woods. Fir trees, bushes, brambles, and that thick,
sweet smell of afternoon. Sparrow ran along the path until his breath got hard.
He rested, pulled down his pants and stooped, watched a pale green frond that
was just beginning to lift from the crumbs of earth at the base of a tall,
thick tree. Baby plant, baby girl. Dying, being old. Being himself. Was Swann ever a baby? Sparrow shook his
head in slow thought.
He
wondered if everyone looked like that at birth. So quiet, so messy, glistening,
dripping, caked with cheesy stuff, so red and blue and small! Sparrow was
nearly six, a lot older than Walker's baby, but he was still a baby compared to
Spider and Coyote and Fuchsia and Rose— and they were all babies compared to
Swann. And Swann was a baby compared to . . . well, to Douglas. Just where did
that end?
He shivered and found himself in shadow. He
got to his feet jerkily, tugged up his pants, and trudged on down the path. The
low red sun flickered among the tree trunks as he passed along. The trail
meandered around and down and then rose steeply, rounded a ridge, and deposited
him on the edge of the woods, just meters from the main dome door.
He
stopped, feeling numb and old. His left cheek began to hurt, and tears ran.
Sparrow ran.
The screen door slammed against the late
afternoon, and footsteps pattered down the ramp. Coyote glanced up from his
sewing. "Hey—" His gray
eyes tracked across the room, followed Sparrow's flight through the blue flannel
door. "Huh," he said. "I wonder what his hurry was."
Swann, beside him, ejected a wooden egg from
a sock and cast her eyebrows toward her son. "Didn't you see the
tears?"
"What?"
Coyote lifted his thin shoulders against his cloud of rusty hair. "But—"
"I was watching Sparrow through the whole thing," came
Fuchsia's voice from behind a pair of trousers. Flip, flop, folded, they landed
with a whump on a pile of clothes. "I think
Sparrow took it . . . specially. . . ." he said. "I think that in some special, five-year-old way, he really understood."
For a minute the room was silent but for
sounds of
cloth against cloth. Then Coyote said, "Oh, God______ "
"I
think Sparrow was touched," said Swann, "in a religious
sense."
Coyote
regarded her silently for a moment, then speared the
patch he was sewing with his needle and stood up from the rug.
"Now,
Coyote—" Swann began, but he
was gone. She settled back, shaking her head and thrusting out her lower lip.
"My lord, when will that man learn to leave well enough alone."
Spider
pushed aside her door (a snapshot of
a spiral molecule, silk-screened on burlap) and walked into the room.
"Swann," she said, "I've got something to—"
"He just doesn't listen," said
Swann. "And Sparrow can't."
"Swann—"
"Oh
well, I suppose we'll have to just leave them to find their own answers
together." She shook her head again.
Spider sighed. "I
guess you're right."
Fuchsia
nudged Swann, cleared his throat. "Spider?"
he said. "Were you about to—"
Spider
smiled wanly at her brother and shook her head. She turned and went back into
her room to finish packing.
Coyote found Sparrow huddled inside a tangle
of blanket against the domelet wall.
"Hey," he said, gently shaking Sparrow's shoulder. "It's
me." He eased the boy over onto his back and regarded the red, wet eyes.
"Hey, what did you think of the birth today? I thought it was beautiful,
didn't you?"
Sparrow nodded, shaking
brown frizz.
"Well,
what did you think? What did you feel? I really want to know."
Sparrow
frowned, nearly smiled, then started to sob. Coyote
found a hand and squeezed.
"Wasn't
she pretty?" he said. "I've seen three births in my life—one of them
was you—and each time it was just too good to
believe, just too beautiful to compare."
His son turned away, crying
freely into the blanket.
"Hey,"
said Coyote, "hey," and ran his hand along the small, skinny arm that
showed. Sparrow released a long, low wail that made Coyote shiver. With care he
turned the boy over again. Sparrow looked at him with bright, wet eyes, and worked
his other hand free from the blanket. His fingers shook, but Coyote could
still read what they said.
"Why, sure," he replied, smiling
with effort. "I don't see why not. A lot of people have babies when they
get old enough."
"Ah-ahhh,"
cried Sparrow, shaking his head, butting his head against Coyote's, skull
meeting skull through scalps and soft hair. The boy made another sign, the one that
stood for impossibility.
"Oh," said Coyote, "now where
did you ever get that idea? Anyone can have a ba—" His jaw went slack. "Oh, God,"
he said, and hugged the boy to him. "Oh, Sparrow, I'm sorry, I didn't
understand." He kissed his head, his face, his
hands. "I'm sorry," he murmured. "I wish I could change you, if
that's what you want, but I can't. We all have to live with the way we were
born."
He pulled away, moved
Sparrow's face so the boy
could see
his lips. "I love you," he said, "just the way you are."
And for a while, then, both of them cried.
When Spider slipped in to say good-by, she
didn't wake either of them.
Here's a new
story by the author of In the Ocean of Night and several other highly praised novels. Of "Time Shards" Benford says:
"For
dramaic reasons I have attributed the central notion
of this story to a scientist at the
American Museum of Natural History.
In fact, though experiments have been done, they are due to Dr. Richard
Woodbridge, who first discussed the possibility in a letter to the Proceedings of the I.E.E.E. (1969, pp. 1465-1466). The process works, but unfortunately so far nothing more than backgound
sounds have been discovered."
Further
research might yield more positive results one day, and if so...
TIME
SHARDS
Gregory Benford
It
had all gone very well, Brooks told himself. Very well
indeed. He hurried along the side corridor, his black dress shoes
clicking hollowly on the old tiles. This was one of the oldest and most rundown
of the Smithsonian's buildings; too bad they didn't have the money to knock it
down. Funding. Everything was a matter of funding.
He
pushed open the door of the barnlike workroom and called out, "John? How
did you like the ceremony?"
John
Hart appeared from behind a vast rack that was filled with fluted pottery. His thin face was twisted in a scowl and he was puffing on a cigarette. "Didn't go."
"John!
That's not permitted." Brooks waved at the cigarette. "You of all
people should be careful about contamination of—"
"Hell with it." He took a final
puff, belched blue, and ground out the cigarette on the floor.
"You
really should've watched the dedication of the Vault, you know," Brooks
began, adopting a bantering
tone. You had to keep a light touch with these
research types. "The President was there—she made a very nice speech—" "I was busy."
"Oh?"
Something in Hart's tone put Brooks off his conversational stride. "Well.
You'll be glad to hear that I had a little conference with the Board, just
before the dedication. They've agreed to continue supporting your work
here."
"Um."
"You
must admit, they're being very fair." "As he talked
Brooks threaded amid the rows of pottery, each in a plastic sleeve. This
room always made him nervous. There was priceless Chinese porcelain here,
Assyrian stoneware, buff-blue Roman glazes, Egyptian earthenware—and Brooks
lived in mortal fear that he would trip, fall, and smash some piece of history
into shards. "After all, you did miss
your deadline. You got nothing out of all this"—a sweep of the hand,
narrowly missing a green Persian tankard—"for the Vault."
Hart,
who was studying a small brownish water jug, looked up abruptly. "What
about the wheel recording?"
"Well, there was that, but—"
"The best in the world, dammitl"
"They
heard it some time ago. They were very interested."
"You
told them what they were hearing?" Hart asked intensely.
"Of course, I—"
"You could hear the hoofbeats
of cattle, clear as day." "They heard. Several commented on it."
"Good." Hart seemed satisfied, but still strangely depressed.
"But you must admit,
that isn't what you promised."
Hart said sourly, "Research can't be
done to a
schedule." '
Brooks
had been pacing up and down the lanes of pottery. He stopped suddenly, pivoted
on one foot, and pointed a finger at Hart. "You said you'd have a voice. That
was the promise. Back in '98 you said you would have something for the BiMillennium celebration, and—" "Okay, okay." Hart waved away the other man's
words.
"Look—"
Brooks strode to a window and jerked up the blinds. From this high up in the
Arts and Industries Building the BiMillennial Vault
was a flat concrete slab sunk in the Washington mud; it had rained the day before.
Now bulldozers scraped piles of gravel and mud into the hole, packing it in
before the final encasing shield was to be laid. The Vault itself was already
sheathed in sleeves of concrete, shock-resistant and immune to decay. The radio
beacons inside were now set. Their radioactive power supply would automatically
stir to life exactly a thousand years from now. Periodic bursts of
radio waves would announce to the world of the TriMillennium
that a message from the distant past awaited whoever dug down to find it. Inside the Vault were
artifacts, recordings, everything the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian
thought important about their age. The coup of the entire Vault was to have
been a message from the First Millennium, the year 1000 a.d. Hart had promised them something far better than a mere written
document from that time. He had said he could capture a living voice.
"See
that?" Brooks said with sudden energy. "That Vault will outlast
everything we know—all those best-selling novels and funny plays and amazing
scientific discoveries. They'll all be dust, when
the Vault's opened."
"Yeah," Hart
said.
"Yeah? That's all you can say?"
"Well, sure, I—"
"The
Vault was important.
And I was stupid
enough"—he rounded on Hart abruptly, anger flashing across his
face—"to chew up some of the only money we had for the Vault to support you."
Hart
took an involuntary step backward. "You knew it was a gamble."
"I knew." Brooks nodded ruefully.
"And_we waited, and waited—"
"Well,
your waiting is over," Hart said, something hardening in him.
"What?"
"I've got it. A voice."
"You
have?" In the stunned silence that followed Hart bent over casually and picked
up a dun-colored water jug from the racks. An elaborate, impossibly
large-winged orange bird was painted on its side. Hart turned the jug in his
hands, hefting its weight.
"Why
. . . it's too late for the Vault, of course, but still . . ." Brooks shuffled
his feet. "I'm glad the idea paid off. That's great."
"Yeah. Great." Hart smiled sourly. "And you know what it's worth? Just about this much—"
He
took the jug in one hand and threw it. It struck the far wall with a
splintering crash. Shards flew like a covey of frightened birds that scattered
through the long ranks of pottery. Each landed with a ceramic tinkling.
"What
are you doing—" Brooks began, dropping to his knees without
thinking to retrieve a fragment of the jug. "That jug was worth—"
"Nothing,"
Hart said. "It was a fake. Almost everything the Egyptians sent was
bogus."
"But why are you . . . you said you
succeeded . . Brooks was shaken out of his normal role
of Undersecretary to the Smithsonian.
"I did. For what it's worth."
"Well... show me."
Hart
shrugged and beckoned Brooks to follow him. He threaded his way through the
inventory of glazed pottery, ignoring the extravagant polished shapes that
flared and twisted in elaborate, artful designs, the fruit of millienna of artisans. Glazes of feldspath, lead, tin, ruby salt. Jas-perware, soft-paste porcelain, albarelloa
festooned with ivy and laurel, flaring lips and serene curved handles. A galaxy
of the work of the First Millennium and after, assembled
for Hart's search.
"It's on the wheel,"
Hart said, gesturing.
Brooks
walked around the spindle fixed at the center of a horizontal disk. Hart called
it a potter's wheel but it was a turntable, really, firmly buffered against the
slightest tremor from external sources. A carefully arranged family of
absorbers isolated the table from everything but the variable motor seated
beneath it. On the turntable was an earthenware pot. It looked unremarkable to
Brooks— just a dark red oxidized finish, a thick lip, and a rather crude
handle, obviously molded on by a lesser artisan.
"What's its origin?" Brooks said, mostly to break the silence that lay between them.
"Southern
England." Hart was logging instructions into the computer terminal nearby.
Lights rippled on the staging board.
"How close to the
First Mil?"
"Around
1280 A.D., apparently."
"Not really close,
then. But interesting."
"Yeah."
Brooks stooped forward. When he peered closer
he could see the smooth finish was an illusion. A thin thread ran around the
pot, so fine the eye could scarcely make it out. The lines wound in a tight
helix. In the center of each delicate line was a fine hint of blue. The jug had
been incised with a precise point. Good; that was exactly what Hart had said he
sought. It was an ancient, common mode of decoration—incise
a seemingly infinite series of rings, as the pot turned beneath the cutting
tool. The cutting tip revealed a differently colored dye underneath, a
technique called sgraffito, the scratched.
It
could never have occurred to the Islamic potters who invented sgraffito that they were, in fact, devising the first
phonograph records.
Hart
pressed a switch and the turntable began to spin. He watched it for a moment,
squinting with concentration. Then he reached down to the side of the
turntable housing and swung up the stylus manifold. It came up smoothly and
Hart locked it in just above the spinning red surface of the pot.
"Not a particularly striking item, is
it?" Brooks said conversationally.
"No."
"Who
made it?"
"Near as I can determine, somebody in a
co-operative of villages, barely Christian. Still used lots
of pagan decorations. Got them scrambled up with the cross motif a
lot."
"You've
gotten... words?" "Oh, sure. In early English,
even." "I'm surprised crude craftsmen could do such delicate
work."
"Luck, some of it. They probably used a pointed wire, a new
technique that'd been imported around that time from Saxony."
The
computer board hooted a readiness call. Hart walked over to it, thumbed in
instructions, and turned to watch the stylus whir in a millimeter closer to the
spinning jug. "Damn," Hart said, glancing at the board. "Correlator's giving hash again."
Hart
stopped the stylus and worked at the board. Brooks turned nervously and paced,
unsure of what his attitude should be toward Hart. Apparently the man had
discovered something, but did that excuse his surliness? Brooks glanced out the
window, where the last crowds were drifting away from the Vault dedication and
strolling down the Mall. There was a reception
for the Board of Regents in Georgetown in an hour. Brooks would have to be
there early, to see that matters were in order—
"If
you'd given me enough money, I could've had a Hewlett-Packard. Wouldn't have to fool with this piece of ..." Hart's voice trailed off.
Brooks
had to keep reminding himself that this foul-tempered, scrawny man was reputed
to be a genius. If Hart had not come with the highest of recommendations,
Brooks would never have risked valuable Vault
funding. Apparently Hart's new method for finding correlations in a noisy
signal was a genuine achievement.
The basic idea was quite old, ofcourse. In the 1960s a scientist at the American Museum
of Natural History in New York had applied a stylus to a rotating urn and
played the signal through an audio pickup. Out came the wreeee sound of the original potter's wheel where the urn was made. It had been
a Roman urn, made in the era when hand-turned wheels were the best available.
The Natural History "recording" was crude, but even that long ago
they could pick out a moment when the potter's hand slipped and the rhythm of
the wreeee faltered.
Hart
had read about that urn and seen the possibilities. He developed his new
multiple-correlation analysis—a feat of programming, if nothing else—and began
searching for pottery that might have acoustic detail in its surface. The sgraffito technique was the natural choice. Potters
sometimes used fine wires to incise their wares. Conceivably, anything that
moved the incising wire— passing footfalls, even the tiny acoustic push of
sound waves—could leave its trace on the surface of the finished pot. Buried
among imperfections and noise, eroded by the random bruises of history ...
"Got
it," Hart said, fatigue creeping into his voice.
"Good.
Good."
"Yeah. Listen."
The
stylus whirred forward. It gently nudged into the jug, near the lip. Hart
flipped a switch and studied the rippling, dancing yellow lines on the board
oscilloscope. Electronic archaeology.
"There."
A
high pitched whining came from the speaker, punctuated by hollow, deep bass
thumps.
"Hear
that? He's using a foot pump."
"A kick wheel?"
"Right."
"I
thought they came later." "No, the Arabs had them."
There came a clop clop clop, getting louder. It sounded oddly disembodied in the silence of the long
room. "What . . . ?"
"Horse. I detected this two weeks ago. Checked it with the
equestrian people. They say the horse is unshod, assuming we're
listening to it walk on dirt. Farm animal, probably.
Plow puller."
"Ah."
The hoofbeats faded. The whine of the kick wheel sang on.
"Here it comes,"
Hart whispered.
Brooks
shuffled slightly. The ranks upon ranks of ancient pottery behind him made him
nervous, as though a vast unmoving audience were in the room with them.
Thin, distant:
"Alf?"
"Aye." A gruff reply.
"It slumps,
sure."
"I
be oct, man." A rasping, impatient voice. "T'art—" "Busy—mark?"
"Ah
ha' wearied o' their laws," the thin voice persisted. "Aye—so
all. What mark it?" Restrained impatience.
"Their Christ. He werkes
vengement an the alt spirits." "Hie yer tongue." "They'll ne hear."
"Wi' 'er
Christ 'er're everywhere." A
pause. Then faintly, as though a whisper: "We ha' lodged th' alt spirits."
"Ah? You? Th' rash gazer?"
"I spy stormwrack.
A hue an' grie rises by this somer
se'sun." "Ferwe?"
"Aye,
unless we spake th'
Ave maris Stella 'a theirs." "Elat. Lat fer that. Hie, I'll do it. Me knees still
buckle whon they must."
"I kenned that. So
shall I."
"Aye. So shall we all. But wh' of the spirits?"
"They suffer pangs,
dark werkes. They are lodged."
"Ah.
Where?" "S'tart."
" 'Ere? In me clay?" "In yer vessels." "Nay!"
"I
chanted 'em in 'fore sunbreak."
"Nay! I fain wad ye not." whir whir whir
The
kick wheel thumps came rhythmically. "They sigh'd
thruu in-t'wixt yer clay. 'S done." "Fer what?"
"These
pots—they bear a fineness, aye?"
"Aye.*"
A rumbling. "—will hie home 'er. Live in yer pots." "An?"
"Whon time werkes a'thwart 'e Christers, yon
spirits of leaf an' bough will, I say, hie an' grie to yer sons, man. To yer sons
sons, man."
"Me
pots? Carry our kenne?"
"Aye. I investe' thy
clay wi' ern'st
spirit, so when's ye causes it ta dance, our law say..." whir
A hollow rattle.
"Even
this 'ere, as I spin it?"
"Aye. Th' spirits innit. Speak as ye form. The
dance, fwill carry yer schop word t' yer sons, yer sons sons
sons."
"While it's spinnin'?"
Brooks
felt his pulse thumping in his throat.
"Aye."
"Than't—"
"Speak
inta it. To yer
sons."
"Ah
. . ." Suddenly the voice came louder. "Aye, aye!
There! If ye hear me, sons! I be from yer past! The ancient dayes!"
"Tell
them wha' ye must."
"Aye.
Sons! Blood a' mine! Mark ye! Hie
not ta strags in th' house of Lutes. They carry the
red pox! An' . . .
an*,
beware th' Kinseps—they
bugger all they rule! An', whilst pot-charrin', mix th' fair smelt wi'
greeno erst, 'ere ye'll flux it fair speedy. Ne'er leave sheep near a
lean-house, ne, 'ey'll snuck down 'an it—"
whir whir thump whir
"What—what
happened?" Brooks gasped.
"He
must have brushed the incising wire a bit. The cut continues, but the fine
touch was lost. Vibrations as subtle as a voice couldn't register."
Brooks
looked around, dazed, for a place to sit. "In ... incredible."
"I suppose."
Hart seemed haggard, worn.
"They were about to convert to
Christianity, weren't they?" Hart nodded.
"They
thought they could seal up the—what? wood
spirits?—they worshiped. Pack them away by blessing the clay or something like
that. And that the clay would carry a message—to the future!"
"So it did."
'To
their sons sons sons . . ." Brooks paused. "Why are you so
depressed, Hart? This is a great success."
Abrupdy Hart laughed. "I'm not, really. Just,
well, manic, I guess. We're so funny. So absurd. Think
about it, Brooks. All that hooey the potter shouted into his damned pot. What
did you make of it?"
"Well
. . . gossip, mostly. I can't get over what a long shot this is—that we'd get
to hear it."
"Maybe it was a common belief back then.
Maybe many tried it—and maybe now I'll find more pots, with just ordinary
conversation on them. Who knows?" He laughed again, a slow warm chuckle.
"We're all so absurd. Maybe Henry Ford was right—history is bunk."
"I
don't see why you're carrying on this way, Hart. Granted, the message was . . .
obscure. That unintelligible information about making pottery, and—"
"Tips
on keeping sheep."
"Yes,
and—" "Useless,
right?"
"Well,
probably. To us, anyway. The conversation before that
was much more interesting."
"Uh huh. Here's a man who is talking to the ages. Sending what he thinks is most
important. And he prattles out a lot of garbage."
"Well,
true ..."
"And
it was important—to him." "Yes."
Hart walked stiffly to the window.
Earthmovers crawled like eyeless insects beneath the wan yellow lamps. Dusk had
fallen. Their great awkward scoops pushed mounds of mud into the square hole
where the Vault rested.
"Look
at that." Hart gestured. "The Vault. Our own monument to our age. Passing on
the legacy. You, me, the others—we've spent years on it. Years, and a fortune." He chuckled dryly. "What
makes you think we've done any better?"
Marta
Randall is one of the rising stars of
science fiction. Her novel Journey quickly
became a science fiction best seller last year, and its sequel, Hart's Children, will further solidify her position as one of our best storytellers.
"The
Captain and the Kid" is a wryly affectionate tale about the problems of tomorrow's star ship captains and their
crews: people who long for the stars,
even after they've found a safe haven on an Earthlike world.
THE
CAPTAIN AND THE KID
Marta Randall
The
captain's taken to looking sneaky again. Usually, when she pretends to help
around the farm, she stands leaning against a rake or staring out at the ridge
of mountains to the west. But lately she's made a show of looking down the
valley toward town, or out along the stretch of lake. I know the signs by now,
but there's nothing to be done. It comes around like clockwork, I put up with
it, it goes away for another eleven months. I used to
tell her that she should make an effort, work the land, make the best of
things, but I gave that up long ago.
Sure
enough, this evening after supper she starts pacing around the slap-dash
kitchen, then stalks out into the yard. She walks
different, outside. Not disdainful, not up-nosed. Just hates the earth, is all.
She'd rather be upstairs.
Course, so would I, but at
least I'm graceful about it
"Not fair!" the captain shouts.
Down comes the mug. Break, splatter, mess. No great
loss, ugly mug anyway.
Second evening of the sneaky-time, and Fm
prepared with mop, bucket, towels, broom, soap. I
start to clean up.
"I ran that ship for them centuries,
centuries, while they were all asleep. D'you hear me, kid? You think they care I got them off and got
them back again? You think they even think about it, kid? Do you?"
"Don't
know," I say. Wring out the towel. "Expect not."
"Course not! They don't give a damn, no respect, no consideration. I've done
my share, damn it. Took 'em up, brought 'em down. Ought to be left alone.
Hate farming. Not fair."
"Could
make an effort," I say. "Home again, new beginning. Everyone's labor
needed. Important."
The
captain makes a skeptical noise in her throat. "No sense of history. Hate
growing things. Pigsty. Unfair to
make me do it."
"I do it."
"Different,
kid. Menial. Negligible."
"Menial!" I shout. Throw broken crockery in the fire. She's gone too damn far,
this time. "Twenty-five years upstairs! Negligible!"
"I
saved your life!" the captain roars, flings a bowl of stew against the stove. "Broken crèche-box, got you out,
raised you up, taught you all you know. Saved your life, kid!"
"And
I saved yours! Leaky suit, shorted vanes, went out and pulled you back.
Sometimes wonder why."
"Don't give me any
backfire!"
"Yeah? Then clean up your own damned mess."
And
with as much dignity as I can muster, I stomp out of the kitchen, up the
rickety stairs, into my room, slam the door. The top leather hinge snaps. Damn,
damn, damn, damn, damn. Blast.
We've been at this for twenty years now
exactly, year in, year out, ever since we set the ship down in the valley west
of here, in the foothills, and unfroze everyone. They looked pretty odd to me,
stumbling around in sunshine, clapping each other on the back, making cheerful
noises, while the captain and I stood at the top of the ramp and watched them.
I hadn't seen people for twenty-five years, didn't remember them at all.
Thought everyone looked like the captain. She hadn't seen them for fifty years,
but at least she remembered.
They
all knew home, too. Not me. This was just another planet, running in circles
around a silly little star— no big thing, not a big enough thing to land for.
I'd seen better. But they got busy, built buildings,
bred animals from the banks. Two thousand years gone, and they all acted as
though they'd cleaned the skies all by themselves. Silly dirters.
Green
stuff all over the place, growing wherever the hell it wanted. Blue upstairs instead of black, and a paltry number of stars.
Hunk of yellow rock overhead. Twittery dumb things in the bushes
and the trees. Unpleasant place. Wished I were
upstairs again, where it's clean, but at least I made the effort. Tried to blend in. Built this falling-down house, farmed
like they said to. Planted orchard. Captain didn't
help at all. Just stormed around being grieved. Bitching. I agree with her, mostly, but what's to do?
Captain's gone in the morning. Stew all over
the stove. I clean up, make tea, make breakfast, start
to eat. She wants to go hungry, that's her business.
Half hour after sunrise, the Jansen kid comes
over.
"Captain's
coming into town with us," he says, not looking at me. Sneaky
little monster.
"Great."
"Mom says maybe you should come
along." "Nope."
"Dad's worried." "Don't
care."
"She might get into trouble."
"Good."
"Nobody's going to
like this," he warns.
"Tough." I put down the mug and
give him the kid-scare double-whammy, and he beats it. I used to like kids,
until the Council said I couldn't have any. Too much radiation.
Didn't want to mess up the genes of the future. Shipdreck.
Course,
this kid's worse than most, I figure. Used to be a family at
the Jansen place, before the Jansens moved in.
Rosenwassers. Decent bunch. Used to bring over
cakes and stuff, help around the orchard. Double handful of
kids, liked to listen to the captain talk. None of
this slithering around after dark peering in the windows, checking up on us,
making nasty remarks over the back fence. Rosenwassers
moved out about, what, three years ago? Four? Got the
feeling they didn't want to go, but what the Council says, the Council does.
Damned Jansens moved in afterward. Rosenwassers came to visit once or twice, and the Jansens always came along to spy. Looking
through our shopping. Shipdreck.
Shopping
list's on the wall, and I think about taking it to the captain before they leave. Next market day won't
be for a month, but the hell with it. Captain's fault, should have remembered.
She'll have to eat squash for the next month; serves her right.
I
get the pruning shears and go into the orchard. Goddamned
plums. Suckin' apples. Idiot pears. I kick the
trees for a few minutes before getting down to work. Hate farming.
Captain's blind drunk when they bring her
home, but so am I. Hit the apple wine before dinner, been on it steady since.
Past midnight now, I guess.
Two
sets of unpleasant neighbors haul her in the door, some holding her feet, some
holding her arms. They sure don't look happy. Kids peer in, excited. People
breed like rabbits. Look like weasels now, though, or windmills. Waving arms, talking all over each other, frowning. Must
have been some show. Old Jansen tells me that she disgraced herself. Made speeches. Interrupted Council meeting.
Stole bottles of wine. Urped over their damned wagon. Mess.
"So report it," I
say, nasty as I can.
"I
already have," says Jansen, righteous as a preacher in a whorehouse. They
dump the captain on the couch and go home.
I
get her out of her clothes, sponge her off. She wakes in the middle of it,
thinks she's aboard ship, thinks she's in the wagon, thinks she's in the
Council rooms, discovers she's at home and starts crying.
"Tried
to tell them about it," she sobs. "Wouldn't listen.
Won't give me my ship back. Don't care. All I've done
for them."
"Nothing new," I say. I pull the
lumpy gray blanket around her; no use trying to get her upstairs. But she sits
up, gray hair all wild and spiky, skinny arms waving.
"I'm
getting old, kid! Old, I'm drying, I want to go home again, don't want to be'
here! I'm tired. I want my ship back, I want my stars back! I don't like this
place! I want to go home!"
What's to say to that? Truth,
truth, truth. I lay down and put my arms around
her, and we cry into each other's hair.
All the next day the captain won't talk, just
lies on the couch staring out the window, looking deep. Never seen her this way
before; it's got me worried. But she won't' even get mad at me. Eats squash for
dinner like it was something else. Goes to sleep on the
couch. I don't want to leave her, don't know what's happening. Take an
extra blanket and stretch out by the fireplace. The captain snores.
Something
wakes hie up. I lie still and listen carefully, and
it comes again, like someone trying the door. I get up, grab a stick, and sneak
over to the door. I'm getting too old for this sort of thing. But if it's that
damned Jansen brat, I'll cheese him.
"Kid?"
Not
the brat. I lower the stick. "Who's there?"
"It's
me, Ike Rosenwasser. Let me in." "Hot
damn," I say, and Ike makes hissing, be-quiet noises until I open the
door.
"Don't
light anything," he says. "I snuck in." "What
for?"
"What do you mean,
what for? Last few times we tried to visit, the Jansens
ran us off." He's got on a black jacket, black pants, black boots, black scarf around his head. He takes the scarf off and
hangs it over a chair. Might just be the dim light, but he looks different. Older. We're all older.
"Surely you know about that."
"Nope."
"People
have been trying to visit you and the captain; they always get chased away. You
didn't think we'd just desert you, did you? You ought to know us better than
that."
"Don't
know anyone," I say. The captain mumbles and thrashes around, but doesn't wake
up.
"We
heard about what happened in town, couple of days ago. Came
to see if we could help."
"What's
to help? Captain got drunk and yelled a lot."
"But
the Council—"
"Offended dignity. They'll survive."
"But
that's the trouble, kid. They won't." Ike paces around, raises his voice.
I wave at him and he stops, starts to whisper. "They say they've had
enough. Say that you two aren't pulling your own. That something's got to be
done."
"Like
what?"
"Easy."
It's the captain. She sits up on the couch and looks at us. "Changes."
"That's
what—" Ike says eagerly.
"Changes,"
the captain says again. "Go away, Ike. I want to sleep."
"Damn
it, Captain—"
"Beat it, Rosenwasser." She lies down again and puts the pillow
over her head. "Kid," Ike says, pleading.
"You heard the captain," I say.
It's late, I'm so tired my eyes feel dirty. "Go
on home, Ike. We don't need help."
"That's
what you think," says Ike Rosenwasser. He ties
the scarf around his face again, hesitates at the door, then
slides into the night. I shake my head. Some of our neighbors are mean crazy
and some are kind crazy, but it's crazy all the same. All of
them trying to run our lives. I lock the door, tuck in the captain, and
go back to sleep.
Scrungy dawn, all pink and pale. The blanket's on the floor, kitchen's full
of dirty dishes, and the captain's outside, hacking at the dirt with a hoe. I
rub my eyes, then go out to her.
She's
got her hair combed, boots on, hat on, pile of mangled
vegetables around her. Sweat on her face. She grabs some of the green stuff and
shoves it at me.
"What's this?"
"Carrot," I say.
"Oh. Thought it was a weed."
She starts hacking again,
between the rows this time.
"What're you looking
at?"
"You."
"Stop it. Go make breakfast. Go fix the
roof. Place is a mess. Got to change
things."
She
stoops down and touches a green stalk. Her fingers are long and gnarled.
"Carrot," she
mutters. "New leaf."
I go
back inside, stand by the window, watch her. She
really means it, she's really working on it. Changes. By hot, sweet damn, the captain's finally home.
By dinner the garden's
completely weeded, there are some new shingles on the roof, the kitchen's swept
and clean. The captain draws water, cursing at the pump, and
I
cook, and we both clean up after. Then sit around the kitchen table, mending
things. Firelight from the wood stove. End of dusk
outside. Feels pretty good to me. But I don't really
trust it until the captain gets up without saying anything, goes outside, comes back with an armload of wood. For some reason, this
makes it all real.
"Might as well," she says, and
dumps the wood in the bin. She stands taller, lighter. "Can't live without
it, might as well live with it. Getting too old and tired to
yell."
All
for the best, I suppose. Life will be duller, but that's the price. We're both
old.
Then
there's the sound of a buggy, and knocking on the door. I go open it, not
knowing what to expect.
It's
the Council, or part of it. A short one, a fat one, a fall one, wearing Council ribbons, holding their
hats in their hands. Serious expressions. They
look so official that the captain gets courtly and dignified, invites them in,
offers tea, takes their hats and jackets.
"I'm
glad you dropped by," she says, bending forward, serious. "I was out
in the garden today, working, and I noticed these little bugs all over the, um,
what in hell were those things, kid?"
"Cabbages."
"Right. Cabbages. Little white buggers, about so long,
eating every goddamned thing in sight," says the captain, very serious,
very courtly. "Got any idea what they are? I tried squishing them, but there's forty billion of the suckers. You gentlepeople have
any suggestions?"
"Well,
Captain, uh, we didn't actually, what I mean to say is—"
"What
he means to say," says the short one, "is
that we didn't come all the way out here to discuss squishing bugs." The
tall one bobs his head and scalds his mouth on the tea. The captain raises her
eyebrows.
"The
village is growing," the fat one says. The others nod. Population's
expanding. Need for more room. Need for more growing space. The captain sits
and sips and looks grave and interested. I try not to look suspicious.
The Council is pleased that we understand,
says the short one. Understand what? But she doesn't give me a chance to talk.
Repopulating the homeworld, she says. Greater glory of humanity. All working
together. The captain nods again, all reformed.
Seeing
as how we're so sympathetic, the tall one says, they're sure we'll understand
and agree. The captain assures them that we definitely want to help. I begin
to feel like I've been abandoned.
Well,
then, the Fukikos will be expecting us tomorrow, and
they'll send over a cart and Old Jelly, the mule.
Fukikos? Cart? Mule? Tomorrow? The captain starts
frowning. Our visitors look even more nervous. A cart to move things in, they
explain. Surely we'll want to move our old stuff to our new home.
New home?
Of course.
We're not farming the land productively. That's obvious. Our orchards are in
terrible condition, precious resources going to waste. The farm needs young
people, willing to work. Good arable land we've got here, doing nothing, and
the Council has set up a nice young couple to take it all over tomorrow. They
might even use our house. And the Fukikos have a
cabin in the far eastern end of their fields, just the place for us. We'll like
it there. They promise.
"But
there's no running water there," says the captain, still reasonable.
"You can dig a
well," says the tall one.
"If
we're too damned old to farm, why are we young enough to dig a well?"
"Besides," says
the short one, "it's private."
"Private!"
I shout. "It's damn near forty kilometers from town and seven from the
road! It's out in the suckin' wilderness!"
"And it's got a lovely
view," says Fatty.
"But—" I say, and stop. But you can't see
the mountains from the eastern end of the settlement. You can't see Ship's
Valley. The captain can't have her ship, but at least she can see the place
where it landed. If the captain can't see Ship's Valley, the captain's going to
die.
Maybe that's what they have in mind.
"And
the land will be just perfect for you," says the tall one.
"It's full of stones and trees,"
says the captain, rather quiet. "Well—"
"You trying to
starve us to death?" Still quiet Well, of course, we understand that people have to pull
their own loads, that's obvious, stated policy of the colony since return. We
can't expect to be fed for free, now, can we?
"Get the suckin'
hell off my ship!" the captain yells, and they jump up fast. They'll send
someone over with the cart tomorrow, they say, edging toward the door. Captain
tells them where to put their cart, says we're not moving. They say they'll
send people to move us, whether we want to or not. Needs of
the colony. They reach the door, and the captain grabs a big stick and
chases them into the yard.
"You
can't do this to me!" she howls as they rush to the buggy. "I'm a
historical monument!"
The
buggy moves so fast it sounds like it's coming apart, and the captain stands at
the door cursing them and shaking her stick. After a while, I take the stick
away and close the door. The captain looks at me like death itself, and I go
fetch the apple wine.
The captain's all trim and vigor the next
morning, has tea made by the time I get up. I've got a headache and my eyes are
red. Captain squats by the fire while I stagger around trying to keep my head
on, and finally I see what she's doing.
"Hey, that's—"
"Burning the Gold Watch," she says
smugly. I go over to see.
The Gold Watch is a piece of paper the
Council gave us, fifteen or more years ago, after the captain's first performance.
Thick paper, creamy-colored, with black ink.
in deep
appreciation, it Says, of a job well
done.
And a bunch of autographs. Supposed to show us that we were thought of highly.
Piece of shipdreck. They
made a ceremony of it, two or three of them brought it around, had a glass of
wine, made a speech, hurried off.
"Thanks
for the goddamned Gold Watch," the captain shouted after them, but they
didn't get it. Neither did I, until she explained it
to me.
So far, three signatures
have burned. It's tough paper.
"Think you ought to do
that?"
"Sure. All it's good
for."
ll done, up in smoke.
"It's all we've
got."
"Good."
p appre
"You're pretty cheerful," I say
gloomily. She's grinning and bouncing on her heels. I can barely see.
"I've
got a plan," says the captain, and since she says it sort of crazy, I take
her seriously. It's when she says things sober that you've got to watch it
"What plan?"
The
captain holds the Gold Watch until the last scrap singes her fingers. She
stands up, wipes her hands on the seat of her pants, and goes to pour tea.
"I've
got a plan," she says again, and for the first time I notice she's in
uniform.
Some of them had wanted to dismantle the
ship, some hadn't. Some argued that the ship was a relic of the terrible,
polluting past, and we shouldn't keep it around. Bad karma,
maybe. Others pointed out that it was our only escape and only defense,
should we ever need it. The argument got pretty hot for a while, but they
finally compromised. The first set put signs all over the ship telling about
what a terrible place home had been before, and how it got that way, and stuff
like that. The second set kept the ship cleaned and in good condition, just in
case. Neither group would let us near it. We tried once, ten years back, after
they told me I couldn't have kids. We damn near got through the guards before
they caught us and hauled us away.
This
time we do it differently. Cart, mule, and neighbor arrive in the morning, and
the captain's got a pile of junk sitting by the door. Tells the neighbor that
we can cart the stuff ourselves and chases him with a stick until he beats it.
Then we unhitch Old Jelly and head for the mountains. Takes us most of the
morning, going through the bushes, having to kick Old Jelly when he decides
he's had enough. We reach the valley by noon, have a bite to eat, and go down
to spy on our ship.
They've
got her chained down now, the idiots. Poor old lady, battered along her sides,
burns slashed up her fins, craters and pocks and pings and dents, and chains
round and up and down and about, leading to rocks, trees, the hut, every damned
thing. She sits there like some old monarch come on evil times, but she'll
shake those chains as easily as the captain shakes her fist.
Two
guards nearby, probably to keep kids from being silly on the acceleration
couches. They sit against trees, batons across their knees, not talking to each
other. Looks good. The captain tugs Old Jelly up, then
makes her lips all straight and thin and kicks Jelly in the right places. Jelly
hollers and takes off down the slope straight at the guards, and they scramble
up and chase him. Captain and I run down through the trees and get behind
them, Jelly's howling and kicking, guards are shouting, captain and I sneak up
and whap them with their own batons, and they go down like lumps. We truss them
up and drag them over the hill out of blast range. Then we pelt up the ramp and
slam the locks, and we're safe.
Captain
heads into the bridge to start check-down, and I take a quick look-through.
Someone's taken good care of our ship: galley's stocked, locks tight, reactors
all engaged, and it's easy to slip the cores into place and cinch them.
God,
she's pretty inside. Curved corridors with handholds all around for freefall,
big bright screens in the forward cabins, the patches
on seats that I made myself, circling one star or another. Grease stains in the
engine rooms and smudges on the controls—my smudges, and they still fit my
hands. The sound of my footsteps echoing in the corridors.
The bright, even lights. Oh, I love her, I love her, I
hadn't realized that I missed her so much. Ship. Home. Stars.
The
engines start humming, then the captain yells through the com and I head up
toward the bridge, double time. I'm panting when I get there, and the captain
points her chin at the downscreen and keeps working
the controls. I walk over and take a look.
The
valley's filling with dirters, tens of them, some of
them carrying bundles and babies, and they wave their arms at us and move their
mouths, and I can't hear a word of it. More of them every minute,
too. Must be near fifty, sixty of them down there, all
in blast range, jumping up and down and being silly.
"What do they
want?" I say.
"To stop us," says the captain,
grimly. She slaps a set of toggles and the engines hum louder. "What for?" "Suckers."
I
look out again. The people have backed off, and someone's pushing through the
crowd.
"Three minutes,"
says the captain. "Get webbed."
"Wait,"
I say. "That's Ike, and Tisha. Hold off a
minute."
"What
for?"
"Come on, Captain. I
want to hear him."
The
captain grumbles and slaps a knob, and the bridge is filled with voices. Then
Ike waves his arms hard until everyone shuts up, and turns and hollers at the
ship.
"Captain! Kid! Want to talk with you!"
"About what?" I say into
the phone.
"Are you taking off?
Are you
leaving?" "No business of
yours."
"Yes it is," he says. Old
Ike looks
pretty nervous himself,
and people
keep glancing down the road
into town. Waiting for help, probably.
"Get clear or well blast you,"
says the captain.
"Listen to mel We want
to come
along!"
"Dreck," says
the captain.
"You want to hold us
up until the rest of them
get here.
Clear out!-"
"Goddamn it!" Ike yells.
First time I've ever heard
Ike curse like that. "Listen up, you selfish old
cow. You're not the only one
snapped off on this planet;
there's plenty of us, too, and
we're sick and tired of
it, and
we've waited pretty damned long for
you to
get off
it and
get us
the hell out of here."
"What did you call me?" the
captain shouts.
"Fukiko came
into town three hours ago
and said
you'd chased him off,
and we
figured you were making a
break for it. So did the
Council, probably, and if you
don't let us aboard they'll be
on our
heads in no time, and
well all be in
for it,
and it
will be your own damned
foolish fault So open up that
crate and let us aboard,
hear?"
"Let 'em in,"
I say.
I turn
toward the main corridor, to
open the lock."
"I'm not letting anyone in my
ship calls me a cow!"
the captain shouts. "I'm the captain,
you understand?"
"Come on—"
"I'm the suckin' captain and I
run this
suckin' ship
and nobody gets aboard until every
damned one of you understands!
Hear me?"
"Yes," the
people shout.
"So what in hell am I?"
"The captain!"
"And who runs this ship?"
"The captain!"
"And who gives the orders around
here?" "the captain!"
"And who's Rosenwasser?" "selfish old
cow!"
"Then get
off 'em and haul 'em aboard,"
the captain
says. "Think we've got
all day?"
Made it just in time, too. They
scramble up the ramp and into
the lock,
I get them
stowed in the sleep couches
and make it to
the navigator's
couch just as the Council
and their dirters come spilling over the
hill. The captain gives them a
good warning roar of the
engines, they hit the dirt, and
we pull
up and
out, and out, and out,
until Ship's Valley and the village
and the
farms are patches of brown and
green on a bigger patch
of land
by a
bigger patch of ocean on a
patch of planet in a
patch of space. And the sky
is filled
with seventy zillion stars.
I unweb and
float off the couch, turn
a couple
of cartwheels
in the
air, grab a handhold, and
grin down at the captain, upside down.
"Well, kid?"
"Well, Captain? Where do
we go
from here?" She stretches
her arms
above her head and grins.
"Nice little planet, off
by Centauri.
Green and blue
and kind of pretty-looking.
We can
drop them off there." "Sounds good. Think they'll like it?"
"They'll like it." "And then?"
"Dunno. Ever
seen the Coalsack, close
up?" "Nope."
The captain grins again,
all wrinkles
and glee,
and pushes the ship around toward
the stars.
This
is the first story Mary C. Pangborn has sold, though
she started writing as a "closet vice" over sixty years ago, when she
and her brother Edgar began "filling endless ancient account books with
vast scribbled epics." (Yes, her brother was the Edgar Pangborn.) She spent most of her life
working as a research biochemist in the New York State Health Department, and
when she retired in 1970 she took up writing again, producing in
collaboration with Edgar a historical
novel that has so far failed to find a publisher because it lacks either sex or swashbuckling.
"The
Back Road" is also devoid of
such sensationalistic attributes; it is, instead, a warm and quietly told story
of a family living near a spacial
anomaly that may be the doorway to another dimension.
Invasions of cubistic
creatures? Intrepid explorers of unknown worlds? You'll find none of them here, simply a tale of calm New .Englanders who accept the doorway as a part
of their environment that makes more
sense than some other aspects of
modem life.
THE BACK ROAD
Mary C. Pangborn
"They pay you real money for writing
this stuff, Tommy?"
"Sure, Gramps, why not? It'll never put me up there with the
Rockefellers, but it's bread. Uh—don't you like
it?"
"Didn't
say I didn't."
Granny
twinkled at me. She pretended to whisper: "Don't you pay him no mind, Tom. Think he a'n't that proud of you? Tells all the neighbors each time there's a new
story."
Grampa made like he didn't hear. "Fact is, I
don't want you should get stuck up, Tom. I'd go so far's
to say it a'n't all that bad, not for a young
squirt." He licked a finger, turned a page of the magazine. "Must take a right smart bit of study, all that science stuff.
Course, I can see you maybe got a couple-three things to learn yet, along that
line." Turned another page. "This faster 'n
light space travel, now. Puts me in mind of a feller over in East Whitchett—what was his name again? Silas—no, that
wa'n't it. Ran around a tree so fast he butted himself
in the arse and knocked himself clean inside out.
Wheeler, that's who 'twas—old Ephraim Wheeler. Before your
time. Only way they could straighten him out was to get one of these mobbious-strip gadgets for an operating table. Never
rightly the same man again, Ephraim wasn't. Always a mite left-handed; didn't
hardly know whether he was coming or going."
"You know all about Moebius strips, Grampa?"
"Why
wouldn't I? Living right alongside of one? Call 'em
that on account you get mobbiouser and mobbiouser each time you go round trying to find a way
off."
Granny said, "He means
the road to Bangor."
It's
true, there's a place where you can easily miss the turn, if you don't know it,
and go off on an old road that was the one before they made the new highway. It
sort of loops back in. I said, "Well, I came that way, this morning. No
problem."
"Sure, 's all
right coming this
way. Going back, though—why,
you could do it, or I could. You don't, though,
do you?"
"No, I usually take the short cut. More
of it's downhill, and you pick up the highway beyond
the old loop."
"Ayuh. Foreigners, though, they don't know that.
Was a young feller up from Boston, week or so back, all he wanted was to set up
in the back field and paint a bit of a picture. Wa'n't
doing no harm to nobody, so I let him set But when he come to leave, be damn 'f
he could find his way out. Wound up back here at the house three times— near
crying, he was, last time around. I figgered he'd had
enough, so I took and showed him the way."
"Grampa,
you didn't—?"
Granny's face stopped me. She looked scared;
if she'd been sitting close enough she'd have put a hand over my mouth. Luckily
Grampa went on before I put my foot in it. "Showed him the short cut, all neat and simple. Decent little feller. Painting wa'n't
all that bad either, you could tell what he'd been looking at. Guess he got
home to Boston all right. Hasn't been back, anyway."
Later,
while he was outside and I was wiping the dishes for Granny, I asked her,
"What was all that about, Gran? What did I say wrong?"
"Well,
you didn't say it, dear, so 'twas all right. You was
thinking it, though. That he'd taken the man to the back road."
"Was wondering, is
all."
"But
that would have been a dreadful thing to say, Tom. You know he wouldn't do a thing like that. Not to a harmless painter from
Boston."
I
was remembering the time Grampa showed me the back
road, when I was maybe eight years old. "Just taking a walk over to East Whitchett to see Cousin Ella," he'd said. Dad and
Mamma were there, and they sort of looked at each other, not quite smiling, and
didn't say anything. For me it was a, mighty
special thing to go off for a long walk with Grampa,
just us two. Looking back, years later, I saw how he'd been making extra sure I knew the way, at every step. And after that I could never be afraid of
getting lost there, though I could see how a person might. Old crossroads, side
paths going nowhere, maybe to places where there used to be houses once, and
the road itself lazying up and down and around those
knobby bumps of hills with their granite bones sticking out, all looking pretty
much alike; no sight of a highway or houses anywhere. Then after a while, not
such a long while, you come scrambling down one more hill and you're right in
East Whitchett. And that's all.
Or
so I'd thought, until the summer Dave Morris came up with me for a visit, and
we walked over the back road.
It
was the vacation before our senior year; Dave was my roommate at Harvard. He's
a chemical engineer now, and my best critic for the science bits in my stories.
He loved that back road. Everything that was commonplace to me was new to him;
he's from New York, and his folks usually took city-type vacations, cruises and
jets to Paris, and so on. He hadn't ever seen blueberries growing. We sat up on
the knoll in the cool sunshine, stuffing our mouths with berries, and I noticed
Dave was keeping a wary eye on the road below, as if to make sure it would wait
for us. He said, "Tom, where d'you suppose you'd
come out, from here, if you didn't make it through to East Whitchett?
A different planet, maybe?"
He
was always kidding me about my first attempts at science fiction. But
suddenly—as though he'd innocently thrown a switch, changing the light—I was
seeing a shimmer and quiver in the air, a slant, an uncertainty; if any piece
of the world could tilt bass-ackward and tip you out
through a crack, this would be it. You told yourself it couldn't happen, but
here on the back road you didn't know it
couldn't. I said—making a safe joke of it— "Could be, I don't know. Maybe
we'd better get going."
So
we went on to East Whitchett, and passed the time
with Cousin Ella, and came home the ordinary way by the short cut, in plenty of
time for supper. Dave was full of enthusiasm over our walk and the lovely
country; it's a gift he has, a thing I can never do—keeping the air bright with
words, hands and eyes talking. I could see Granny sort of warm-happy chuckling
to herself: Poor city boy, time he got some clean air into his chest.
And
then he mentioned the blueberries. Grampa sort of
went still all over. He said to me, flat and quiet, "You showed David the
back road?"
Dave
laughed. "Showed
met Why, Mr. Waldron, I couldn't begin to find my way through there without following Tom. All
those crazy little roads—man, it's really out
of this world. Like stepping into the fourth dimension."
You
could watch Grampa digesting that while he finished
his pie. "That's the science word for it, hey? Fourth dimension. . . .
Well, now, I'll remember that, be damn "f I don't."
I
put away the last cup, thinking of questions I ought to ask Granny while I had
the chance. Seemed I was remembering old yarns about people disappearing
from the back road, but was
I remembering
or maybe
dreaming them up, now, like getting
a plot
for a
fresh story? Some other time, I
decided. I said, "Guess I'll go for a
little walk, Gran."
I went down the short cut
a ways,
but only
as far
as the turn-off to the back
road. Stood there for a
while, then turned home
again. Not knowing any more
than I had already.
When I got back near the
house I heard voices. Strangers' voices. Two men
getting out of a big
black car. White shirts, so help me, and neckties.
Briefcases. Grampa sitting there a-sprawl
in his
old chair
on the
porch, not moving to
get up.
Granny peeking out
the kitchen window.
The pudgy one squeezed himself out
of the
car and
started toward the porch,
trying on a hopeful sort
of grin.
I could see him
as the
fat kid
who's always getting picked on by
the tougher
boys at school. "Good morning, Mr. Walton."
I thought
he was
wishing he could take off
that stupid suit jacket, was maybe
itching some place
where he couldn't scratch.
"Waldron. Henry
M. Waldron."
"Mr. Waldron, of course." Small unhappy jerk at
the mouth corner, quickly fixed by
a big
jolly smile. "Glad
to know you, sir. Beautiful day,
isn't it? Beautiful country you got here. Beautiful."
"Ayuh."
The other fellow, the thin one,
was obviously
the boss.
Intense, solemn, horn-rimmed
spectacles. He was frowning
a little.
He set
to work
straightening out the protocol: "Mr. Waldron, let me introduce
myself: I am Charles Rowlandson, of the Federal Energy
Commission, and my friend here is
John Carter, from your own
State Power Authority."
"Government men."
"That's right, Mr. Waldron.
Your
government. Now
we know you're busy, we don't
want to waste your time.
You're a well-informed intelligent man; I'm
sure you're aware of the great crisis of our time. Power, sir: energy. You've
heard the scientists have calculated—"
"Those fellers. Always calc'lating
something. Ask my boy Tom here, he knows 'em."
I'd
come to stand beside Grampa's chair; I had a crazy
feeling he might need me. Johnny-boy gave me a big hello grin: "Ah, how do
you do, young man? You're a scientist?"
"Me? No, I'm just a—a writer. Pay me no
mind. Grampa's having a joke on me." "Oh, ah?"
They
decided to let it ride. Mr. Rowlandson—I wouldn't have dared think of him as
Charley—acknowledged my existence with a benevolent nod. He had planted
himself on the porch step and was opening his briefcase—quite a procedure; it
seemed to have three or four fastenings at least.
"We'd
be sadly at a loss without those calculations, Mr. Waldron. Our civilization
depends on science, you know. And our present situation with regard to energy
is—ah— it's not too much to call it unprecedented. We
cannot allow the wheels of progress to grind to a halt."
"Progress,
Mr. Waltham!" Johnny's pink face reflected glory from that blessed word.
"What a wonderful age we live in! Just think what progress you and I have
seen in our lifetime—cars for everybody, jets, satellites, television—all
depending on power, Mr. Watson, power! And if this great country of ours is to
go on growing—as it must, sir, as it must—"
Mr. Rowlandson didn't want to take dme out for a campaign speech. He put on that faint gray
frown again, just enough to turn his partner off. I was beginning to feel sorry
for Johnny. I said, "Why don't you take off your coat,
Mr. Carter? It's plenty hot here."
"Why—why, I believe I
will. Thank you."
Rowlandson
had his briefcase open now. Patiently, he began again. "Now, we're agreed
there must be new power stations, new sources of energy for growing industry;
I think there can be no argument on that. And I'm sure you know, Mr. Waldron,
we have an option, a really tremendous opportunity, that no previous age ever
had. Nuclear power, sir. That is the future."
"Was a piece in the
paper about it, awhile back."
"Indeed."
Rowlandson had taken out an impressive folder of documents. "Now, the
problem that confronts us is to find the best sites for these new power plants.
Ours is strictly a preliminary survey, Mr. Waldron; in the last analysis, decisionwise, the outcome will be conditioned by our
recommendations. It has been brought to our attention that you are the owner
of a large tract of land lying to the north and west of this highway." He
fetched a big map out of the briefcase. "Ah, approximately two hundred acres,
wouldn't you say?"
"Nope."
"No? But our
information is—"
"You looked it up, don't have to ask what I'd say."
Johnny
chuckled. "Oh, very sharp, very witty! Now this land of yours has
exceptional advantages, adjoining the lake here, you see, and—"
"Land's not for
sale."
"Well,
Mr. Wilson, I'm sure you've heard of eminent domain, means if the government needs your land it can—"
"Not around here it
don't"
Rowlandson
said, "Your own attorney will be happy to explain the situation to you,
Mr. Waldron. You would receive an excellent price, of course, if we should
decide in your favor. But, as I was saying, all this is preliminary. Td suggest
you have a meeting of your neighbors to talk it over, that's the way we like to
have things done, and well be delighted to send you a speaker if you'll notify
us. Clear everything up for you, informationwise. And
there's another side to this, of course—new jobs, you know—everyone will be
better off, moneywise, you can see that. Meanwhile we thought you'd be
interested in these fine aerial survey maps—this copy
is for
you, sir, you might call it a portrait of
your property."
"You fellers been riding your airplanes over
my back
land?"
Johnny laughed merrily. "Why,
you don't
own the
air, you know, Mr. Wharton."
"Depends how low you've been flying.
We got
laws on that."
"Yes, and you'll find we've been
careful not to infringe on your rights." Rowlandson was opening up the
map. Grampa
didn't do anything to stop
him from
spreading it out on the porch
floor. I love maps, and
it was
a beauty.
There was Grampa's house, clear as clear;
you could
pick out every house in East
Whitchett, and
the tricky
loop of highway on the road
to Bangor.
Only in one spot there
was nothing but a
kind of blur: that was
the piece
around the back road. I thought
of pointing
it out
to them,
asking if there might have been
a bad
spot in the film there,
and then I thought I wouldn't.
Grampa might
have slid his eyes sidewise
a bit
to look
at it. People don't always credit
him with
20-20 vision, at his age. He
said, "You folks aiming to
make recommendations about my back
land? That what you said?"
"That's right,
sir."
"That's good land back there, mister.
Some of the
best acreage in the state. Can't waste land like
that on no goddamn atoms."
Rowlandson started to say
something, then clamped his mouth on
it, the
frown coming back. He stood
up, closed
the briefcase. The two
of them
didn't quite look at each
other.
There was a while when nothing
happened. Then Grampa got up and stretched,
and they
both backed off a bit; they
hadn't noticed he was all
that big. He stood thinking, not making any move
at them.
"Well, now, being as all this
is so
pre-liminary,
reckon you boysll be wanting
to get
back to wherever you're going.
You can
tell your boss that back
land a'n't for sale.
And you can tell'm
yes, we'll have a meeting,
like you said, only we don't
need no speaker
from you,
mister, we can read, you might
be surprised
about that. Well
let you
know if you can
come back here. Or not."
Johnny tried again, earnestly: "I'm sure
we can
expect your cooperation, Mr. Weldon, an
intelligent public-spirited citizen
like you—"
"You won't be wanting
to go
back just the way you
came," Grampa
said. "Mean twist in the
road, bothers some folks, even with
those pretty maps. Ill show you a
better way. Tom, you
want to get out the
pickup, bring her round front?"
I went, feeling sick and scared.
But not able
to think
of anything to do about it.
I was
expecting him to motion me
down out of the
truck, but he said, "Move
over," and climbed in. That old
Chewy always coughs and sputters
for me, no matter
what I do, but one
touch of Grampa's big foot
on the
pedal and she starts purring
like a Cadillac with kittens.
"Yes, sir, the short cut is
a mighty
pretty road," he told them, talking down over his
shoulder. "Goes through that back land
of mine, you can anyway get
a look
at it
from the car. You just follow
along after us, road takes
you right back into the highway,
headed straight for Bangor. Can't miss it."
We'd been
tooling along the short cut
for a
couple-three miles before Grampa said anything
to me.
"I know what you was thinking,
Tommy. Won't say I didn't have
the notion,
myself. Thing of it is, though,
even those government men, why, they're
people. Got to
give 'em a chance." Another
mile, or two.
"Not saying what we mightn't have
to do,
if they
was to keep
coming back. Wouldn't do it on
my own,
no, we
got to
get the
meeting onto it, have everything square and legal. Can't
let 'em build that
goddamn thing. Not here."
(. . . a crack into
the fourth dimension?)
We came
out into
the straight
piece, where the black car would
be nosing
impatiently at our tail. I
scrunched around to look
back. "Grampa, I don't think they're
following us."
He stopped and listened
a bit,
then swung the pickup around and drove back, slowly,
studying both sides of the
road. Nothing.
No place where
a big
car could
turn off, not until the back
road. We stopped there. Everything
was empty, quiet. A thrush was
tuning up, off in the
woods.
Grampa said, "They must of went that-a-way,
after all."
"Look, Grampa—it's nothing
but an
ordinary little old country road. Isn't
it?"
"A'n't no
sort of use going in
there to look for 'em."
"No, they'd have made
it through
to East
Whitchett by now, wouldn't
they? No reason why not.
Is there?"
"I dunno
about reasons, Tommy. All
I'm saying,
I never told 'em
to go
that-a-way. Told 'em to follow the
pickup. You heard me."
"Yes, but—Grampa,
you know you ought not to have said they
couldn't miss it"
Since his last appearance here ("Under
the Generator," Universe
6), John Shirley has sold
stories to a wide variety of science fiction magazines and original-story
anthologies, plus two novels, Changeworld and City
Come A-Walkin'. Born in Houston, Texas, in 1953, he traveled
around the country with "wanderlustful
parents," worked in a variety of occupations so unusual that many don't
have proper names, and currently lives with his wife Ann Feldstein Shirley in
Portland, Oregon, where he turns out some of the oddest stories in science
fiction.
"Will
the Chill" is typical of Shirley's work in that it embodies, in a crisply
written adventure story, some offbeat speculations about the interface between
physics and metaphysics . . . and a protagonist who's a cold, alienated man who
remains likable. "Or at least admir-rable,"
says Shirley.
WILL
THE CHILL
John Shirley
"I refuse
to speak
to him,"
Tondius Will declared.
"If you don't, there will be
no more
sponsor," replied Great Senses. The biocyber computer paused,
its wall
of lights changed from considering-yellow to assertion-blue; the programming room's shadows fled before
the brighter
glow of blue so
that the oval chamber resembled
the interior
of a
great turquoise egg.
The ship's computer asserted:
"Sports-eyes is serious.
No interview, no sponsorship."
"Very well. Let
there be an end to
it."
"Nonsense. You
cannot live without Contest. Mina's
death proved that. You
are a
hookup addict," Great Senses
said, its fifty-by-fifty-meter
panel of honeycomb-crystal glowing red
for regret
amid the blue of assertion.
You are an addict. A simple
statement of fact. It
hurt, because it meant that Will
was tied
to Sports-eyes.
But he
couldn't deny it.
"You cannot
live without Contest and you
cannot Con-128 test without a contestship.
And this starship is owned by Sports-eyes. And there is the immense cost of the
planet-push-coils to consider. . . ."
"I'll find a way to sponsor it
myself." But even as he said it, Tondius Will
knew it was impossible.
"Sports-eyes
has legal access to this ship. If you refuse to speak
with the reporter, you'll have to talk to the show's director. And he'll come
here personally. And you know how they like to touch you in
greeting—on the lips. Latest homeworld
fad."
Will
the Chill spat in disgust. The self-cleaning walls of the ship absorbed the
spittle.
"All
right," said Will. "I'll speak to the reporter. But
only on the screen. Should I dress? What is the present custom?"
"No need. Nudity is
sanctioned."
Will
turned and strode to the lift, rode the compression tube to tertiary level,
communications. He glimpsed his reflection in the glass of the communication
room's inactive screen. He was golden-skinned, compact but muscular, utterly hairless, his bald scalp gleaming with metal hookup
panels—for his physical guidance-rapport with Great Senses and the contestship—set flush with his cranium. His dark-eyed,
pensive features, already cold, intensified as he approached the screen. His
full hps hardened to thin lines; his hairless brows
creased.
A nulgrav cushion
darted from a wall niche to uphold him as he sat. The screen flickered alive.
The Sports-eyes communications ensign, a spaceship shaped like an eye, flashed
onto the screen. The sign faded, and Will faced a spindly, nude, gray-haired
man with tiny, restive blue eyes and lips that seemed permanently puckered.
The
stranger ceremoniously blew Will a kiss. Will merely nodded.
The man moved uneasily in his seat; his^ shoulders bobbed, his thin
cheeks ticked, his prominent Adam's apple bounced. "Eric
Blue here." He spoke rapidly. "They call me Blue the Glue.
This is a guh-reat honor for me, Tondius
Will. A very great honor."
Will shrugged.
Blue the
Glue pounced on Will the
Chill. "Will, it's my understanding that you didn't want
to give
this interview. Correct?"
Will nodded slightly.
"Well, uh, Will—heh—why is that? Can you
be frank?
I mean, you're Titleholder
for four
Contests, you've been
a planet-hurlin'
waverider for many
longuns now. Twice my lifetime.
You've earned two replenishings, so
you'll live another century at least.
Is this
the last
interview for another century? As far
as I
know only one other SprtZ NewZ holorag has spoken to you
in your
entire—"
"What is
the pertinence
of this?"
Will asked sharply. Blue's voice was abundant
with hidden meanings. His face
was not his face.
Will wished he were back on
Five, listening to those who
spoke with no faces at
all.
"It's relevant to your
image. And your image is
important to your audience-draw. And your audience-draw is dropping off, Will. Though
some say you're the best
damn planet-hurler since Elessar in 2270. Still, you
don't—**
"I don't caper and jape for
the cameras
like Svodba? I don't brag endlessly
on my
prowess and gossip about lovers
like Browning? I don't soak
up publicity
like Munger? Is that your complaint?"
"Look, Will, there's a difference between, uh, maintaining dignity—and being cold. And you're cold, man.
They's why
they call you Will the—"
"There's a different between
being emotive and artistic, Blue."
"Look here,
let me
put it
to you
in the
plainest terms. I'm a Sportsize reporter, my
job is
public relations— you've failed
to give
me anything
to relate
to that
public, Will. Sportsize stars need audience appeal. They have
to be likable characters. They have
to be
likable—ah— folks. They have to be fellows people
can identify
with. Not cold and distant automatons—"
"AH waveriders
are cold
and distant,
as you
put it,
Blue," said Will, coldly
and distandy. "But most of
them pretend they're not, in order to maintain
themselves in the public eye. But it is not coldness,
not really. Not inside. It is the aura of unflinching and unremitting
dedication."
Blue
the Glue looked startled. "Well. Now we're making progress. The Philosophical Waverider? Image
BoyZ might be able to do something with that."
Will snorted.
"Will, I wonder if you'll be kind enough
to examine a holotape I have with me and give me your
analysis of it. I'll feed it into your screen, with your permission." Without
waiting for permission, Blue punched a button and the screen was filled with a
simplified holoimage of the final weeks
(time-lapsed, sped-up to twenty minutes condensed action) of Will's Contest
with Opponent Brigg in system GV-5498. Two planets approached one another, one
brown-black, crescent-edged with silver, its atmosphere swirling turmoil; the
other, Will's masspiece, shining chrome-blue like
the shield of Theseus. Both were approximately
Earth-sized and devoid of life, as was customary. Relative to the viewer's
plane of perspective, the planets closed obliquely, Brigg's from the lower
left-hand corner and Will's from the upper right-hand corner of the rectangular
screen.
How
diluted the public impression of Contest! Will thought.
The
right-hand planet, GV5498 Number Four, showed white pushcoil
flares at its equator and Southern Pole. Atmospheric disturbances and volcanic
explosions roiled the contiguous faces of the planets as gravitational fields
meshed and struggled.
Involuntarily,
Will twitched and flexed his arms as if he were in hookup again, adjusting pushcoils, controlling the tilt, impetus, spin, momentum,
and mass resistance of his masspiece.
Seconds
before impact, as dead seas boiled and ice caps fractured, as continents
buckled like children flinching back before a blow, the pushcoil
on the South Polar face toward Will's Opponent flared and forced the pole to
swing back, tilting the axis, lobbing the North Polar bulge forward,
precipitating collision before Opponent expected it.
Opponent's
planet took the worst of the collision forces. And after the impact, orgasmic
rending of two worlds: more of Will's masspiece
remained intact than remained on Opponent's. So Tondius
Will won the Contest And took Title from Brigg.
The
two Sports-eyes contestships, Will's and Brigg's, wre glimpsed speeding to safety from the still-exploding
bodies—
The image vanished, the face of Blue the Glue
returned. "Now," said Blue, "why did you fire that pushcoil on your South Pole, the face toward Opponent,
during the last stage's final—"
"It
should be obvious," Will interrupted wearily.
"The ploy's success supplies its logic. You must have noticed that my
mass-piece had a more irregular spherism than
Brigg's. There was more mass in the North Polar hemispheres. It was like an
inverted pear, relative to the viewer's perspective of impact zone. I applied
torque in order to use the club-end of the planet with the greatest force of
momentum—this can be useful only in rare instances, and Brigg probably hadn't
seen it before. Most impacts are initiated along the equatorial swell."
"I
see. Beautiful. Uh, such niceties are too often lost
on the Sports-eyes viewer who sees—"
"Niceties! It was the most obvious ploy of the game. Brigg perceived it instantly
but too late; he couldn't compensate in time. Niceties! The most important
plays of the game are the early stages when masspieces
are moved into place for the final approach to designated impact zone. If one
misapprehends the earliest adjustments of trajectory of Opponent's masspiece—or mistakes its accruence
level of mass energy and the modifying attributes of the surrounding
fields—well, one has lost the game long before entering impact zone. What do
you know of subtlety beyond your techniques for interrogation? What is this whole affair to you,
Blue? What can you know
of the
exquisite visions of hookup? You
see only
very limited aspects of Contest.
You observe,
and not
scrupulously, the composite images drawn from
a thousand
Sports cameras and you see them
in timelapse and you see only
brief flashes of the months of
preparation. There is no comprehension
of the
internal artistry requisite—we spend weeks at a time in
hookup, assessing and tasting and
physically experiencing every known
factor in hundreds of millions of
cubic kilometers of space!" Will was not aware that
he was
shouting. "What is it to you? A contest
between two waveriders hovering off
dead planets which they seem to—to
shove about by
remote control, kicking —kicking!—the planets
out of
orbit and tossing them at
one another—and the piece
surviving impact with the greatest mass determines winner. That's
all it
is, to
you. And in the timelapse you thrill to a few adjustments out of the
hundreds of thousands we make,
the few
that are visible to you. You
huzzah at the
fight' of planets, their gargantuan turnings; they seem like
colossal bowling balls in the hands
of mites
riding tiny specks and you
swill your drink and clap your
hands with juvenescent glee when you
see the
wracking and cracking of impact.
You enjoy the sight of planets
cracked like eggshells! Idiots! What do you know of
the possession
of men
by worlds?
Can you even for
an instant
imagine—"
Will stopped.
He swallowed,
sat back,
untensing. Specks of
black swarmed his vision.
Blue was
grinning.
'T suppose,"
said Tondius Will ruefully, "that you're proud of yourself now,
eh, Blue?
You recorded
my little
tirade, no doubt. You'll
crow about it at the
SprtZwrtrZ Club. How
you got
a rise
out of
Will the Chill." Will's tone was bitter ice.
"It's good
to see
passion in you, Will! Though
I have
to admit I don't
entirely get your meaning. But
why are
you so tight with your enthusiasm,
Will? We can build your ratings if youll give me more of that.
And, really, can't you leak us just a littie of your
love life?"
"I have no lover:
male, female, or bimale. None."
"No?
None? Except your masspieces and playing fields, perhaps. . . . But
you had a lover once, didn't you, Tondius?"
Will
felt his face growing hard and dark with anger.
Blue
spoke rapidly. "Just for the sake of accurate historical perspective,
listen, please, and answer my question—a yes or no will do. I have a document
here I'd like to read to you. I want to know if what it states is true or
false. Is this true? 'In a.d. 2649 Tondius Will's fouth
confrontation with Enphon brought him at
last into public eyes and put him in the running for Title. It was said he had
prepared for this Contest for eight years; Enphon's
reputation doubtless warranted this, but eight years is unprecedented even for
a waverider.
'"It
is known that at this time Will's lover, Mina Threeface, was not permitted
to visit the waverider—he avoided all distractions.
For eight years he refused to screen to her for more than a period of ten
minutes once a month. The lover of a waverider is
best advised to understand his need for utter concentration. Apparently, Mina
did not understand. She hovered just out of scanrange
in her father's yacht and, minutes before impact, she dove on a sure course
for the impact zone between masspieces, dispatching
an emergency transmission to Tondius Will: I've gone to Impact Zone. Avert your masspiece,
lose Contest because you love me. Or I die. His Great Senses dutifully relayed this
message to Will. Tondius Will's thoughts can only be
conjectured. He had to measure the scope of two loves. He found he could not
permit himself to surrender or even stalemate Contest simply to save Mina. She
was trapped between impacting planets, she died there and, though Will won
Contest, it was this victory that also won him the cognomen Will the
Chill—'"
"Yes," Will said
softly, though inwardly he shook with the effort at self-control.
"It's all true. It's true."
And he
added: "Your heart, Blue—your
heart is far more chill than mine will ever be."
Will broke
contact and strode to the
hookup chambers.
Hookup flushed
Will's circulation, winnowing fatigue poisons from his blood, unclouding his brain. Refreshed, he adjusted hookup from yoga to extern. The cushions
at his back, the cups gripping
his shaven
pate, the crowded instrument panel—all seemed
to vanish.
He closed
his eyes and saw the universe.
The senses (but not
the mind)
of Great
Senses were his, now. He scanned
first through visible light. He
had been orbiting Roche Five for
two months;
the alien
constellations overwheeling the Roche system seemed
almost natively familiar. He
observed nine of the ten-planet
system, each in its respective
orbit, hookup magnifying
automatically; Roche's Star occluded
Number Two. Dominating the right-hand scope of his vision: Five, fifth planet from Roche's Star, bullring half in golden-red light,
half in shadow. Five
was Will's
Contest masspiece. And patching into a
drifting Sportseyes camera satellite's signal, he
could see himself: his contestship soaring above the twilight border,
north-south over the face of
the Earth-sized planet. The
contestship, with
its outspread
solar panels and the beaked
globe at its forward end,
resembled a metallic vulture scanning the
barren planet face beneath.
Not quite
barren, thought Will the Chill.
The survey
crew was wrong—there's more than desert and
ruins down there.
He looked
up from
Five, and
sought for Opponent. Focusing away
from visible fight, he worked
his way
down ("down") through infrared's
multifarious blaze, down through the longer
wave lengths, seeking a certain
radio transmission. He sorted
through the transmissions of the
star itself, discarded background
sources, letting frequencies riffle by
like an endless deck of
cards, each card with its wave-length-identifying
signet He was looking for
a Queen of
Diamonds. She wasn't transmitting. He worked his way up
("up"), toward shorter
wave lengths, and ten thousand hairs split themselves ten thousand times apiece.
He skimmed X-rays, and,
through hookup's multifaceted
neutrino-focused eyes, spotted her,
traced her spoor of nuclear radiation—she was using a
hydrogen-scoop, fusing, traveling
overspace, so
Will's Great Senses (constantly monitoring gravwave
ripplings) wouldn't
notice her change of position. She
was far
from Three, her own masspiece.
What was she doing? Then—Will shuddered. A strong probe signal had
bounced from his contestship. He
felt it again, and again. He
waited. It came no more.
He traced
the signals to their
sources—and found that the source
was Opponent's contestship, fusing
to travel
unnoticed in ordinary space. Will tied
in with
Great Senses. "Did you feel that?"
"Someone tasted our defense
screens with a probe signal,"
Great Senses replied, voice particularly
mechanical coming through hookup
channels. "Who was it?"
"It was Opponent! She's traveling through
upper space so we wouldn't be
likely to think the probe
came from her ... no
reason for her to assess
us from
that direction, surreptitiously. She
knew in this stage we'd
expect to find her wave-riding. What do you think?
Is she
testing our reflexes or trying
to kill
us?"
"Three sleeps gone there
was a disguised Opponent drone—I recognized it for what it
was, though it was designed to appear as a
Sports-eyes camera, because it was maneuvering
in a
pattern for which a Sports-eyes
vehicle would have no use.
It was
probing our defense systems."
"You didn't
tell me."
"I was waiting for confirmation of my suspicions. We have it now."
"She plans
to kill
me."
That's within the scope of Contest rules. She
has the right to kill you. Under certain conditions."
"It's accepted technically but it's not
considered sporting. No one's killed an Opponent for half a thousand
Contests."
"Shall we kill her
first?"
"No. I shall Contest, and 111 defend myself. She's inexperienced. Luck brought her this far.
She's too impulsive to take the Title."
"But she has innersight.
Admittedly she's unjudicious, little precision as
yet. Her Opponent second to last died in deep space. .. . She admitted nothing. They said it was a leak."
"I didn't know." Will snorted.
"So, she's a killer. Let her kill if she can. That's all—I'm going back to
scanning—"
"One moment. Do you want me to maintain ship's
gravity?"
"Yes. Ill be
going planetside. After hookup.
I've got to go down to—ah—" He
hesitated. Why lie to Great Senses? But he couldn't bring himself to voice the
truth. So he said: "I'm going down to inspect the fusion scoops. All that
dust—there may be corrosion on the pushcoils. And well keep the planet in this orbit for another sleep. Until
then, maintain gravity. I want to be gravadjust-ed—I
might be going planetside fairly often."
He broke contact with Great
Senses.
But
in the programming room the lights of Great Senses went from questioning-green
to doubting-orange.
The atmosphere of Five
was breathable, but too rarefied to nourish him long. So he wore a
respirator. Also, a thermalsuit
against the bitter cold, the cutting winds. That was all. Unweaponed (against the advice of Great Senses: Opponent
skulked nearer), he leaped from the airlock of the lander.
He stretched, getting the wieldiness of planetside back into his limbs. He walked a few meters to
a large boulder, clambered atop it, and looked about him.
Just below, the double-domed lander squatted on spidery limbs. Beyond the lander, many kilometers across the battered yellow plain, rose the shining column of the nearest pushcoil,
the planetmover.
Anemic
sunlight glanced from its argent hide, light streaks chasing the shadows of
striated dust clouds skating low in the bluegray
sky. It was afternoon, but overhead a few stars guttered, visible in thin
atmosphere.
The pushcoil column towered, broad and austere, into the clouds
and beyond. Its lower end widened into a compression skirt that uniformly
clamped the ground; steams and fumes trailed from vents in the conical skirt:
the column was converting minerals into energy, building power for conversion
into magnetic push. There were ten such columns placed at regular intervals
about the planet. Put there by the Sports-eyes Corporation for Will the Chill's
exclusive use.
Made from metals extracted from Five's core,
the columns were powered geothermally. Sports-eyes
had built hundreds—on hundreds of worlds. Worlds now asteroid belts and clouds
of dust; crushed and dispersed for the amusement of jaded millions on the homeworld.
The
Sports-eyes crew had departed months before; Will was glad that they were gone.
He hadn't spoken to another human being, except on screen, since Mina's death,
years before.
Will turned and gazed west. Roche's Star was
low, opposite the column. Long shadows reached from the endless scatter of
boulders and crater rims. The meteorite-scored hills to the north stretched to
him like the pitted, skeletal fingers of a dead giant
Will strode
into the grasp of those peninsular fingers.
In
those hills were the ruins, and the sunharp, and the
voices. Will began to climb, anticipation growing.
In the ship. In the hookup chamber.
In the hookup seat. In hookup.
Time to re-examine the playing field. He tested the solar wind, noted its slant
and strength.
Then he immersed himself in somatic-eidedc impressions of gravitational energy. An exquisitely
fine and resiliently powerful fabric flexed between star systems. On this skein
a star and ten planets moved like monstrous spiders, electromagnetic grips
adhering them to the field, bending the webwork,
reverberating the field so that the positioning procress
of each planet was integral to the status of each of the others. The
gravitational field was the chief turf of the playing field, and Will examined
the attributes of each obstacle on the field, assessing each component's
interaction with the whole, synthesizing his strategy.
Will
needed no numerical calculation. No holotrigono-metry. He had never got beyond the
multiplication tables. All he needed was hookup and Great Senses and the skill,
the innersight. Great Senses was navigator, astrogator, life-systems watch.
Hookup was Will's cerebral connection with the ship's electronic nerves, a
binding of synthetic and biological neural systems. Will's was the instinct,
the athleticism, the determination. Determiner of
destinations.
He knew the ship physically.
The ship's cognizance of (and interaction
with) visible light, cosmic rays, gamma rays, unclear forces—these he felt in
his loins. Physically.
De hipbone is connected to de backbone; the
electro is connected to the magnetic. The seat of his magnetic sen-sorium was his spine. This chakra he experienced in the
region of his heart. Electricity in his heart. Physically.
He comprehended the gravitional
field through shoulders, legs, arms. Very physically.
In loins, light-packets. In heart,
electromagnetism. In limbs, gravity.
In hookup they integrated as variations on
the wave-particle theme: in his brain. Sometimes, Tondius
Will remembered a poem, one of many the ship's library had recited to him. It
was Blake....
Energy is the only life and is
from the body: and Reason is the bound or outward
circumference of Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight.
Innersight hookup. On one level he knew the vast gravitational
field in terms of mass and weight, gross proportions.
Take it down, another and
broader condition of unity.
He
penetrated the vacillation of gravitrons, the endless
alternation between wave and particle forms, slipped the knife edge of his innersight into the transitory sequence between wave into
particle and particle into wave; waves, here, revealed as particles and
particles exposed: packets of waves. This particularization arranged in
resonations distinctive to the gravitional field of
Roche's star system.
He
caused his perception of the gravitational spectrum to click with his
perception of the electromagnetic spectrum, his limbs throbbing in concert
with pulsings in heart-spine. And
this light with his loins. All together now.
His brain took a picture, recorded and filed
it. He had memorized the playing field.
And
that was enough for now. He willed internalization. Hookup shut down his
connection with Great Senses. He sat up and yawned. But his eyes glittered.
He was hungry, and there was no hookup here
to feed and refresh him. He was weary, but the hills drew him on. There was
only the sighing wind, hiss of breath in respirator, clink of small air tanks
on his belt, crunch of his boot steps in sand. And the wide-open, the empty. He
trudged the rim of a crater, admiring the crystalline glitter streaking its
slopes, the red nipple of iron oxides in the impact basin. On the far side of
this crater were the ruins, up-thrusting along the broken ridges like exposed
spinal segments. Light splashed off the sunharp,
still half a kilometer away.
The
sun was westering behind the mesas,
the jet sky overhead spread shadow wings to enfold the bluer horizons.
Will
slid down the embankment, enjoying the earthy heft of hillside resisting his boots.
He reached the floor of the gulley and picked his way over rough shin-high boulders
to the base of the hill whose crown exposed the first stretch of ragged ruins,
uneven walls like battlements above.
The
hills were not simple hills—they were barrows, grave mounds cloaking the
remains of a once-city. Here, an earthslide triggered
by a meteorite strike had exposed a portion of the city's skeleton. The walls
of rusted metal and cracked glass and tired plastics, throwing jagged shadows
in the fading daylight, were notched and scored with age, erosion.
But there were no signs of war, on the ruins.
These were not broken battlements. . . . Genetic Manipulation experiments had
released an unstoppable plague, robbing the world of most of its life and all
its fertility. No offspring were born to lower life forms, or to the world's
people. People they were, of a sort,
with tendrills instead of boned fingers and large
golden whiteless eyes like polished stones. The
plants withered, the air thinned, the land died. Those who survived, one
hundred thousand living on chemically synthesized food, were so long-lived
they were nearly immortal. Childless, living without societal evolution in an
endlessly bleak landscape, they surrendered to a growing collective sense of
futility. A new religion arose, preaching fulfillment beyond the veil of death,
advocating mass suicide. A vote was taken, its tally unanimous. The remaining
one hundred thousand decided to die. To die by poison,
together, and all at once....
For so Will had been told. The voices in the sunharp told him this.
He
passed through the maze of roofless ruins, coming to the broad square at their
radial center. He beheld the sunharp. Everything here
had decayed but the sunharp. It had been built at the
end, as a monument. Built to endure a nova.
The
diamond-shaped sunsharp's frame was constructed of
light silvery tubing crisscrossing in equilateral parallelograms based in
common on a wire-veined cube of crystal which was two meters to a side. The
horizontal axis of each silvery rhombus was at right angles to the others, the
tube frames meeting at the peak of the diamond form three meters over the
base. A coppery netting was woven densely between the
frames, a four-faced crystal form of webbing, basket for sifting and carrying
light impulses.
The
final rays of sunset; veering lances of red, broke the
thin dust cloud and struck the coppery sunharp wires.
Till now it had been singing in the subsonic. Struck full by corpuscular rays,
its netting vibrated visibly, resonated internally, interpreted
the sun shiver according to strict aural formulas. Translated into sound waves,
photons sang out. Choirs of alien races, chorus of human voices, subhuman
voices, wolves baying and birds singing: all in concert. The wind sounds of
thousands of landscapes (each landscape altering the wind song as Bach's inventions
vary the hymnal theme) combining into a single voice. The nature of rippling
endlessly defined in song.
Will
listened, and more than listening: he heeded. And if Blue the Glue had seen
Will's face just then, he might not have recognized him; he did not associate
joy with Will the Chill.
Royal purple gathered in the ground hollows,
dusty darkness collected in the dead windows of the ruins, the stars shone more
fiercely, the mesas at the horizon swallowed the sun. The sunharp's
call dwindled to lower frequencies, softly moaning to starlight and
occasionally pinging to cosmic rays. Other sighs came to replace the sunharp's voice. Will shuddered and, for an instant, dread
enfolded his heart. But the fear left him abruptly, as it always did before
they spoke to him. He smiled. "Hello," he said aloud.
There came a reply, one hundred thousand
voices speaking the same word at once, a mighty susurration in an alien tongue.
A greeting.
Then
they spoke subvocally, in his own
tongue, echoes within the skull:
For
the fifth time you have returned to us (said the voices). But the first time
and the three thereafter you came alone. Why have you now brought a companion?
"I have no
companions," said Tondius Will.
We
see now that you do not know about the one who follows you. It is a lurking he who does the bidding of a distant she. The he comes to destroy you.
"Then
he is an assassin," said WU1 sadly, "sent by my Opponent. She becomes
reckless. She has breached the rules of Contest. Death-dealing must be done by
Opponent or by her machines only. Still, I will not protest. Let him
come."
The time is not yet, Tondius Will.
"Will the time be
soon?"
You
doubt us. You wonder if you are the One prophesied by the Gatekeeper. You are
he. Ten thousand times in ten thousand millenniums we have attempted transit to
the fuller spheres. Ten thousand times we have been denied. One hundred thousand cannot enter as one, said the Gatekeeper, unless they become onemind,
or unless they are guided by a sailor of inner seeing. We were bound together by a united death. Simultaneity. We plunged together
into that tenuous Place, this between. We need a guide to lead us out. Do not doubt us. You
are He. The Gatekeeper whose seven stony visages exhale backlight said to us: One who wields spheres below can guide you
through spheres above. . . . You are He. We know your history, Tondius
Will.
"My
father..."
Was
an orbitglider, a great athlete of space race. "My mother ..."
Was
a freefall ballerina for a space-station ballet company.
*'My
grandfather..."
Was
an Earthborn snow skier of Earth who journeyed to the ultimate ski course on
mountainous Reginald IV, and died on Thornslope.
"My
great-grandfather ..."
Was
a Terran trapeze artist
"My
great-grandmother..."
Was a surfer on the vast seas of terra-formed
Venus, and once rode a wave for seven days. "And I came to waveriding..."
When your mother killed herself en route to
Earth from your father's doom on Reginald IV, and the captain of the transport
adopted you; he was himself a retired waverider.
"And
I know your history, and how you came to die, one hundred thousand at a single stroke,
trapped by imperfect unity...."
We
are as one hundred thousand waves...
"On a single sea."
The
ritual done, the understanding forged anew, the voices hushed. The air about
him began to course and whirl, a dust-devil rose up and the spirit host—seen in
the dark of his closed eyes as endless banners of unfurling white—enclosed Tondius Will. He wept in unbridled joy and relief as they
entered him, and swept him up. . . . He could not abide the touch of flesh on
flesh, not since he had crushed Mina between two worlds. Trapped in his anomic
flesh, unable to feel others, utterly alone and apart like a Djinn in a bottle. Until the voices in the sunharp came and entered him, spirit on spirt,
transcending the barriers in his flesh. They took him with them, for a while,
and let him incorporeaUy ride, like a surfer on a sea
constituted of the ectoplasm of one hundred thousand souls. For this time of
merging, loneliness was beyond conception. For this time of— But it ended.
Returned to his body, he felt like an infant
coughed from the womb into a snowdrift.
He screamed. He begged.
"Please!"
No longer (the voices said), for now. If we kept you from your body any longer,
you'd wither, and pass on to us. It would be too soon. You're not quite ready
to lead us yet, though you have the innersight of
energies, particles, and planes. You are a born sailor of upper spheres. But not quite yet. Next time. Soon.
"Wait!
One thing! You said you would search for her. Have you found her? Was she too
far away?"
Linear
distances don't impede our call. We have found her. She was very much alone.
She is coming. Next time. Soon.
(The voices faded.)
They were gone. Will was
alone in the dark.
The sunharp moaned faintly. Distant whispers; starlight rumors
stirred its webwork.
He
shivered in sudden awareness of the night's cold. Stretching, he fought
numbness from his limbs. He turned up the heat in his thermalsuit,
checked his air tanks' reading. Best get back to the landing pod, and soon.
He
turned and began to descend the hillside. At the outermost finger of the ragged
walls, he stopped and listened. He nodded to himself.
He took-an electric light from his belt,
flicked it alive, and set the small beacon on a ledge of the crumbling wall.
"Come out and face me as you shoot me!" he called.
Silence,
except for the echo of his shout.
Then,
a squeak of boot steps on gravel. A broad, dark figure in a gray thermalsuit stepped warily from a murky doorway. He was two
meters from Will. Most of the assassin's face was concealed by goggles and
respirator mask. "You are one of the guild,"
Tondius Will observed. The assassin nodded. He held a
small silver tube lightly in his right hand. The tube's muzzle was directed at
Will's chest. Will said, "It is a tenet of your guild
that if your quarry discovers you and challenges you then you are compelled to
face him. Yes?" The assassin nodded.
"Well
then, come into the light of my lamp. I want to see some of your face as you
kill me. You can't begrudge me that, surely."
The
assassin came two strides forward, stepping into the ring of light. His lips
were compressed, his eyes were gray as the ice a
thousand meters beneath the ice cap. His thick legs were well apart and braced.
Will
the Chill fastened his eyes on those of the assassin. The stranger frowned.
Tondius Will spoke in a voice compelling; it was compelling
because his voice was the raiment of his will power, and his will was backed by
the unspeakable mass of all the planets he had hurled. He said: "I am
going to move my arm quickly in order to show you something. Do not fire the weapon, I am not going to reach for you. I'm going to reach
into this wall. . . . The guild of assassins esteems its members greatly
skilled in martial arts. ..."
To his left was a high wall of transparent
bricks backed by old metal. Ancient but solid. Will
had explored these ruins thoroughly. He knew that there was a metal urn on the
other side of the wall, lying on a shelf; he knew just -where it was. He moved,
visualizing his left hend passing through the
obstruction as if through a cloud, fingers closing about the small urn; he
pitted perfect form against the mass resistance of the wall.
There was a crack! and a small explosion in the wall side; dust
billowed, chips of glass rained. The assassin twitched but did not fire. Will
withdrew his arm from the hole he'd made. He held something in his bare hand. A stoppered urn of age-dulled gold.
"Waveriders learn that masses are merely
electron-bounded fields of space-influence," he remarked casually,
examining the um in the dim light, "and all fields have a weak point,
where that which seems impenetrable may be penetrated." He paused, glanced
up, murmuring, "That's the principle behind the traversing of space
between stars: knowledge of secret passages through the fabric of spacestuff. And it's the principle behind what you've just
seen, assassin." Will reached out with his right
hand, poised it over the urn, and, with a motion outspeeding
the eye, he stabbed a rigid thumb at the metal casing held in his other hand.
The urn split neady in two; half of it dropped to the
ground. The assassin took a step backward; his eyes dancing with wonder, he
held his fire.
Tondius Will reached into the half of the urn in his
left hand and extracted something that had lain there for ten thousand
millennia. A tiny skeleton to which a thin shroud of skin clung; a miniature
mummy. "It's an infant who died at birth," Will muttered.
"The urn was his sarcophagus. A shame to disturb it.
So . . ." He bent, retrieved the fallen half, replaced it over the mummy.
Clamping the two halves snug with his left hand, with the thumb of his right he
pressed the seams of the urn, all the way around, fusing it shut. Moving slowly
and easily, he replaced the urn in the hole he had made in the wall. Then he returned
his gaze to the eyes of the assassin. "Now: can you match what I have just
done?"
The assassin slowly shook his head.
"Then,
you know that I could kill you," said Will lightly, taking a cautious step
forward so that he was within striking distance. "I could kill you even
before you pressed the fire stud of your charge gun." Will smiled.
"Yes?"
Looking stooped and weary, the assassin
nodded. 'Therefore, your mission is useless. Depart now, in peace."
The assassin shook his head..
. . The tenets of the assassin's guild.
Will saw the man's eyes narrow. Will knew, a split-second realization, that
the assassin was depressing the stud of his charge gun.
Will struck, doubly.
One hand struck aside the charge gun, the other dipped into the assassin's
chest. Just as that hand had penetrated the wall
Will
took something from the man's chest and held it up for him to see.
Spurting
blood from the gaping crater in his chest, the assassin took two seconds to
collapse, two more to die.
But
before he fell he had a glimpse of his heart, his own heart torn still pumping
from his chest, wet-red and steaming in Will the Chill's outthrust hand.
In A.D. 1976
the physicist-philosopher Denis Postle said:
"Mass-energy tells space-time how to curve and curved space-time tells
mass-energy how to move."
Imagine
that you are involved in a competition which requires that, with your right
hand, you throw a discus with Olympic skill, while your legs are performing an
elaborate ballet choreography and with your left hand you are playing the world
tennis champion (and winning), and in between racquet strokes you must move a
piece to attack a champion chessmaster effectively on
a three-dimensional chessboard. If you can imagine doing all that in near
simultaneity, then you know something of what it is to be a waverider.
Externally. In hookup, Will's eyes were closed, his
hands were clamped rigidly on armrests, his legs flexed and poised; except for
his heaving chest, he seemed inert—about to fly to activity like a drawn
bowstring.
Internally. He saw himself, in his mind's eye, floating naked in space; outside him
were luminous matrices, the energy fields, flickering in and out of ken as he
looked up and down the spectrum. He approached a pulsing sphere—to innersight, the sphere seemed only ten meters across. It
traveled in preordained paths through the matrix. Paths he had ordained. He had set his globe on the road it was taking by
manipulating pushcoils situated about the
vast surface of its genuine
counterpart, Roche Five.
He felt
the presence
of Opponent,
though he could not yet see
her. He sensed her position
as a
man with
closed eyes knows the whereabouts of the sun by
the feel
of its
glare on his eyelids.
She had
not yet
moved Roche Three from tertiary-stage orbit. But she was
there, satelliting Three eUiptically, just
within pushcoil-control range. She was waiting
for Will
to serve.
Will served.
He reached
out, mentally, for the imaged
sphere. He didn't touch
Roche Five directly, just as
Great Senses kept out of range
of the
planet's gravdrag so that orbitshift
wouldn't wrench the ship. He
placed his hand near the Eastcenter South Polar pushcoil, poised
over the pushcoil column (externally he remained
in his
seat—but his muscles flexed accordingly) in a hand posture
that told Great Senses exactly how
much push should be exerted
by the
coil, and for how long,
and at
what intervals. Through hookup,
Great Senses drank Will's muscular
expressions, translated them into mathematical
formulas. Great Senses knew
Will's flesh, though Will denied
that flesh to humanity.
Except for autonomic functions, breathing and
blood moving, Will's every movement (as
visualized on the noumenon
plane, hookup) represented, to Great
Senses, a signal to be transmitted
to the
pushcoil control units
on Five.
Externally. He
was rippling
like an eel, rippling purposefully,
sending three dozen signals in
one dozen
seconds. Sometimes several pushcoils were activated
simultaneously, sometimes one at
a time;
on each
occasion the activation signal carried
a precisely
quantified regulation of the
thrust applied.
Roche Five
moved out of orbit.
A man about 1.8 meters high
and weighing
170 pounds
moved a mass of
about 6 billion trillion tons,
some 11,000 kilometers in diameter. And
he did
this (apparently) by rotating his
hips and flexing shoulder muscles.
He did this very swiftly—but very warily.
Because the wrong nudge could conflict impetus with the planet's rotational
force, sundering the masspiece.
Internally. Swimming through space after the sphere, waving his hands about it in
intricate patterns like a wizard invoking visions from a crystal ball, he swept
it easily (but not effortlessly) in a wide arc,
ninety degrees from the solar system's orbital plane, right
angles from its former path.
This
was stage three-fifty in Contest. Six months since stage one.
The
greater the scope entailed in implementing an activity, the greater the need
for strict attention to small details.
Each
split-second decision taking into account all that Will read of gravitational
fields, electromagnetic and heat-energy factors, gravdrag
on nearby asteroids, influence of solar wind—the consequences of interaction
with these factors.
Will
struggled with ecstasy. Each aspect of the celestial
field had its own musics, in Will's mind, and its own
fireworks, exquisite and hypnotic: a threat of distraction.
. . . Opponent drew Roche Three in
ever-widening spi-
rals, never quite breaking free of the gravitational
field of
the sun. She used the pull of the sun, increasing her speed
as she neared it, profiting in impetus accumulated with
one pass after another. She expended weeks in each
strategic repositioning, always moving with strict reference
to the ploys of Will the Chill____
Concentration
opaqued time; Will's fixation on Contest never
faltered. The weeks collapsed upon themselves; Three and Five spun nearer, and
nearer.
Hookup
fed and cleansed him. In place of sleep it washed his unconcious and hung it to dry in
the winds of dreaming. Weeks melted into minutes. Sports-eyes recorded all.
Sports-eyes staring from a thousand angles, a thousand droneships
with camera snouts preparing the composite time-lapse film reducing Contest to
the relative simplicity of a bullfight.
They entered the specified ninety thousand
cubic kilometers of space agreed upon as Impact Zone.
Like
macrocosmic Sumo wrestlers, the planets closed, bulk
upon bulk. Sadly, as with Sumo wrestlers, the naked eye made them seem
mindlessly charging brutes, naked force versus naked force; but Sumo artists
know their wrestle as a kind of dance, a finely pivotal judo, intricate in
calculation and performance.
The masspieces
were ten thousand kilometers apart.
She
was closing fast, impulsively, driving straight as a billiard ball, utilizing
the equatorial bulge as impending impact point. She was overconfident, perhaps,
because Will had not been performing as well as in the past; his mind was
troubled, divided. He had to struggle to keep from thinking of the ruins, the sunharp, the voices, and Mina.
This
was his final Contest, and his heart pleaded with him to play it to denouement.
But
as the two planets engaged for impact—each making minute split-second
adjustments in trajectory, rate of spin, and lean of axis—Will rose up from
hookup, thinking: Sports-eyes,
this time you're cheated. Crack your own eggshells.
Great
Senses was not capable of surprise. But it was capable of alarm. Alarmed by
Will's withdrawal from hookup, the computer spoke to him through ship's intercom.
"What's wrong? Impact is in—"
"I
know. Less than two hours. So it is scheduled, and so Opponent expects. But
there will be no impact. We are stalemating; no one wins. Ill back out of the
approach pattern as if I'm preparing another. But Five
will never collide with Three."
Will
was capable of surprise. "You aren't supposed to read my mind."
"Because
of the voices in the ruins?"
"I read only what hookup leaks to me. I
know you want to preserve the planet for the voices. The dead
one hundred thousand. Why? They're already dead. Do you want to preserve
Five intact as a monument to them?"
"In
a way, it will be a monument. But—do you know what they require of me?"
"They
want you to guide them upspectrum. Beyond
the shortest known wavelengths, the highest frequencies. Into the fuller spheres."
"I
want to go. I want to see upspectrum. And I want
Mina. ... It is a condition of their
advancement that there must be a solid point of departure. We have to depart
from an intact planet; it's like a door into the Farther Place. If the game
were consummated, most of Five would be destroyed. . .
. The only reason—beyond my love of Contest—that I've played this far was to be
near Five. I had to Contest to stay near, since this is sponsor's ship."
"Within an hour the quakes on Five will begin. If you want to preserve the ruins—"
"Fve programmed the backup navigator. You won't have to do a
thing. In forty-five minutes the pushcoil will
veer Five. Opponent's momentum will prevent her from coming about to strike. As
soon as we're out of impact zone, on that instant, transmit a message to her,
tell her, as is my right at this point, I declare stalemate, by right of points accrued. That will
infuriate her."
"And you'll go to the
surface of Five."
"Yes ... and you'll go to serve another waverider."
"And on Five you'll die and go with them."
"Yes."
"How? Will you crash the lander?"
"No. I've got to be in sunharp rapport with them
when I die."
"Then—you'll remove
your respirator? An uglv
death."
"I
don't think that will be necessary. She's proved herself to be vindictive.
When she discovers the stalemate she'll come after me. She'll find me in
rapport."
That was where she found
him.
The
sudden change in orbital trajectory had riven the
surface of Five. The sky was mordant with volcanic
smog. Some of the ruins crumbled. The sunharp
survived.
Roche
Five was moving into a wide, cold, permanent orbit. The pushcoil
column, in the waning light like a colossal mailed fist and forearm, flared for
the last time.
He
stood before the sunharp, tranced
by its distant hum. The voices whispered, sang louder, a cry touched by
exultation.
"Hello," he said.
Again
you have not come alone (said the voices). A she comes in a small, armed ship. Just out of sight, in the clouds. She
approaches.
"I know. She will be
the instrument of our union."
Tondius...
"Mina!"
shouted Will the Chill warmly. Tm here.
The
planet was rotating into darkness. Light diminished, night engulfed Five. But Tondius Will had no lack of light: "Mina!" he
breathed.
She
touched him before the others, a chill breath, a kiss
of ether. Then the others came and he was borne up, the surfer deliquesced; a
sea of one hundred thousand and two waves. His body, still standing, remained
alive and for a few moments it tethered him to that plane.
Something metallic broke from the clouds. A
chip of light glittered low in the black sky, growing. It was a con-testship, diving like a vulture. It spat a beam of harsh
red light; the laser passed through Will's chest and through his heart—but
before his body crumpled his ears resounded with a joyous cry, the song of the
sunharp: struck by the laser blade passed through his
flesh.
One
wavelength, infinitely divisible.
Freed
of his body Will had no need of hookup. He showed them the way. In a moment,
the one hundred thousand and two had gone.
. . . Far
over the surface of Five,
Will's Great Senses
surveyed the planet. Its
face of honeycombed crystal was
a mixture of three
colors; red for regret, blue
for con-
sidering, green
for triumph____
Great Senses veered from
Five and departed
the system.
Opponent's ship
departed as well.
Now, Roche Five, icing over, a
frigid forever monument to a
transcended race, was utterly empty.
Except for the lonely
ghost of a forgotten assassin.
Here's another "first" story, in
the sense that ifs Juleen Brantingham's
first sale in the science fiction field; she is, however, an experienced writer
of children's stories and confessions. ("I confess I've been a
seventy-year-old man who held up a grocery store, a sixteen-year-old-girl who
posed for pornographic pictures, and a fourteen-year-old hit-and-run
driver.")
"Chicken
of the Tree" is a departure for her, and delightfully different as a
science fiction story, too: a witty and odd tale of people escaping from the
automated pollution of tomorrow's cities.
Juleen Brantingham was
born in Ohio but spent most of her life in Florida; currently she lives with
her husband and three children in New York State, "where it's cold and
dark but that's all right because it gives me lots of time to write." Lets hope she continues to give us
science fiction stories as original and entertaining as this.
CHICKEN
OF THE TREE
Juleen Brantingham
Chicken
Little didn't do enough. She should have hired Foxy Loxy
as a lobbyist, sent petitions to the President, and recruited Henny Penny and the other members of her commune to picket
everyone who ever raised a hand to take an oath of office. The sky is falling. And our cluck was too dumb to get out of the way.
I'm just your ordinary nut back-to-the-lander. I was converted the day I walked into a
supermarket, mistaking it for a grocery store. This was one of the modern ones
that comes from the manufacturer complete with prepackaged
food, prepackaged music, and prepackaged smiles. I wanted one tomato for my
supper salad. That was another mistake. I should have given up salads and
fresh vegetables and embraced the delights of the canning industry. It would
have been safer.
A stock boy, rushing to fill shelves with the
five o'clock special, knocked me against the produce case. A pile of
ethylene-ripened tomatoes cascaded down the side of the case and bombarded my
sneaker-clad feet.
The
produce manager raced toward me waving a waiver of responsibility. Groggy with
pain I signed it and hobbled out of the store, home to a tomatoless
salad.
Gly and Spike were properly sympathetic. Pickles
just giggled. She did that a lot and we tried to ignore it. She was arrested
for felonious joking the last time she visited the airport to see her mother
and she hasn't been the same since. Gly—that's GLY
for God Loves You—she says Pickles is still in shock from discovering that someone
as powerful as her uncle has no sense of humor. Spike says she has always been
antisocial and giggles just to annoy us.
The
truth is, Pickles was a flake before that visit and she's a flake now and I
don't care what
she says they did to her in
that interrogation room, I won't let her get away from me until she tells me
where she hid my Euell Gibbons autograph.
As you can see, we're a
very close family.
Gly brewed me an herb tea, Pickles made
poultices for my feet, and the four of us had a family conference. Twenty-two
if you count the ragweed and toadstools as Gly
insists on doing.
Spike wanted to buy all those tomatoes and
throw them at the store window but I convinced him that even if we could afford
to buy the tomatoes, reducing plate glass to rubble
would prove nothing.
"The
time for action is past. Actions are ignored. Our only defense is
reaction."
I
must apologize. At one time I could create slogans that stirred the mind and
lit a fire in the heart, not to be confused with scrambled eggs and heartburn.
That time is gone now. I think words began to fail me the day I found out a
multimillion-dollar corporation was being fined one hundred and fiftv dollars
for tumin*»
a healthv
stream into an open sewer. I manage as well as I can now, though the spirit has
gone out of me. At least I have the consolation of knowing that in the bosom of
my own family my failure is forgiven.
"Dumb.
Really dumb, EL Why don't you just say
what you mean and quit trying for immortality?"
Spike
is a jackass and one of these days he's going to get muzzled. One of these days.
"We
should move to the country," I told them. "Get away from this rebreathed' air and callous disrespect for life. Think of
it! Sunshine! Clean water! Vegetables! Chickens!"
"Rats!"
screamed Pickles, getting into the spirit of things. "Thumbscrews!"
Spike sat on her and Gly
stuffed a pillow into her mouth. When she stopped twitching they let her up
again.
We
packed Gly's dried herbs and Pickles' pots of ragweed
and toadstools. Gly took all the bulbs from the
sockets so we would have flowers in the spring. I filled a box with my
toothpick model of Golden Gate Bridge and used coffee grounds and eggshells
from the restaurant down the street. Compost is important to organic gardeners
and I thought that box of valuables would make a good start.
Spike
sneered at our materialism but before we reached the street door Pickles
convinced him that even Buddha and Christ wore robes.
We
had gone no more than six blocks when Gly began to
whimper. That was strange. Gly is our Earth Mother.
She never leans or cries or raises her voice. It may have been the smog that
upset her. People were falling like custard pies in the fumes. Or maybe it
wasn't the smog. Maybe it was the baby we saw lying in a litter basket. Anyway,
she quit whimpering when Spike went back and got the baby for her. The baby's
screams weren't much of an improvement.
The
wounds on my feet had become ulcerated and ugly by the third day and we still
weren't out of the city. Spike complained of headaches after the peace patrol
questioned him. Gly filled the dent in his head with
a toadstool poultice and it stank. Pickles giggled incessandy.
The baby turned blue from screaming.
We
were all a little lightheaded from hunger on the twelfth day when we crossed
the City Limits line. Gly put the baby down and
breathed deeply of the fresh air. Pickles turned over stones looking for rats.
I scratched a pus pocket on my right foot. Spike died. None of us quite knew
what to do now that we had reached our goal.
I
have to admit we were an unlikely group of pioneers. Gly
is probably the closest of all of us to nature, having been found lying in the
middle of the toadstool crop three days after a party. She has never said but her skin is very white and leathery. Spike claims to be in touch
with the cycles of the Earth but all he really means is that he knows what it
is like to die and he picked up that habit in high school, not the most natural
environment.
I
was brought up rather ordinarily in a city apartment. Pickles
is the daughter of a 747 and
an albatross, abandoned by her mother in a luggage locker. So it's not as if
we had any notions of returning
to a natural lifestyle.
It
was the Oracle Usda who turned us on. Read forward
his announcements seem like pravers to the eod Technos. But read backward,
as the Oracle intended, these announcements hold seeds of revolution as a
too-cool compost heap holds weed seeds, needing only the proper season to
germinate. My experience at the supermarket had provided that season.
Now
here we were. City to the north of us. City to the south of us. Country in the
middle. As foretold by the Oracle.
"Rat," announced
Pickles.
Gly and I tensed to leap on her but it was not
necessary. She was pointing to an animal that was scurrying across the bare,
dusty ground underneath the tree where we had taken shelter. It was not a rat.
It was a hen with feathers as brown as dried leaves. True to its calling it
settled into Spike's cold, outstretched hand and laid an egg.
Gly dumped the ragweed from one of Pickles'
pots, broke the egg into it, and scrambled it with her finger. Our first meal, grown on our own farm. We took turns lapping
from the pot. Even Spike sat up to have a taste.
In
the days that followed, Pickles and Spike wove branches and autumn leaves into
a shelter. I started a compost heap, shredding leaves and crushing eggshells by
hand. The baby grew a tail and climbed the tree. Gly
had to grow a tail too so she could swing through the upper branches to nurse
the baby. The hen laid an egg every day.
We
have lived in the joy of the tree for six years. We watched the City Limits
inching toward us. Pickles put down a cinder and broken glass barrier that
stopped the cities as well as it stopped slugs. But cities are not so easily
frustrated. They sent our old friend Oracle Usda to
impound our chicken. We saved her by promising never to smoke her eggs. They
sent building inspectors to demolish our tree because it didn't meet safety
codes. The baby quoted legal precedents at the building inspectors until they
cried.
There
was no bitterness in our hearts for the cities because we could see how they
were suffering. People would appear at the Limits lines occasionally, fading
into view like ghosts in the black mist. We offered them orchids and carnations
and dandelion chains but they were too scared to leave their protective veil.
Lately
the blackness has been lifting over the cities,' thickening as it rises. I
think they are trying to cure themselves. Spike says the mist just rises and
falls like the tides. Spike is still a jackass but a quieter one.
Gly and the baby seldom come down from the top
of the tree. When they do they bring bananas and grapes and apples and
coconuts. Pickles has stopped giggling and she gave
back my Euell Gibbons autograph. I ate it for
breakfast with honey and yogurt.
Spike has begun to commune with the
earthworms. I think he feels a rapport with them because of his deathly experiences. The
other day he shyly showed
me a
diamond engagement ring. I told
him the
worms were only after his virginal
young body but he still
does not listen to me. He
borrowed a shovel and I
think he's planning to writhe away
with them.
Every spring
the hen
dropped her brown feathers and
grew green ones. Every
autumn the feathers turned yellow,
then brown.
Until lately
she continued
to lay
an egg
a day.
Chicken Little didn't do
enough. The sky really is falling. I can see it in
the city
to the
north and the city to
the south. They used
to call
that stuff smog in the
old days and fog in the
older days before that. I
don't know what they call it
now. Plog, perhaps. I call it
sky. I have become a child
of the
tree.
Pickles has been
studying it On moonless nights
she creeps across the City Limits
lines to get a chunk
or two.
At first she thought
I might
be able
to use
it in
my compost
heap, which has grown healthily
and is
now sixty
feet across.
That first sample convinced us it
wasn't safe to use in
the compost heap. We
whacked it with shovels for
a while, played ping-pong and polo,
and we
couldn't even scratch it. Pickles thinks plastics are breaking down
and recombining with smog
to form
this stuff which falls in
chunks from the sky.
She has a new use for
it now.
She is
building a hen house of sky.
Unfortunately, we no
longer need a hen house. Our hen crossed the
cinder barrier to catch a
slug and plog turned her into Chicken
Pancake.
She tasted
just fine with fried bananas.
Hey, Turkey
Lurkey, the
sky is
falling.
Though Greg Bear began
writing stories when he was eight or nine years old, he denies any
autobiographical content in the following tale of archetypal storytellers who
have a profound influence on the life of an imaginative child.
Bear
sold his "firsf' story at the age of fifteen to
Robert A. W. Lowndes" Famous Science Fiction; since then he's published about a dozen more
in a variety of sf publications. He's also an artist,
and has sold cover paintings to both Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy (where he illustrated one of his own stories). Born in 1951 in San
Diego, he's lived in Japan, Rhode Island, Texas, the Philippines, and Alaska:
his father was in the Navy. He now lives in the Los Angeles area with his wife,
Christina.
THE WHITE HORSE CHILD
Greg Bear
When I was seven
years old, I met an
old man
by the
side of the dusty road between
school and farm. The late
afternoon sun had cooled and
he was
sitting on a rock, hat
off, hands held out
to the
gentle warmth, whistling a pretty song.
He nodded
at me
as I walked past. I nodded back. I was curious,
but I knew better than to
get involved
with strangers. Nameless evils seemed
to attach
themselves to strangers, as if they might
turn into lions when no one
but a
little kid was around. "Hello, boy," he said.
I stopped and shuffled my feet. He
looked more like a hawk than a lion. His clothes
were brown and gray and
russet, and his hands
were pink like the flesh
of some
rabbit a hawk had just
plucked up. His face was
brown except around the eyes,
where he might have worn
glasses; around the eyes
he was
white, and this intensified his gaze. "Hello,"
I said.
"Was a hot day. Must have been hot in school," he said.
"They
got air conditioning." "So they do, now. How old are you?"
"Seven," I said. "Well, almost eight." "Mother told
you never to talk to strangers?" "And Dad,
too."
"Good advice. But haven't you seen me
around here before?" I looked him over. "No."
"Closely. Look at my clothes. What color are
they?"
His
shirt was gray, like the rock he was sitting on. The cuffs, where they peeped
from under a russet jacket, were white. He didn't smell bad, but he didn't look
particularly clean. He was smooth-shaven, though. His hair was white and his
pants were the color of the dirt below the rock. "All kinds of
colors," I said.
"But mostly I partake
of the landscape, no?"
"I guess so," I
said.
"That's
because I'm not here. You're imagining me, at least part of me. Don't I look
like somebody you might have heard of?"
"Who are you supposed
to look like?" I asked.
"Well,
Tm full of stories," he said. "Have lots of stories to tell little
boys, little girls, even big folk, if they'll listen."
I started to walk away.
"But
only if they'll listen," he said. I ran. When I got home, I told my older
sister about the man on the road, but she only got a worried look and told me
to stay away from strangers. I took her advice. For some time afterward, into
my eighth year, I avoided that road and did not speak with strangers more than
I had to.
The
house that I lived in, with the five other members of my family and two dogs
and one beleaguered cat, was white and square and comfortable. The stairs were
rich, dark wood overlaid with worn carpet. The walls were dark oak paneling up
to a foot above my head, then white plaster, with a white plaster ceiling. The
air was full of smells—bacon when I woke up, bread and soup and dinner when I
came home from school, dust on weekends when we helped clean.
Sometimes my parents argued, and not just
about money, and those were bad times; but usually we were happy. There was
talk about selling the farm and the house and going to Mitchell where Dad could
work in a computerized feed-mixing plant, but it was only talk.
It
was early summer when I took to the dirt road again. I'd forgotten about the
old man. But in almost the same way, when the sun was cooling and the air was
haunted by lazy bees, I saw an old woman. Women strangers are less malevolent
than men, and rarer. She was sitting on the gray rock, in a long green skirt
summer-dusty, with a daisy-colored shawl and a blouse the precise hue of cot-tonwoods seen in a late hazy day's muted light.
"Hello, boy," she said.
"I don't recognize you, either," I
blurted, and she smiled.
"Of course not. If you didn't recognize him, you'd hardly know me."
"Do you know him?" I asked. She
nodded. "Who was he? Who are you?"
"We're both full of stories. Just tell
them from different angles. You aren't afraid of us, are you?"
I
was, but having a woman ask the question made all the difference.
"No," I said. "But what are you doing here? And how do you know—?"
"Ask for a story," she said.
"One you've never heard of before." Her eyes were the color of baked
chestnuts, and she squinted into the sun so that I couldn't see her whites.
When she opened them wider to look at me, she didn't have any whites.
"I don't want to hear
stories," I said softly.
"Sure you do. Just
ask."
"It's late. I got to
be home."
"I
knew a man who became a house," she said. "He didn't like it. He
stayed quiet for thirty years, and watched all the people inside grow up, and
be just like their folks, all nasty and dirty and leaving his walls to fake,
and the bathrooms were unbearable. So he spit them out one morning, furniture
and all, and shut bis doors and locked them."
"What?"
"You
heard me. Upchucked. The poor house was so disgusted
he changed back into a man, but he was older and he had a cancer and his heart
was bad because of all the abuse he had lived with. He died soon after."
I
laughed, not because the man had died but because I knew such things were lies.
"That's silly," I said.
"Then
here's another. There was a cat who wanted to eat butterflies. Nothing finer in the world for a cat than to stalk the grass,
waiting for black and pumpkin butterflies. It crouches down and wriggles
its rump to dig in the hind paws, then it jumps. But a
butterfly is no sustenance for a cat. It's practice. There was a little girl
about your age— might have been your sister, but she won't admit it—who saw the
cat and decided to teach it a lesson. She hid in the taller grass with two old
kites under each arm and waited for the cat to come by stalking. When it got
real close, she put on her mother's dark glasses, to look all bug-eyed, and she
jumped up flapping the kites. Well, it was just a little too real, because in a
trice she found herself flying, and she was much smaller than she had been,
and the cat jumped at her. Almost got her, too. Ask
your sister about that sometime. See if she doesn't deny it."
"How'd she get back to
be my sister again?"
"She
became too scared to fly. She lit on a flower and found herself crushing it.
The glasses broke, too."
"My sister did break a
pair of Mom's glasses once."
The woman smiled.
"I got to be going
home."
"Tomorrow you bring me
a story, okay?"
I
ran off without answering. But in my head, monsters were already rising. If she
thought I was scared, wait until she heard the story I had to tell! When I got
home my oldest sister, Barbara, was fixing lemonade in the kitchen. She was a
year older than I, but acted as if she were grown-up. She was a good six inches
taller and I could beat her if I got in a lucky punch, but no other way—so her
power over me was awesome. But we were usually friendly.
"Where you been?"
she asked, like a mother.
"Somebody tattled on
you," I said.
Her
eyes went doe-scared, then wizened down to slits.
"What're you talking about?"
"Somebody
tattled about what you did to Mom's sunglasses."
"I already been whipped for that,"
she said nonchalantly. "Not much more to tell." "Oh, but I know more."
"Was
not playing doctor," she said. The youngest,
Sue-Ann, weakest and most full of guile, had a habit of telling the folks
somebody or .other was playing doctor. She didn't know what it meant—I just
barely did—but it had been true once, and she held it over everybody as her
only vestige of power.
"No,"
I said, "but I know what you were doing. And I won't tell anybody."
"You
don't know nothing," she said. Then she accidentally
poured half a pitcher of lemonade across the side of my head and down my front.
When Mom came in I was screaming and swearing like Dad did when he fixed the
cars, and I was put away for life plus ninety years in the bedroom I shared
with younger brother Michael. Dinner smelled better than usual that evening,
but I had none of it. Somehow, I wasn't brokenhearted. It gave me time to think
of a scary story for the country-colored woman on the rock.
School
was the usual mix of hell and purgatory the next day. Then the hot, dry winds
cooled and the bells rang and I was on the dirt road again, across the southern
hundred acres, walking in the lees and shadows of the big cottonwoods. I
carried my Road-Runner lunch pail and my pencil box and one book—a handwriting
manual I
hated so much I tore pieces
out of it at night, to shorten its lifetime—and I walked slowly, to give my
story time to gel.
She
was leaning up against a tree, not far from the rock. Looking back, I can see
she was not so old as a boy of eight years thought.
Now I see her lissome beauty and grace, despite the dominanace
of gray in her reddish hair, despite the crow's-feet around her eyes and the
smile-haunts around her lips. But to the eight-year-old she was simply a
peculiar crone. And he had a story to tell her, he thought, that would age her
unto graveside.
"Hello, boy," she
said.
"Hi." I sat on
the rock.
"I can see you've been
thinking," she said.
I
squinted into the tree shadow to make her out better. "How'd you
know?"
"You
have the look of a boy that's been thinking. Are you here to listen to another
story?"
"Got one to tell, this
time," I said.
"Who goes first?"
It
was always polite to let the woman go first so I quelled my haste and told her she could. She
motioned me to come by the tree and sit on a smaller rock, half-hidden by
grass. And while the crickets in the shadow tuned up for the evening, she said,
"Once there was a dog. This dog was a pretty usual dog, like the ones that
would chase you around home if they thought they could get away with it—if they
didn't know you, or thought you were up to something the big people might
disapprove of. But this dog lived in a graveyard. That
is, he belonged to the caretaker. You've seen a graveyard before, haven't
you?"
"Like where they took
Grandpa."
"Exactly,"
she said. "With pretty lawns, and big white and gray stones, and for those
who've died recently, smaller gray stones with names and flowers and years cut
into them. And trees in some places, with a mortuary nearby made of brick, and
a garage full of black cars, and a place behind the garage where you wonder
what goes on." She knew the place, all right. "This dog had a pretty
good life. It was his job to keep the grounds clear of animals at night. After
the gates were locked, he'd be set loose, and he wandered all night long. He
was almost white, you see. Anybody human who wasn't supposed to be there would
think he was a ghost, and they'd run away.
"But this dog had a problem. His problem
was, there were rats that didn't pay much attention to
him. A whole gang of rats. The leader was a big one, a
good yard from nose to tail. These rats made their living by burrowing under
the ground in the old section of the cemetery."
That
did it. I didn't want to hear any more. The air was a lot colder than it should
have been, and I wanted to get home in time for dinner and still be able to eat
it. But I couldn't go just then.
"Now
the dog didn't know what the rats did, and just like you and I, probably, he
didn't much care to know. But it was his job to keep them under control. So one
day he made a truce with a couple of cats that he normally tormented and told
them about the rats. These cats were scrappy old toms and they'd long since
cleared out the competition of other cats, but they were friends themselves.
So the dog made them a proposition. He said he'd let them use the cemetery any
time they wanted, to prowl or hunt in or whatever, if they would put the fear
of God into a few of the rats. The cats toojr. him up on it. 'We get to do
whatever we want,' they said, "whenever we want, and you won't bother us.'
The dog agreed.
"That
night the dog waited for the sounds of battle. But they never came. Nary a yowl." She glared at me for emphasis. "Not
a claw scratch. Not even a twitch of tail in the wind." She took a deep
breath, and so did I. "Round about midnight the dog went out into the
graveyard. It was very dark and there wasn't wind, or bird, or speck of star to relieve the quiet and the dismal,
inside-of-a-box-camera blackness. He sniffed his way to the old part of the
graveyard, and met with the head rat, who was sitting on a slanty,
cracked wooden grave marker. Only his eyes and a tip of tail showed in the
dark, but the dog could smell him. 'What happened to the cats?' he asked. The
rat shrugged his haunches. 'Ain't seen any cats,' he
said. 'What did you think—that you could scare us out with a couple of cats?
Ha. Listen—if there had been any cats here tonight, they'd have been strung and
hung like meat in a shed, and my youn'uns
would have grown fat on—"
"No-o-o!" I screamed, and I ran away from the woman and the tree until I couldn't
hear the story any more.
"What's
the matter?" she called after me. "Aren't you going to tell me your
story?" Her voice followed me as I ran.
It
was funny. That night, I wanted to know what happened to the cats. Maybe
nothing had happened to them. Not knowing made my visions even worse—and I
didn't sleep well. But my brain worked like it had never worked before.
The
next day, a Saturday, I had an ending—not a very good one
in retrospect—but it served to frighten Michael so badly he threatened to tell
Mom on me.
"What
would you want to do that for?" I asked. "Cripes, I won't ever tell
you a story again if you tell Mom!"
Michael
was a year younger and didn't worry about the future. "You never told me
stories before," he said, "and everything was fine. I won't miss
them."
He
ran down the stairs to the living room. Dad was smoking a pipe and reading the
paper, relaxing before checking the irrigation on the north thirty. Michael
stood at the foot of the stairs, thinking. I was almost down to grab him
and haul him upstairs when he made his decision and headed for the kitchen. I
knew exactly what he was considering—that Dad would probably laugh and call him
a little scaredy cat. But Mom would get upset and do
me in proper.
She was putting a paper form over the kitchen
table to mark it for fitting a tablecloth. Michael ran up to her and hung onto
a pants leg while I halted at the kitchen door, breathing hard, eyes
threatening eternal torture if he so much as peeped. But Michael didn't worry
about the future much.
"Mom," he said.
"Cripes!"
I shouted, high-pitching on the i. Refuge awaited me in the tractor shed. It was an agreed-upon hiding
place. Mom didn't know I'd be there, but Dad did, and he could mediate.
It
took him a half-hour to get to me. I sat in the dark behind a workbench,
practicing my pouts. He stood in the shaft of light falling from the unpatched chink in the roof. Dust motes May-poled around
his legs. "Son," he said. "Mom wants to know where you got that
story."
Now,
this was a peculiar thing to be asked. The question I'd expected had been,
"Why did you scare Michael?" or maybe, "What made you think of
such a thing?" But no. Somehow, she had plumbed
the problem, planted the words in Dad's mouth, and impressed upon him that
father-son relationships were temporarily suspended.
"I made it up," I
said.
"You've
never made up that kind of story before." "I just started."
He
took a deep breath. "Son, we get along real good, except when you lie to
me. We know better. Who told you that story?"
This
was uncanny. There was more going on than I could understand—there was a mysterious,
adult thing happening. I had no way around the truth. "An old woman,"
I said.
Dad sighed even deeper.
"What was she wearing?"
"Green dress," I
said.
"Was there an old
man?"
I nodded.
"Christ," he said
softly. He turned and walked out of the shed. From outside, he called me to
come into the house. I dusted off my overalls and followed him. Michael sneered
at me.
" 'Locked them in coffins with old dead bodies,'" he mimicked. "Phhht! You're going to get
it."
The
folks closed the folding door to the kitchen with both of us outside. This
disturbed Michael, who'd expected instant vengeance. I was too curious and
worried to take my revenge on him, so he skulked out the screen door and chased
the cat around the house. "Lock you in a coffin!" he screamed.
Mom's
voice drifted from behind the louvred doors. "Do
you hear that? The poor child's going to have nightmares. It'll warp
him."
"Don't
exaggerate," Dad said.
"Exaggerate
what? That those filthy people are back? Ben, they must be a hundred years old
now! They're trying to do the same thing to your son that they did to your
brother . . . and just look at him! Living in sin, writing for those hell-spawned girlie magazines."
"He ain't
living in sin, he's living alone in an apartment in
New York City. And he writes for all kinds of places."
"They
tried to do it to you, too! Just thank God your aunt sayed
you."
"Margie, I hope you
don't intend—"
"Certainly
do. She knows all about them kind of people. She chased them off once, she can sure do it again!"
All hell had broken loose. I didn't
understand half of it, but I could feel the presence of Great Aunt Sybil Danser. I could almost hear her crackling voice and the shustle of her satchel of Billy Grahams
and Zondervans and little tiny pamphlets with shining
light in blue offset on their covers.
I knew there was no way to get the full story
from the folks short of listening in, but they'd stopped talking and were
sitting in that stony kind of silence that indicated Dad's disgust and Mom's
determination. I was mad that nobody was blaming me, as if I were some idiot
child not capable of being bad on my own. I was mad at Michael for
precipitating the whole mess.
And
I was curious. Were the man and woman more than a hundred years old? Why hadn't
I seen them before, in town, or heard about them from other kids? Surely I
wasn't the only one they'd seen on the road and told stories to. I decided to
get to the source. I walked up to the louvred doors
and leaned my cheek against them. "Can I go play at George's?"
"Yes," Mom said.
"Be back for evening chores."
George
lived on the next farm, a mile and a half east. I took my bike and rode down the old dirt road
going south.
They
were both under the tree, eating a picnic lunch from a wicker basket. I pulled
my bike over and leaned it against the gray rock, shading my eyes to see them
more clearly.
"Hello, boy," the old man said. "Ain't seen you in a while."
I
couldn't think of anything to say. The woman offered me a cookie and I refused
with a muttered, "No, thank you, ma'am."
"Well then, perhaps
you'd like to tell us your story."
"No,
ma'am."
"No
story to tell us? That's odd. Meg was sure you had a story in you someplace. Peeking out from behind your ears maybe, thumbing its nose at
us."
The woman smiled
ingratiatingly. "Tea?"
"There's going to be
trouble," I said.
"Already?" The woman smoothed the skirt in her lap and set a plate of nut bread
into it. "Well, it comes sooner or later, this time sooner. What do you
think of it, boy?"
"I
think I got into a lot of trouble for not much being bad," I said. "I
don't know why."
"Sit
down then," the old man said. "Listen to a tale, then
tell us what's going on."
I sat down, not too keen
about hearing another story but out of politeness. I took a piece of nut bread
and nibbled on it as the woman sipped her tea and cleared her throat.
"Once there was a city on the shore of a broad, blue sea. In the city
lived five hundred children and nobody else, because the wind from the sea
wouldn't let anyone grow old. Well, children don't have kids of their own, of
course, so when the wind came up in the first year the city never grew any
larger."
"Where'd
all the grownups go?" I asked. The old man held his fingers to his lips
and shook his head.
"The
children tried to play all day, but it wasn't enough. They became frightened at
night and had bad dreams. There was nobody to comfort them because only
grownups are really good at making nightmares go away. Now, sometimes
nightmares are white horses that come out of the sea, so they set up guards
along the beaches, and fought them back with wands made of blackthorn. But
there was another kind of nightmare, one that was black and rose out of the
ground, and those were impossible to guard against. So the children got
together one day and decided to tell all the scary stories there were to tell,
to prepare themselves for all the nightmares. They found it was pretty easy to
think up scary stories, and every one of them had a story or two to tell. They
stayed up all night spinning yarns about ghosts and dead things, and live
things that shouldn't have been, and things that were neither. They talked
about death and about monsters that suck blood, about things that live way deep
in the earth and long, thin things that sneak through cracks in doors to lean
over the beds at night and speak in tongues no one could understand. They
talked about eyes without heads, and vice versa, and little blue shoes that
walk across a cold empty white room, with no one in them, and a bunk bed that
creaks when it's empty, and a printing press that produces newspapers from a
city that never was. Pretty soon, by morning, they'd told all the scary
stories. When the black horses came out of the ground the next night, and the
white horses from the sea, the children greeted them with cakes and ginger ale,
and they held a big party. They also invited the pale sheet-things from the
clouds, and everyone ate hearty and had a good time. One white horse let a
little boy ride on it, and took him wherever he wanted to go. So there were no
more bad-dreams in the city of children by the sea."
I finished the piece of bread and wiped my
hands on my crossed legs. "So that's why you tried to scare me," I
said.
She
shook her head. "No. I never had a reason
for telling a story, and neither should you."
"I don't
think I'm going to tell stories any more," I said. "The folks get too upset."
"Philistines,"
the old man said, looking off across the fields.
"Listen, young man. There is nothing finer in the world than the telling of tales. Split
atoms if you wish, but splitting an infinitive—and getting away with it—is far
nobler. Lance boils if you wish, but pricking pretensions is often cleaner and
always more fun."
"Then why are Mom and
Dad so mad?"
The old man shook his head.
"An eternal mystery."
"Well,
I'm not so sure," I said. "I scared my litde
brother pretty bad and that's not nice."
"Being
scared is nothing," the old woman said. "Being bored, or ignorant—now
that's a crime."
"I
still don't know. My folks say you have to be a hundred years old. You did something to my
uncle they didn't like, and that was a long time ago. What kind of people are
you, anyway?"
The old man smiled. "Old, yes. But not a hundred."
"I
just came out here to warn you. Mom and Dad are bringing out my great aunt, and
she's no fun for anyone. You better go away." With that said, I ran back
to my bike and rode off, pumping for all I was worth. I was between a rock and
a hard place. I loved my folks but I itched to hear
more stories. Why wasn't it easier to make decisions?
That night I slept restlessly. I didn't have
any dreams, but I kept waking up with something pounding at the back of my
head, like it wanted to be let in. I scrunched my face up and pressed it back.
At
Sunday breakfast, Mom looked across the table at me and put on a kind face.
"We're going to pick up Auntie Danser this
afternoon, at the airport," she said.
My face went like warm
butter.
"You'll
come with us, won't you?" she asked. "You always did like the
airport."
"All the way from
where she lives?" I asked. "From Omaha," Dad said.
I
didn't want to go, but it was more a command than a request. I nodded and Dad
smiled at me around his pipe.
"Don't
eat too many biscuits," Mom warned him. "You're putting orfweight again."
"Ill wear it off come harvest. You
cook as if the whole crew was here, anyway."
"Auntie Danser
will straighten it all out," Mom said, her mind
elsewhere. I caught the suggestion of a grimace on Dad's face, and the pipe
wriggled as he bit down on it harder.
The airport was something out of a TV space
movie. It went on forever, with stairways going up to restaurants and big smoky
windows which looked out on the screaming jets, and crowds of people, all leaving, except for one pear-shaped figure in a cotton print
dress with fat ankles and glasses thick as headlamps. I knew her from a hundred
yards.
When we met, she shook hands with Mom, hugged
Dad as if she didn't want to, then bent down and gave me a smile. Her teeth
were yellow and even, sound as a horse's. She was the ugliest woman I'd ever
seen. She smelled of lilacs. To this day lilacs take my appetite away.
She carried a bag. Part of it was filled with
knitting, part with books and pamphlets. I always wondered why she never
carried a Bible—just Billy Grahams and Zondervans. One
pamphlet fell out and Dad
bent to pick it up.
"Keep it,
read it," Auntie Danser instructed him. "Do you good." She turned to Mom
and scrutinized
her from
the bottom of a
swimming pool. "You're looking good.
He must be treating
you right"
Dad ushered us out
the automatic
doors into the dry heat. Her
one suitcase
was light
as a
mummy and probably just as
empty. I carried it and
it didn't
even bring sweat to my brow.
Her life
was not
in clothes
and toiletry
but in the plastic knitting bag.
We drove back to the farm
in the
big white
station wagon. I leaned
my head
against the cool glass of
the rear
seat window and considered
puking. Auntie Danser, I
told myself, was like a mental
dose of castor oil. Or
like a visit to the dentist.
Even if nothing was going
to happen
her smell presaged disaster, and like
a horse
sniffing a storm, my entrails worried.
Mom looked across the
seat at me—Auntie Danser was riding up front with Dad—and
asked, "You feeling okay7 Did they give
you anything
to eat?
Anything funny?"
I said they'd given me a
piece of nut bread. Mom
went, "Oh, Lord."
"Margie, they
don't work like that. They
got other
ways." Auntie Danser leaned over
the back
seat and goggled at me. "Boy's
just worried. I know all
about it. These people and I
have had it out before."
Through those murky glasses, her flat
eyes knew me to my young,
pithy core. I didn't like
being known so well. I
could see that Auntie
Darner's life was firm and
predictable, and I made a
sudden commitment. I liked the
man and woman. They caused trouble,
but they
were the exact opposite of my
great-aunt. I felt better, and
I gave
her a
reassuring grin. "Boy will
be okay,"
she said.
"Just a colic of the
upset mind."
Michael and Barbara sat on the
front porch as the car
drove up. Somehow a
visit by Auntie Danser didn't bother them as much as
it did
me. They
didn't fawn over her but they accepted her without
complaining—even out of adult earshot. That made me think
more carefully about them. I decided I didn't love them any the less, but I
couldn't trust them, either. The world was taking sides and so far on my side I
was very lonely. I didn't count the two old people on my side, because I wasn't
sure they were—but they came a lot closer than anybody in the family.
Auntie
Danser wanted to read Billy Graham books to us after
dinner, but Dad snuck us out before Mom could gather us together—all but
Barbara, who stayed to listen. We watched the sunset from the loft of the old
wood barn, then tried to catch the little birds that
lived in the rafters. By dark and bedtime I was hungry, but not for food. I asked Dad if he'd tell me a story before bed.
"You
know your Mom doesn't approve of all that fairy-tale stuff," he said.
"Then no fairy tales. Just a story."
"I'm
out of practice, son," he confided. He looked very sad. "Your mom
says we should concentrate on things that are real and not waste our time with
make-believe. Life's hard. I may have to sell the farm, you know, and work for
that feed-mixer in Mitchell."
I went to bed and felt like crying. A whole
lot of my family had died that night, I didn't know exactly how, or why. But I
was mad.
I
didn't go to school the next day. During the night I'd had a dream, which came
so true and whole to me that I had to rush to the stand of cottonwoods and tell
the old people. I took my lunch box and walked rapidly down the road.
They
weren't there. On a piece of wire braided to the biggest tree they'd left a
note on faded brown paper. It was in a strong, feminine hand, sepia-inked,
delicately scribed with what could have been a goose-quill pen. It said:
"We're at the old Hauskopf farm. Come if you
must."
Not "Come if you can." I felt a
twinge. The Hauskopf farm, abandoned fifteen years
ago and never sold, was three miles farther down the road and left on a
deep-rutted fork. It took me an hour to get there.
The
house still looked deserted. All the white paint was flaking, leaving dead gray
wood. The windows stared. I walked up the porch steps and knocked on the heavy
oak door. For a moment I thought no one was going to answer. Then I heard what
sounded like a gust of wind, but inside the house, and the old woman opened the
door. "Hello, boy," she said. "Come for more stories?"
She
invited me in. Wildflowers were growing along the baseboards and tiny roses
peered from the brambles that covered the walls. A quail led her train of
inch-and-a-half fluffball chicks from under the
stairs, into the living room. The floor was carpeted but the flowers in the
weave seemed more than patterns. I could stare down and keep picking out detail
for minutes. "This way, boy," the woman said. She took my hand. Hers
was smooth and warm but I had the impression it was also hard as wood.
A
tree stood in the living room, growing out of the floor and sending its
branches up to support the ceiling. Rabbits and quail and a lazy-looking
brindle cat looked at me from tangles of roots. A wooden bench surrounded the
base of the tree. On the side away from us, I heard someone breathing. The old
man poked his head around, and smiled at me, lifting his long pipe in greeting.
"Hello, boy," he said.
"The
boy looks like he's ready to tell us a story, this time," the woman said.
"Of course, Meg. Have a seat, boy. Cup of
cider for you? Tea? Herb
biscuit?"
"Cider, please,"
I said.
The
old man stood and went down the hall to the kitchen. He came back with a wooden
tray and three steaming cups of mulled cider. The cinnamon tickled my nose as I
sipped.
"Now. What's your story?"
"It's about two
hawks," I said. I hesitated.
"Go on."
"Brother hawks. Never did like each
other. Fought for a strip
of land where they could hunt." "Yes?"
"Finally,
one hawk met an old, crippled bobcat that had set up a place for itself in a rockpile. The bobcat was learning itself magic so it
wouldn't have to* go out and catch dinner, which was awful hard for it now. The
hawk landed near the bobcat and told it about his brother, and how cruel he
was. So the bobcat said, 'Why not give him the land for the day? Here's what
you can do.' The bobcat told him how he could rum
into a rabbit, but a very
strong rabbit no hawk could hurt."
"Wily bobcat,"
the old man said, smiling.
"
*You mean, my brother wouldn't be able to catch me?' the hawk asked. 'Course not,' the bobcat said. 'And you can teach him a
lesson. Youll tussle with him, scare him real
bad—show him what tough animals there are on the land he wants. Then hell go
away and hunt some-wheres else.' The hawk thought
that sounded like a fine idea. So he let the bobcat turn him into a rabbit and
he hopped back to the land and waited in a patch of grass. Sure enough, his
brother's shadow passed by soon, and then he heard a swoop and saw the claws
held out. So he filled himself with being mad and jumped up and practically
bit all the tail feathers off his brother. The hawk just flapped up and rolled
over on the ground, blinking and gawking with his beak wide. 'Rabbit,' he said,
'that's not natural. Rabbits don't act that way.'
"
'Round here they do,' the hawk-rabbit said. 'This is a tough old land, and all the animals here know
the tricks of escaping from bad birds like you.' This scared the brother hawk,
and he flew away as best he could, and never came back again. The hawk-rabbit
hopped to the rockpile and stood up before the
bobcat, saying, 'It worked real fine. I thank you. Now turn me back and 111 go
hunt my land.' But the bobcat only grinned and reached out with a paw and broke
the rabbit's neck. Then he ate him, and said, 'Now the
land's mine, and no hawks can take away the easy game.' And that's how the
greed of two hawks turned their land over to a bobcat."
The
old woman looked at me with wide, baked-chest-nut eyes and smiled. "You've
got it," she said. "Just like your uncle. Hasn't he got it,
Jack?" The old man nodded and took his pipe from his mouth. "He's got
it fine. Hell make a good
one."
"Now, boy, why did you
make up that story?"
I
thought for a moment, then shook my head. "I
don't know," I said. "It just came up."
"What are you going to
do with the story?"
I didn't have an answer for
that question, either.
"Got any other stories
in you?"
I considered, then said,
"Think so."
A
car drove up outside and Mom called my name. The old woman stood and
straightened her dress. "Follow me," she said. "Go out the back
door, walk around the house. Return home with them. Tomorrow, go to school like
you're supposed to do. Next Saturday, come back and we'll talk some more."
"Son? You in there?"
I
walked out the back and came around to the front of the house. Mom and Auntie Danser waited in the station wagon. "You aren't
allowed out here. Were you in that
house?" Mom asked. I shook my head.
My
great aunt looked at me with her glassed-in flat eyes and lifted the corners of
her lips a littie. "Margie," she said,
"go have a look in the windows."
Mom
got out of the car and walked up the porch to peer through the dusty panes.
"It's empty, Sybil."
"Empty, boy,
right?"
"I don't know," I
said. "I wasn't inside."
"I
could hear you, boy," she said. "Last night. Talking
in your sleep. Rabbits and hawks don't behave that way. You know it, and
I know it. So it ain't no
good thinking about them that way, is it?"
"I don't remember
talking in my sleep," I said.
"Margie, let's go home. This boy needs
some pamphlets read into him."
Mom
got into the car and looked back at me before starting the engine. "You
ever skip school again, I'll strap you black and blue.
It's real embarrassing having the school call, and not knowing where you are.
Hear me?"
I nodded.
Everything
was quiet that week. I went to school and tried not to dream at night, and did
everything boys are supposed to do. But I didn't feel like a boy. I felt something
big inside, and no amount of Billy Grahams and Zondervans read at me could change that feeling.
I
made one mistake, though. I asked Auntie Danser why
she never read the Bible. This was in the parlor one evening after dinner and
cleaning up the dishes. "Why do you want to know, boy?" she asked.
"Well,
the Bible seems to be full of fine stories, but you don't carry it around with
you. I just wondered why."
"Bible
is a good book," she said. "The only good book.
But it's difficult. It has lots of camouflage. Sometimes—" She stopped. "Who put you up to asking that
question?"
"Nobody," I said.
"I
heard that question before, you know," she said. "Ain't
the first time I been asked. Somebody else asked me, once."
I sat in my chair, stiff as
a ham.
"Your father's brother asked me that
once. But we won't talk about him, will we?" I shook my head.
Next
Saturday I waited until it was dark and everyone was in bed The
night air was warm but I was sweating more than the warm could cause as I rode
my bike down the dirt road, lamp beam swinging back and forth. The sky was
crawling with stars, all of them looking at me. The Milky Way seemed to touch
down just beyond the road, like I might ride straight up it if I went far
enough.
I
knocked on the heavy door. There were no lights in the windows and it was late
for old folks to be up, but I knew these two didn't behave like normal people.
And I knew that just because the house looked empty from the outside didn't
mean it was empty within. The wind rose up and beat against the door, making me
shiver. Then it opened. It was dark for a moment and the breath went out of me.
Two pairs of eyes stared from the black. They seemed a lot taller this time.
"Come in, boy," Jack whispered.
Fireflies lit up the tree in the living room.
The brambles and wildflowers glowed like weeds on a sea floor. The carpet
crawled, but not to my feet. I was shivering in earnest now and my teeth
chattered.
I only saw their shadows as they sat on the
bench in front of me. "Sit," Meg said. "Listen close. You've
taken the fire and it glows bright. You're only a boy but you're just like a
pregnant woman now. For the rest of your life youll
be cursed with the worst affliction known to humans. Your skin will twitch at
night. Your eyes will see things in the dark. Beasts will come to you and beg
to be ridden. You'll never know one truth from another. You might starve,
because few will want to encourage you. And if you do make good in this world,
you might lose the gift and search forever after, in vain. Some will say the
gift isn't special. Beware them. Some will say it is special and beware them,
too. And some—"
There
was a scratching at the door. I thought it was an animal for a moment. Then it
cleared its throat. It was my great-aunt.
"Some
will say you're damned. Perhaps they're right. But you're also enthused. Carry
it lightly, and responsibly."
"Listen in there. This is Sybil Danser. You know me. Open up."
"Now
stand by the stairs, in the dark where she can't see," Jack said. I did as
I was told. One of them—I couldn't tell which—opened the door and the lights
went out in the tree, the carpet stilled, and the brambles were snuffed. Auntie
Danser stood in the doorway, outlined by star glow,
carrying her knitting bag. "Boy?" she asked. I held my breath.
"And you others,
too."
The
wind in the house seemed to answer. "I'm not too late," she said.
"Damn you, in truth, damn you to hell! You come to our towns, and you plague
us with thoughts no decent person wants to think. Not just fairy stories, but
telling the way people live, and why they shouldn't live that way! Your very
breath is tainted! Hear me?" She walked slowly into the empty living room,
feet clonking on the wooden floor. "You make them write about us, and make
others laugh at us. Question the way we think. Condemn our deepest prides. Pull
out our mistakes and amplify them beyond all truth. What right do you have to
take young children and twist their minds?"
The
wind sang through the cracks in the walls. I tried to see if Jack or Meg was
there, but only shadows remained.
"I know where you come from, don't
forget that! Out of the ground! Out of the bones of old, wicked
Indians! Shamans and pagan dances and worshiping dirt and filth! I heard about
you from the old squaws on the reservation. Frost and Spring,
they called you, signs of the turning year. Well, now you got a different name!
Death and demons, I call you, hear me?"
She seemed to jump at a sound but I couldn't
hear it. "Don't you argue with me!" she shrieked. She took her
glasses off and held out both hands. "Think I'm a weak old woman, do you?
You don't know how deep I run in these communitites! Fm the one who had them books taken off the shelves. Remember
me? Oh, you hated it— not being able to fill young minds with your pestilence.
Took them off high school shelves, and out of lists—burned them for junk!
Remember? That was me. I'm not dead yet! Boy, where are you?"
"Enchant her," I whispered to the
air. "Magic her. Make her go away. Let me live here with you."
"Is that you, boy? Come with your aunt,
now. Come with, come away!"
"Go with her," the wind told me.
"Send your children this way, years from now. But go with her."
I
felt a kind of tingly warmth and knew it was time to get home. I snuck out the
back way and came around to the front of the house. There was no car. She'd
followed me on foot all the way from the farm. I wanted to leave her there in
the old house, shouting at the dead rafters, but instead I called her name and
waited.
She came out crying. She
knew.
"You
poor, sinning boy," she said, pulling me to her lilac bosom.
Science
fiction in the 1970s has been greatly enriched by the stories of John Varley,
most of them set in a wonder-filled,
consistent future in which our solar system has been explored and colonized by
people to whom cloning, memory transplants, and sex changes are routine aspects
of everyone's life.
The ease with which one can change sexes in Varley's world has enabled him to explore the fascinating
sociological ramifications of his
"future history," but as so often happens with stories postulating
that such changes have occurred, Varley's fiction has
left many of us wondering how we got from Here to There.
"Options" is his answer to our questions; it's a convincing character
study of one woman, happily married
and the mother of three, who becomes
curious about sex changes while the practice is still new. Varley
is uncompromising in his depiction of
every problem or anomaly that might come up in such
a situation; the result is an eye-opening novelette that may well be the best
story he's yet written.
OPTIONS
John Varley
Cleo hated breakfast
Her
energy level was lowest in the morning, but not so the children's. There was
always some school crisis, something that had to be located at the last
minute, some argument that had to be settled.
This
morning it was a bowl of cereal spilled in Lilli's lap. Cleo hadn't seen it
happen; her attention had been diverted momentarily by Feather, her youngest.
And of course it had to
happen after Lilli was dressed.
"Mom, this was the last outfit I had."
"Well,
if you wouldn't use them so hard they might last more than three days, and if
you didn't. . ." She stopped before she lost her temper.
"Just take it off and go as you are."
"But Mom, nobody goes to school naked. Nobody. Give me some money and I'll stop at the store on—" Cleo raised her voice, something she tried
never to do. 188
"Child,
I know there are kids in your class whose parents can't afford to buy clothes
at all."
"All right, so the
poor kids don't—"
"That's enough. You're
late already. Get going."
Lilli stalked from the
room. Cleo heard the door slam.
Through
it all Jules was an island of calm at the other end of the table, his nose in
his newspad, sipping his second cup of coffee. Cleo
glanced at her own bacon and eggs cooling on the plate, poured herself a first cup of coffee, then had to get up and help
Paul find his other shoe.
By then Feather was wet again, so she put her
on the table and peeled off the sopping diaper.
"Hey,
listen to this," Jules said. " 'The City
Council today passed without objection an ordinance requiring—'"
"Jules, aren't you a
little behind schedule?"
He glanced at his thumbnail. "You're
right. Thanks.** He finished his coffee, folded his newspad and tucked it under his arm, bent over to kiss her,
then frowned.
"You
really ought to eat more, honey," he said, indicating the untouched eggs.
"Eating for two, you know. 'By, now."
"Good-by,"
Cleo said, through clenched teeth. "And if I hear that 'eating for two'
business again, I'll . . ." But he was gone.
She
had time to scorch her lip on the coffee, then was out
the door, hurrying to catch the train.
There were seats on the sun car, but of
course Feather was with her and the UV wasn't good for her tender skin. After a
longing look at the passengers reclining with the dark cups strapped over their
eyes—and a rueful glance down at her own pale skin—Cleo boarded the next car
and found a seat by a large man wearing a hardhat. She settled down in the
cushions, adjusted the straps on the carrier slung in front of her, and let
Feather have a nipple. She unfolded her newspad and
spread it out in her lap.
"Cute," the
man said.
"How old is he?"
"She," Cleo
said, without looking up. "Eleven
days." And five hours
and thirty-six
minutes....
She shifted in the
seat, pointedly turning her shoulder
to him, and made
a show
of activating
her newspad and scanning the day's contents.
She did
not glance
up as
the train left the underground tunnel and emerged on
the gently rolling, airless plain of
Mendeleev. There was little enough out there to interest
her, considering she made the
forty-minute commute run to
Hartman crater twice a day.
They had discussed moving
to Hartman,
but Jules
liked living in King City near
his work,
and of
course the kids would have missed
all their
school friends.
There wasn't much in
the news
storage that morning. She queried when
the red
light flashed for an update.
The pad printed some routine city
business. Three sentences into the story
she punched
the reject
key.
There was an Invasion Centennial parade listed for 1900 hours
that evening. Parades bored her,
and so
did the Centennial. If you've heard
one speech
about how liberation of Earth is
just around the corner if
we all
pull together, you've heard
them all. Semantic
content zero, nonsense quotient
high.
She glanced wistfully at
sports, noting that the J
Sector jumpball
team was doing poorly in
the intracity tournament without her. Cleo's
small stature and powerful legs
had served her well
as a
starting sprint-wing in her playing
days, but it just didn't
seem possible to make practices
any more.
As a last resort,
she called
up the
articles, digests, and analysis listings, the
newspad's Sunday Supplement and Op-Ed department.
A title
caught her eye, and she
punched it up.
Changing:
The Revolution in Sex Roles (Or, Who's on Top?)
Twenty years ago, when cheap and easy sex
changes first became available to the general public, it was seen as the
beginning of a revolution that would change the shape of human society in ways
impossible to foresee. Sexual equality is one thing, the sociologists pointed
out, but certain residual inequities—based on biological imperatives or on upbringing,
depending on your politics—have proved impossible to weed out. Changing was
going to end all that. Men and women would be able to see what it was like from
the other side of the barrier that divides humanity. How could sex roles
survive that?
Ten years later the answer is obvious.
Changing had appealed to only a tiny minority. It was soon seen as a harmless
aberration, practiced by only 1 per
cent of the population. Everyone promptly forgot about the tumbling of
barriers.
But in the intervening ten years a quieter
revolution has been building. Almost unnoticed on the broad scale because it
is an invisible phenomenon (how do you know the next woman you meet was not a
man last week?), changing has been gaining growing, matter-of-fact acceptance
among the children of the generation that rejected it. The chances are now
better than even that you know someone who has had at least one sex change. The
chances are better than one out of fifteen that you yourself have changed; if
you are under twenty, the chance is one in three.
The article went on to describe the
underground society which was springing up around changing. Changers tended to
band together, frequenting their own taprooms, staging their own social events,
remaining aloof from the larger society which many of them saw as outmoded and
irrelevant. Changers tended to marry other changers. They divided the
childbearing equally, each preferring to mother only one child. The author
viewed this tendency with alarm, since it
went against the socially approved
custom of large families.
Changers retorted that the time
for that was past, pointing out that Luna
had been
tamed long ago. They quoted statistics
proving that at present rates of expansion, Luna's population, would be in the
billions in an amazingly short
time.
There were interviews with changers, and
psychological profiles. Cleo read
that the males had originally
been the heaviest users of the
new technology,
stating sexual reasons for their
decision, and the change had
often been permanent Today, the changer
was slightly
more likely to have been bom female, and to give
social reasons, the most common of
which was pressure to bear
children. But the modem changer committed
him/herself to neither
role. The average time
between changes in an individual
was two years, and
declining.
Cleo read the whole article, then thought
about using some of the reading
references at the end. Not
that much of it was really
new to
her. She had been aware
of changing,
without thinking about it much.
The idea
had never
attracted her, and Jules
was against
it But for some reason it
had struck
a chord
this morning.
Feather had
gone to sleep. Cleo carefully
pulled the blanket down around the
child's face, then wiped milk from her
nipple. She folded her newspad and stowed it in
her purse, then rested
her chin
on her
palm and looked out the window
for the
rest of the trip.
Cleo was
chief on-site architect for the
new Food
Systems, Inc., plantation that was
going down in Hartman. As such, she was in
charge of three junior architects,
five construction bosses, and
an army
of drafters
and workers.
It was a big project, the
biggest Cleo had ever handled.
She liked her work, but the
best part had always been
being there on the
site when things were happening,
actually supervising construction
instead of running a desk.
That had been difficult
in the
last months of carrying
Feather, but at least there were
maternity pressure suits. It was even
harder now.
She had been through it all
before, with Lilli and Paul.
Everybody works. That had
been the rule for a
century, since the Invasion.
There was no labor to
spare for babysitters, so having
children meant the mother or
father must do the same job
they had been doing before,
but do
it while taking care
of the
child. In practice, it was
usually the mother, since she had
the milk.
Cleo had tried leaving Feather with
one of
the women
in the office, but each had
her own
work to do, and not
unreasonably felt Cleo should
bear the burden of her
own offspring. And Feather
never seemed to respond well
to another person. Cleo would return
from her visit to the
site to find the
child had been crying the
whole time, disrupting everyone's work. She had taken
Feather in a crawler a few times,
but it
wasn't the same.
That morning was taken
up with
a meeting.
Geo and
the other section chiefs
sat around
the big
table for three hours, discussing ways of dealing with
the cost
overrun, then broke for lunch only
to return
to the
problem in the afternoon. Cleo's back
was aching
and she
had a
headache she couldn't shake,
so Feather
chose that day to be cranky.
After ten minutes of increasingly
hostile looks, Cleo had to retire
to the
booth with Leah Farnham, the
accountant, and her three-year-old
son, Eddie. The two of
them followed the proceedings
through earphones while trying to cope
with their children, and make
their remarks through throat mikes. Half
the people
at the
conference table either had
to turn
around when she spoke, or
ignore her, and Cleo was hesitant
to force
them to that choice. As a result, she chose
her remarks
with extreme care. More often, she
said nothing.
There was something at the core
of the
world of business that refused to
adjust to children in the
board room, while appearing to make
every effort to accommodate the working mother. Cleo
brooded about it, not for the
first time.
But what did she want? Honestly, she could
not see what else could be done. It certainly wasn't fair to disrupt the entire
meeting with a crying baby. She wished she knew the answer. Those were her
friends out there, yet her feeling of alienation was intense, staring through
the glass wall that Eddie was smudging with his dirty fingers.
Luckily,
Feather was a perfect angel on the trip home. She gurgled and smiled
toothlessly at a woman who had stopped to admire her, and Cleo warmed to the
infant for the first time that day. She spent the trip playing games with her,
surrounded by the approving smiles of other passengers.
"Jules, I read the most interesting
article on the pad this morning." There, it was out, anyway. She had decided
the direct approach would be best.
"Hum?"
"It
was about changing. It's getting more and more popular."
"Is that so?" He
did not look up from his book.
Jules
and Cleo were in the habit of sitting up in bed for a few hours after the
children were asleep. They spurned the video programs that were designed to
lull workers after a hard day, prefering to use the
time to catch up on reading, or to talk if either of them had anything to say.
Over the last few years, they had read more and talked less.
Cleo reached over Feather's crib and got a
packet of dope-sticks. She flicked one to light with her thumbnail, drew on it,
and exhaled a cloud of lavender smoke. She drew her legs up under her and
leaned back against the wall.
"I just thought we
might talk about it. That's all."
Jules
put his book down. "All right. But what's to talk
about? We're not into that."
She
shrugged and picked at a cuticle. "I know. We did talk about it, way back.
I just wondered if you still felt the same, I guess." She offered him
the stick and he took a drag.
"As
far as I know, I do," he said easily. '"It's not something I spend a
great deal of thought on. What's the matter?" He looked at her
suspiciously. "You weren't having any thoughts in that direction, were
you?"
"Well,
no, not exactly. No. But you really ought to read the article. More people are
doing it. I just thought we ought to be aware of it."
"Yeah,
I've heard that," Jules conceded. He laced his hands behind his head.
"No way to tell unless you've worked with them and suddenly one day
they've got a new set of equipment." He laughed. "First time it was
sort of hard for me to get used to. Now I hardly think about it."
"Me,
either."
"They
don't cause any problem," Jules said with an air of finality. "Live
and let live."
"Yeah." Cleo smoked in silence for a time and let Jules get back to his
reading, but she still felt uncomfortable. "Jules?"
"What is it now?"
"Don't you ever wonder
what it would be like?"
He sighed and closed his
book, then turned to face her.
"I don't quite
understand you tonight," he said.
"Well, maybe I don't,
either, but we could talk—"
"Listen.
Have you thought about what it would do to the kids? I mean, even if I was
willing to seriously consider it, which I'm not."
"I
talked to Lilli about that. Just theoretically, you understand. She said she
has two teachers who change, and one of her best
friends used to be a boy. There's quite a few kids at
school who've changed. She takes it in stride."
"Yes,
but she's older. What about Paul? What would it do to his concept of himself as
a young man? HI tell you, Cleo, in the back of my mind I keep thinking this
business is a little sick. I feel it would have a bad effect on the
children."
"Not according to—"
"Cleo, Cleo. Let's not get into an
argument. Number one, I have no intention of getting a change, now or in the
future. Two, if only one of us was changed, it would sure play hell with our
sex life, wouldn't it? And three, I like you too much as you are." He
leaned over and began to kiss her.
She was more than a little annoyed, but said
nothing as his kisses became more intense. It was a damnably effective way of
shutting off debate. And she could not stay angry: she was responding in spite
of herself, easily, naturally.
It
was as good as it always was with Jules. The ceiling, so familiar, once again
became a calming blankness that absorbed her thoughts.
No,
she had no complaints about being female, no sexual dissatisfactions. It was
nothing as simple as that.
Afterward she lay on her side with her legs
drawn up, her knees together. She faced Jules, who absently stroked her leg
with one hand. Her eyes were closed, but she was not sleepy. She was savoring
the warmth she cherished so much after sex; the slipperiness between her legs,
holding his semen inside.
She felt the bed move as he
shifted his weight.
"You did make it,
didn't you?"
She opened one eye enough
to squint at him.
"Of
course I did. I always do. You know I never have any trouble in that
direction."
He relaxed back onto the pillow. "I'm
sorry for . . . well, for springing on you like that."
"It's okay. It was
nice."
"I
had just thought you might have been . . . faking it. I'm not sure why I would
think that."
She
opened the other eye and patted him gently on the cheek.
"Jules, I'd never be that protective of
your poor ego. If you don't satisfy me, I promise you'll be the second to
know."
He chuckled,
then turned on
his side
to kiss
her.
"Good night,
babe.''
"G'night."
She loved him. He loved her.
Their sex life was good—
with the slight mental
reservation that he always seemed
to initiate it—and she
was happy
with her body.
So why
was she
still awake three hours later?
Shopping took
a few
hours on the vidphone Saturday morning. Cleo bought the household
necessities for delivery that afternoon,
then left the house to
do the
shopping she fancied: going from
store to store, looking at
things she didn't really
need.
Feather was with Jules on Saturdays.
She savored
a quiet lunch alone at a
table in the park plaza, then found herself walking down Brazil Avenue
in the
heart of the medical district. On
impulse, she stepped into the
New Heredity Body Salon.
It was only after she was
inside that she admitted to
herself she had spent
most of the morning arranging
for the impulse.
She was on edge as she
was taken
down a hallway to a
consulting room, and had
to force
a smile
for the
handsome young man behind the
desk. She sat, put her
packages on the floor, and
folded her hands in her
lap. He asked what he could
do for
her.
"I'm not actually here for any
work," she said. "I wanted to look into the
costs, and maybe learn a
little more about the procedures involved in changing."
He nodded
understandingly, and got
up.
"There's no charge for the initial
consultation," he said.
"We're happy to answer
your questions. By the way,
I'm Marion, spelled with an 'O'
this month." He smiled at
her and motioned for her to
follow him. He stood her
in front
of a full-length mirror mounted on
the wall.
"I know it's hard to make
that first step. It was
hard for me, and I do
it for
a living.
So we've
arranged this
demonstration that won't cost you anything, either in money or worry. It's a
non-threatening way to see some of what it's all about, but it might startle
you a little, so be prepared." He touched a button in the wall beside the
mirror, and Cleo saw her clothes fade away. She realized it was not really a muror, but a holographic screen linked to a computer.
The computer introduced changes in the image. In thirty seconds she
faced a male stranger. There was no doubt the face was her own, but it was more
angular, perhaps a little larger in its underlying bony structure. The skin on
the stranger's jaw was rough, as if it needed shaving.
The rest of the body as she might expect,
though overly muscled for her tastes. She did little more than glance at the
penis; somehow that didn't seem to matter so much. She spent more time studying
the hair on the chest, the tiny nipples, and the ridges that had appeared on
the hands and feet. The image mimicked her every movement.
"Why all the brawn?" she asked
Marion. "If you're trying to sell me on this, you've taken the wrong
approach."
Marion punched some more
buttons. "I didn't choose this image," he explained. "The
computer takes what it sees, and extrapolates. You're more muscular than the
average woman. You probably exercise. This is what a comparable amount of
training would have produced with male hormones to fix nitrogen in the muscles.
But we're not bound by that.
The image lost about eight kilos of mass,
mostly in the shoulders and thighs. Cleo felt a little more comfortable, but
still missed the smoothness she was accustomed to seeing in her mirror.
She turned from the display and went back to
her chair. Marion sat across from her and folded his hands on the desk.
"Basically,
what we do is produce a cloned body from one of your own cells. Through a process
called Y-Recombinant Viral Substitution we remove one of your X chromosomes and
replace it with a Y.
"The
clone is forced to maturity in the usual way, which takes about six months.
After that, it's just a simple non-rejection-hazard brain transplant. You walk
in as a
woman, and leave an hour
later as a man. Easy as that."
Cleo
said nothing, wondering again what she was doing here.
"From
there we can modify the body. We can make you taller or shorter,
rearrange your face, virtually anything you like." He raised his
eyebrows, then smiled ruefully and spread his hands.
"All
right, Ms. King," he said. "I'm not trying to pressure you. You'll
need to think about it. In the meantime, there's a process that would cost you
very little, and might be just the thing to let you test the waters. Am I right
in thinking your husband opposes this?"
She nodded, and he looked
sympathetic.
"Not
uncommon, not uncommon at all," he assured her. "It brings out
castration fears in men who didn't even suspect they had them. Of course, we do
nothing of the sort. His male body would be kept in a tank, ready for him
to move back whenever he wanted to."
Cleo
shifted in her chair. "What was this process you were talking about?"
"Just a bit of minor surgery. It can be done in ten minutes, and corrected
in the same time before you even leave the office if you find you don't care
for it. It's a good way to get husbands thinking about changing; sort of a signal you
can send him. You've heard of the andro-genous look.
It's in all the fashion tapes. Many women, especially if they have large
breasts like you do, find it an interesting change."
"You say it's cheap? And reversible?"
"All
our processes are reversible. Changing the size or shape of breasts is our most
common body operation."
Cleo sat on the examining table while the
attendant gave her a quick physical.
"I
don't know if Marion realized you're nursing," the woman said. "Are
you sure this is what you want?"
How
the hell should I know? Cleo thought. She wished the feeling of confusion and
uncertainty would pass.
"Just do it"
Jules hated it.
He
didn't yell or slam doors or storm out of the house; that had never been his
style. He voiced his objections coldly and quietly at the dinner table, after
saying practically nothing since she walked in the door.
"I
just would like to know why you thought you should do this without even talking
to me about it. I don't demand that you ask me,
just discuss it with me."
Cleo
felt miserable, but was determined not to let it show. She held Feather in .her
arm, the botde in her other hand, and ignored the
food cooling on her plate. She was hungry but at least she was not eating for
two.
"Jules,
I'd ask you before I rearranged the furniture. We both own this apartment. I'd
ask you before I put Lilli or Paul in another school. We share the responsibility
for their upbringing. But I don't ask you when I put on lipstick or cut my
hair. It's my body."
"I like it, Mom,"
Lilli said. "You look like me."
Cleo smiled at her, reached
over and tousled her hair.
"What
do you like?" Paul asked, around a mouthful of food.
"See?" said Cleo.
"It's not that important."
"I
don't see how you can say that. And I said you didn't have to ask me. I just
would . . . you should have ... I
should have known."
"It was an impulse,
Jules."
"An impulse. An impulse." For the first time, he raised his voice, and Cleo knew how upset he
really was. Lilli and Paul fell silent, and even Feather squirmed.
But Cleo liked it. Oh, not forever and ever:
as an interesting change. It gave her a feeling of freedom to be that much in
control of her body, to be able to decide how large she wished her breasts to
be. Did it have anything to do with changing? She really didn't think so. She
didn't feel the least bit like a man.
And
what was a breast, anyway? It was anything from a nipple sitting flush with the
rib cage to a mammoth hunk of fat and milk gland. Cleo realized Jules was
suffering from the more-is-better syndrome, thinking of Cleo's action as the
removal of her breasts, as if they had to be large to exist at all. What she
had actually done was reduce their size.
No
more was said at the table, but Cleo knew it was for the children's sake. As
soon as they got into bed, she could feel the tension again.
"I
can't understand why you did it now. What
about Feather?"
"What about her?"
"Well, do you expect
me to nurse her?"
Cleo
finally got angry. "Damn it, that's exactly what
I expect you to do. Don't tell me you don't know what I'm talking about. You
think it's all fun and games, having to carry a child
around all day because she needs the milk in your breasts?"
"You never complained
before."
"I
. . ." She stopped. He was right, of course. It amazed even Cleo that this
had all come up so suddenly, but here it was, and she had to deal with it. They had to deal with it.
"That's
because it isn't an awful thing. It's great to nourish another human being at
your breast. I loved every minute of it with Lilli. Sometimes it was a
headache, having her there all the time, but it was worth it. The same with Paul." She sighed. "The
same with Feather, too, most of the time. You hardly think about
it."
"Then
why the revolt now? With no warning?"
"It's
not a revolt, honey. Do you see it as that? I just ... I'd like you to try it. Take Feather for a few months.
Take
her to work like I do. Then you'd . . . you'd see a little of what I go
through." She rolled on her side and playfully punched his arm, trying to
lighten it in some way. "You might even like it. It feels real good."
He snorted. "I'd feel silly."
She
jumped from the bed and paced toward the living room, then turned, more angry than ever. "Silly? Nursing is silly? Breasts
are silly? Then why the hell do you wonder why I did what I did?"
"Being
a man is what makes it silly," he retorted.
"It doesn't look right. I almost laugh every time I see a man with breasts.
The hormones mess up your system, I heard, and—"
"That's not true! Not any more. You
can lactate—"
"—and besides, it's my body, as you pointed out. Ill
do with it what pleases me."
She
sat on the edge of the bed with her back to him. He reached out and stroked
her, but she moved away.
"All
right," she said. "I was just suggesting it. I thought you might like
to try it. I'm not going to nurse her. She goes on the
bottle from now on."
"If that's the way it
has to be."
"It
is. I want you to start taking Feather to work with you. Since she's going to
be a bottle baby, it hardly matters which of us cares for her. I think you owe
it to me, since I carried the burden alone with LiTli
and Paul."
"All
right."
She
got into bed and pulled the covers up around her, her back to him. She didn't
want him to see how close she was to tears.
But
the feeling passed. The tension drained from her, and she felt good. She
thought she had won a victory, and it was worth the cost. Jules would not stay
angry at her.
She
fell asleep easily, but woke up several times during the night as Jules tossed
and turned.
He did adjust to it. It was impossible for
him to say so all at once, but after a week without love-making he admitted
grudgingly that she looked good. He began to touch her in the mornings and when
they kissed after getting home from work. Jules had always admired her slim
muscularity, her athlete's arms and legs. The slim chest looked so natural on her, it fit the rest of her so well that he began to wonder
what all the fuss had been about.
One
night while they were clearing the dinner dishes, Jules touched her nipples for
the first time in a week. He asked her if it felt any different.
"There is very little feeling anywhere
but the nipples," she pointed out, "no matter how big a woman is. You
know that"
"Yeah, I guess I do."
She
knew they would make love that night and determined it would be on her terms.
She
spent a long time in the bathroom, letting him get settled with his book, then came out and took it away. She got on
top of him and pressed close, kissing and tickling his
nipples with her fingers.
She
was aggressive and insistent. At first he seemed reluctant, but soon he was responding as she pessed her hps hard against his,
forcing his head back into the pillow.
"I love
you," he said, and raised his head to kiss her nose. "Are you
ready?"
"I'm
ready." He put his arms around her and held her close, then rolled over
and hovered above her.
"Jules. Jules. Stop it." She squirmed onto her side, her legs held firmly
together.
"What's wrong?"
"I want to be on top
tonight."
"Oh.
All right." He turned over again and reclined passively
as she repositioned herself. Her heart was pounding. There had been no reason
to think he would object—they had made love in any and all positions, but
basically the exotic ones were a change of pace from the "natural"
one with her on her back. Tonight she had wanted to feel in control.
"Open your legs, darling," she
said, with a smile. He did, but didn't return the smile. She raised herself on
her hands and knees and prepared for the tricky insertion.
"Cleo."
"What
is it? This will take a little effort, but I think I can make it worth your
while, so if you'd just—"
"Cleo, what the hell
is the purpose of this?"
She
stopped dead and let her head sag between her shoulders.
"What's
the matter? Are you feeling silly with your feet in the air?"
"Maybe. Is that what you wanted?"
"Jules,
humiliating you was the farthest thing from my mind."
"Then
what was on your mind? It's not like we've never done
it this way before. It's—"
"Only when you chose to do so. It's always your decision."
"It's not degrading to
be on the bottom."
"Then why were you feeling
silly?"
He
didn't answer, and she wearily lifted herself away from him, sitting on her
knees at his feet. She waited, but he didn't seem to want to talk about it.
"I've
never complained about that position," she ventured. "I don't have any complaints about it. It works pretty well." Still he said
nothing. "All right. I wanted to see what it
looked like from up there. I was tired of looking at the ceiling. I was
curious."
"And
that's why I felt silly. I never minded you being on top before, have I? But before . . . well,
it's never been in the context of the last couple of weeks. I know what's on your mind."
"And
you feel threatened by it. By the fact that I'm curious about changing, that I
want to know what it's like to take charge. You know I can't—and wouldn't if I
could—force a change on you."
"But your curiosity is
wrecking our marriage."
She felt like crying again,
but didn't let it show except for a trembling of the lower lip. She didn't want
him to try and soothe her; that was all too likely to work, and she would find
herself on her back with her legs in the air. She looked down at the bed and
nodded slowly, then got up. She went to the mirror and took the brush, began
running it through her hair.
"What are you doing
now? Can't we talk about this?"
"I
don't feel much like talking right now." She leaned forward and examined
her face as she brushed, then dabbed at the corners of her eyes with a tissue.
"I'm going out. I'm still curious."
He said nothing as she
started for the door.
"I may be a little
late."
The place was called Oophyte.
The capital "O" had a plus sign hanging from it, and an arrow in the
upper right side. The sign was built so that the symbols revolved; one moment
the plus was inside and the arrow out, the next moment the reverse.
Cleo moved in a pleasant haze across the
crowded dance floor, pausing now and then to draw on her dope-stick. The air in
the room was thick with lavender smoke, illuminated by flashing blue lights.
She danced when the mood took her. The music was so loud that she didn't have
to think about it; the noise gripped her bones and animated her arms and legs.
She glided through a forest of naked skin, feeling the occasional roughness of
a paper suit and, rarely, expensive cotton clothing. It was like moving
underwater, like wading through molasses.
She
saw him across the floor and began moving in his direction. He took no notice
of her for some time, though she danced right in front of him. Few of the
dancers had partners in more than the transitory sense. Some were celebrating
life, others were displaying themselves, but all were looking for partners, so
eventually he realized she had been there an unusual length of time. He was
easily as stoned as she was.
She told him what she
wanted.
"Sure. Where do you
want to go? Your place?"
She
took him down the hall in back and touched her credit bracelet to the lock on
one of the doors. The room was simple, but clean.
He looked a lot like her phantom twin in the
mirror, she noted with one part of her mind. It was probably why she had chosen
him. She embraced him and lowered him gently to the bed.
"Do you want to exchange names?" he
asked. The grin on his face kept getting sillier as she toyed with him.
"I don't care. Mosdy I think I want to use you."
"Use
away. My
name's Saffron."
"I'm Cleopatra. Would
you get on your back, please?"
He
did, and they did. It was hot in the little room, but neither of them minded
it. It was healthy exertion, the physical sensations were great, and when Cleo
was through she had learned nothing. She collapsed on top of him. He did not
seem surprised when tears began falling on his shoulder.
"I'm
sorry," she said, sitting up and getting ready to leave.
"Don't go," he said, putting his
hand on her shoulder.. "Now that you've got that
out of your system, maybe we can make love."
She
didn't want to smile, but she had to, then she was crying harder, putting her
face to bis chest and
feeling the warmth of his arms around her and the hair tickling her nose. She
realized what she was doing, and tried to pull away.
"For God's sake, don't be ashamed that
you need someone to cry on."
"It's
weak. I... I just didn't want to be
weak." "We're all weak."
She
gave up struggling and nestled there until the tears stopped. She sniffed,
wiped her nose, and faced him.
"What's
it like? Can you tell me?" She was about to explain what she meant, but he
seemed to understand.
"It's like ... nothing special."
"You were born female, weren't you? I
mean, you . . . I thought I might be able to tell."
"It's
no longer important how I was born. I've been both. It's still me, on the
inside. You understand?"
"I'm not sure I
do."
They
were quiet for a long time. Cleo thought of a thousand things to say, questions to ask, but
could do nothing.
"You've been coming to a decision,
haven't you?" he said, at last. "Are you any closer after
tonight?" "I'm not sure."
"It's
not going to solve any problems, you know. It might even create some."
She
pulled away from him and got up. She shook her hair and wished for a comb.
"Thank you,
Cleopatra," he said.
"Oh.
Uh, thank you . . ." She had forgotten his name. She smiled again to cover
her embarrassment, and shut the door behind her.
"Hello?"
"Yes.
This is Cleopatra King. I had a consultation with one of your staff. I believe
it was ten days ago."
"Yes,
Ms. King. I have your file. What can I do for you?"
She
took a deep breath. "I want you to start the clone. I left a tissue
sample."
"Very well, Ms. King. Did you have any instructions concerning the chromosone
donor?"
"Do you need
consent?"
"Not as long as
there's a sample in the bank."
"Use
my husband, Jules La Rhin. Security number
4454390."
"Very
good.
We'll be in contact with you."
Cleo
hung up the phone and rested her forehead against the cool metal. She should
never get this stoned, she realized. What had she done?
But it was not final. It would be six months
before she had to decide if she would ever use the clone. Damn Jules. Why did
he have to make such a big thing of it?
Jules did not make a big thing of it when she told him what she had done. He took it
quietly and calmly, as if he had been expecting it.
"You know I won't
follow you in this?"
"I
know you feel that way. I'm interested to see if you change your mind."
"Don't count on it. I
want to see if you change yours."
"I
haven't made
up my mind. But I'm
giving myself the option."
"All
I ask is that you bear in mind what this could do to our relationship. I love
you, Cleo. I don't think that will ever change. But if you walk into this house
as a man, I don't think ITl be able to see you as the
person I've always loved."
"You could if you were
a woman."
"But I won't be."
"And
111 be the same person I always was." But would she be? What the hell
was wrong? What had Jules ever done that he should
deserve this? She made up her mind never to go through with it, and they made
love that night and it was very, very good.
But
somehow she never got around to calling the vivarium
and telling them to abort the clone. She made the decision not to go through
with it a dozen times over the next six months, and never had the clone
destroyed.
Their
relationship in bed became uneasy as time passed. At first, it was good. Jules
made no objections when she initiated sex, and was willing to do it any way she
preferred. Once that was accomplished she no longer cared whether she was on
top or underneath. The important thing had been having the option of making
love when she wanted to, the way she wanted to.
"That's
what this is all about," she told him one night, in a moment of clarity
when everything seemed to make sense except his refusal to see things from her
side. "It's the option I want.
I'm not
unhappy being female. I don't
like the feeling that
there's anything I can't be. I want to know how much
of me
is hormones,
how much
is genetics,
how much
is upbringing.
I want
to know
if I
feel more secure being aggressive as a man, because
I don't,
most of the time,
as a
woman. Or do men feel
the same
insecurities I feel? Would
Cleo the man feel free
to cry?
I don't know any of those
things."
"But you said it yourself. You'll
still be the same person."
They began to drift apart in
small ways. A few weeks
after her outing to
Oophyte she returned
home one Sunday afternoon to find
him in
bed with
a woman.
It was not like him to
do it
like that; their custom had
been to bring lovers home and
introduce them, to keep it
friendly and open. Cleo
was amused,
because she saw it as his
way of
getting back at her for
her trip
to the
encounter bar.
So she was the perfect hostess,
joining them in bed, which seemed to disconcert Jules. The woman's name
was Harriet, and Cleo found herself
liking her. She was a
changer—something Jules had not
known or he certainly would not have chosen her
to make
Cleo feel bad. Harriet was
uncomfortable when she realized why
she was
there. Cleo managed to
put her
at ease
by making
love to her, something that surprised
Cleo a lirde
and Jules
considerably, since she
had never
done it before.
Cleo enjoyed it; she
found Harriet's smooth body to
be a whole new world. And
she felt
she had
neatly turned the tables on Jules,
making him confront once more
the idea of his wife in
the man's
role.
The worst
part was the children. They
had discussed
the possible impending change
with Lilli and Paul.
Lilli could not see what all
the fuss
was about;
it was
a part of her life, something
that was all around her
which she took for granted as
something she herself would do
when she was old
enough. But when she began
picking up the
concern from her father, she drew subtly closer to her mother. Cleo was
tremendously relieved. She didn't think she could have held to it in the face
of Lilli's displeasure. Lilli was her first born, and though she hated to admit
it and did her best not to play favorites, her darling. She had taken a year's
leave from her job at appalling expense to the household budget so she could
devote all her time to her infant daughter. She often wished she could somehow
return to those simpler days, when motherhood had been her whole life.
Feather,
of course, was not consulted. Jules had assumed the responsibility for her
nurture without complaint, and seemed to be enjoying it. It was fine with
Cleo, though it maddened her that he was so willing about taking over the
mothering role without being willing to try it as a female. Cleo loved Feather
as much as the other two, but sometimes had trouble recalling why they had
decided to have her. She felt she had gotten the procreation impulse out of
her system with Paul, and yet there Feather was.
Paul was the problem.
Things could get tense when Paul expressed
doubts about how he would feel if his mother were to become a man. Jules's face
would darken and he might not speak for days. When he did speak, often in the middle
of the night when neither of them could sleep, it would be in a verbal explosion that was as close to
violence as she had ever seen him.
It frightened her, because she was by no
means sure of herself when it came to Paul. Would it hurt him? Jules spoke of
gender identity crises, of the need for stable role models, and finally, in
naked honesty, of the fear that his son would grow up to be somehow less than a
man.
Cleo
didn't know, but cried herself to sleep over it many nights. They had read
articles about it and found that psychologists were divided. Traditionalists
made much of the importance of sex roles, while changers felt sex roles were
important only to those who were trapped in them; with the breaking of the
sexual barrier, the concept of roles vanished.
The
day finally came when the clone body was ready. Cleo still did not know what
she should do.
"Are you feeling
comfortable now? Just nod if you can't talk." "Wha..."
"Relax.
It's all over. You'll be feeling like walking in a few minutes. We'll have
someone take you home. You may feel drunk for a while, but there's
no drugs in your system."
"Wha'...
happen?"
"It's over. Just
relax."
Cleo did, curling up in a ball. Eventually he
began to laugh.
Drunk was not the word for it. He sprawled on
the bed, trying on pronouns for size. It was all so funny. He was on his back with his hands in his lap. He giggled and rolled back and forth,
over and over, fell on the floor in hysterics.
He raised his head.
"Is that you,
Jules?"
"Yes,
it's me." He helped Cleo back onto the bed, then
sat on the edge, not too near, but not unreachably far away. "How do you
feel?"
He
snorted. "Drunker 'n a skunk." He narrowed
his eyes, forced them to focus on Jules. "You must call me Leo now. Cleo
is a woman's name. You shouldn't have called me Cleo then."
"All
right. I
didn't call you Cleo, though."
"You didn't? Are you sure?"
"I'm very sure it's
something I wouldn't have said."
"Oh.
Okay." He lifted his head and looked confused for a moment. "You know
what? I'm gonna be sick."
Leo felt much better an hour later. He sat in
the living room with Jules, both of them on the big pillows that were the only
furniture.
They
spoke of inconsequential matters for a time, punctuated by long silences. Leo
was no more used to the sound of his new voice than Jules was.
"Well,"
Jules said, finally, slapping his hands on his knees and standing up. "I
really don't know what your plans are from here. Did you want to go out
tonight? Find a woman, see what it's like?"
Leo
shook his head. "I tried that out as soon as I got home." he said.
"The male orgasm, I mean."
"What was it
like?"
He laughed. "Certainly
you know that by now."
"No, I meant, after
being a woman—"
"I
know what you mean." He shrugged. "The erection is interesting. So
much larger than what I'm used to. Otherwise . . ." He frowned for a
moment. "A lot the same. Some different. More localized. Messier."
"Urn." Jules looked away, studying the electric fireplace as if seeing it for
the first time. "Had you planned to move out? It isn't necessary, you
know. We could move people around. I can go in with Paul, or we could move him
in with me in ... in our old room.
You could have his." He turned away from Leo, and put his hand to his
face.
Leo
ached to get up and comfort him, but felt it would be exactly the wrong thing
to do. He let Jules get himself under control.
"If
you'll have me, I'd like to continue sleeping with you."
Jules said nothing, and
didn't turn around.
"Jules,
I'm perfecdy willing to do whatever will make you
most comfortable. There doesn't have to be any sex. Or I'd be happy to do what
I used to do when I was in late pregnancy. You wouldn't have to do anything at
all."
"No sex," he said.
"Fine, fine. Jules, I'm getting awfully tired. Are you
ready to sleep?"
There was a long pause, then he turned and nodded.
They lay quietly, side by side, not touching.
The lights were out; Leo could barely see the outline of Jules's body.
After a long time, Jules
turned on his side.
"Cleo, are you in
there? Do you still love me?"
"I'm here," she
said. "I love you. I always will."
Jules
jumped when Leo touched him, but made no objection. He began to cry, and Leo
held him close. They fell asleep in each other's arms.
The Oophyte was as
full and noisy as ever. It gave Leo a headache.
He
did not like the place any more than Cleo had, but it was the only place he
knew to find sex partners quickly and easily, with no emotional entanglements
and no long process of seduction. Everyone there was available; all one needed
to do was ask. They used each other for sexual calisthenics just one step
removed from masturbation, cheerfully admitted the fact, and took the position
that if you didn't approve, what were you doing there? There were plenty of
other places for romance and relationships.
Leo
didn't normally approve of it—not for himself, though
he cared not at all what other people did for amusement. He preferred to know
someone he bedded.
But
he was here tonight to learn. He felt he needed the practice. He did not buy
the argument that he would know just what to do because he had been a woman and
knew what they liked. He needed to know how people reacted to him as a male.
Things
went well. He approached three women and was accepted each time. The first was
a mess—so thafs what they meant by too soon!—and she was rather indignant about it
until he explained his situation. After that she was helpful and supportive.
He was about to leave when he was
propositioned by a woman who said her name was Lynx. He was tired, but decided
to go with her.
Ten
frustrating minutes later she sat up and moved away from him. "What are
you here for, if that's all the interest you can
muster? And don't tell me it's my fault."
"I'm
sorry," he said. "I forgot. T thought I could . . . well, I didn't
realize I had
to be really interested before I could perform."
"Perform? That's a
funny wav to out it."
"I'm
sorry." He told her what the problem was, how many times he had made love
in the last two hours. She sat on the edge of the bed and ran her hands through
her hair, frustrated and irritable.
"Well,
it's not the end of the world. There's plenty more out there. But you could ewe
a girl a warning. You didn't have to say yes back there."
"I know. It's my fault. I'll have to
learn to nidge my capacity, I guess. It's just that
I'm used to being able
to, even if I'm not
particularly—"
Lynx laughed. "What am I savin it? Listen to me. Honey, I used to have the same problem myself. Weeks of not getting it up. And I know it hurts."
"Well,"
Leo said. "I know what you're feeling like, too. It's no fun."
Lynx shrugged. "In
other circumstances, yeah. But like I said, the woods are full of 'em tonight. I won't have any problem." She put her
hand on his cheek and pouted at him. "Hey, I didn't hurt your poor male ego, did I?"
Leo thought about it, probed around for
bruises, and found none.
"No."
She laughed. "I didn't think so. Because you don't have one. Enjoy it, Leo. A male ego is
something that has to be grown carefully, when you're young. People have to
keep pointing out what you have to do to be a man, so you can recognize failure
when you can't 'perform.' How come you used that word?"
"I don't know. I guess I was
just thinking of it that way."
"Trying to be a quote man unquote. Leo, you don't have enough emotional
investment in it. And you're lucky. It
took me over a year to shake mine. Don't be a man. Be a male human, instead.
The switchover's a lot easier that way."
"I'm not sure what you
mean."
She
patted his knee. "Trust me. Do you see me getting all upset because I
wasn't sexy enough to turn you on, or some such garbage? No. I wasn't brought
up to worry that way. But reverse it. If I'd done to you what you just did to
me, wouldn't something like that have occurred to you?"
"I
think it would Though I've always been pretty secure
in that area."
"The
most secure of us are whimpering children beneath it, at least some of the
time. You understand that I got upset because you said yes when you weren't
ready? And that's all
I was upset about? It was
impolite, Leo. A male human shouldn't do that to a female human. With a man and
a woman, it's different. The poor fellow's got a lot of junk in his head, and
so does the woman, so they shouldn't be held responsible for the tricks their
egos play on them."
Leo
laughed. "I don't know if you're making sense at all. But I like the sound
of it. 'Male human.' Maybe I'll see the difference one
day."
Some of the expected
problems never developed.
Paul
barely noticed the change. Leo had prepared himself for a traumatic struggle
with his son, and it never came. If it changed Paul's life at all, it was in
the fact that he could now refer to his maternal parent as Leo instead of
mother.
Strangely
enough, it was Lilli who had the most trouble at first. Leo was hurt by it,
tried not to show it, and did everything he could to let her adjust gradually.
Finally she came to him one day about a week after the change. She said she had
been silly, and wanted to know if she could get a change, too, since one of her
best friends was getting one. Leo talked her into remaining female until after
the onset of puberty. He told her he thought she might enjoy it.
Leo
and Jules circled each other like two tigers in a cage, unsure if a fight was necessary but ready
to start clawing out eyes if it came to it. Leo didn't like the analogy; if he
had still been a female tiger, he would have felt sure of the outcome. But he
had no wish to engage in a dominance struggle with Jules.
They
shared an apartment, a family, and a bed. They were elaborately polite, but
touched each other only rarely, and Leo always felt he should apologize when
they did. Jules would not meet his eyes; their gazes would touch, then rebound
like two cork balls with identical static charges.
But
eventually Jules accepted Leo. He was "that guy who's always around"
in Jules's mind. Leo didn't care for that, but saw it as progress. In a few
more days Jules began to discover that he liked Leo. They began to share
things, to talk more. The subject of their previous relationshp
was taboo for a while. It was as if Jules wanted to know Leo from scratch, not
acknowledging there had ever been a Cleo who had once been his wife.
It
was that simple; Leo would not let it be. Jules sometimes sounded like he was mourning
the passing of a loved one when he hesitantly began talking about the hurt inside him. He
was able to talk freely to Leo, and it was in a slightly different manner from
the way he had talked to Cleo. He poured out his soul. It was astonishing to Leo
that there were so many bruises on it, so many defenses and insecurities. There
was buried hostility which Jules had never felt free to tell a woman.
Leo
let him go on, but when Jules started a sentence with, "I could never tell
this to Cleo," or, "Now that she's gone," Leo would go to him,
take his hand, and force him to look.
"I'm
Cleo," he would say. "I'm right here, and I love you."
They
started doing things together. Jules took him to places Cleo had never been.
They went out drinking together and had a wonderful time getting sloshed.
Before, it had always been dinner with a few drinks or dopesticks,
then a show or concert. Now they might come home at 0200 harmonizing loud enough to get thrown in jail. Jules admitted he hadn't
had so much fun since his college days.
Socializing
was a problem. Few of their old friends were changers, and neither of them
wanted to face the complications of going to a party as a couple. They couldn't
make friends among changers, because Jules correctly saw he would be seen as
an outsider.
So they saw a lot of men. Leo had thought he
knew all of Jules's close friends, but found he had been wrong. He saw a side
of Jules he had never seen before: more relaxed in ways, some of his
guardedness gone, but with other defenses in place. Leo sometimes felt like a spy, looking in on a stratum of society he had always known" was
there, but he had never been able to penetrate. If Cleo had walked into the group its structure
would have changed subtly; she would have created a new milieu by her presence,
like light destroying the atom it was meant to observe.
After
his initial outing to the Oophyte, Leo remained
celibate for a long time. He did not want to have sex casually; he wanted to
love Jules. As far as he knew, Jules was abstaining, too.
But they found an acceptable alternative in
double-dating. They shopped around together for a while, taking out different
women and having a lot of fun without getting into sex, until each settled on a
woman he could have a relationship with. Jules was with Diane, a woman he had
known at work for many years. Leo went out with Harriet.
The
four of them had great times together. Leo loved being a pal to Jules, but
would not let it remain simply that. He took to reminding Jules that he could
do this with Cleo, too. What Leo wanted to emphasize was that he could be a
companion, a buddy, a confidant no matter which sex he was. He wanted to
combine the best of being a woman
and being a man, be both things for Jules, fulfill all
his needs. But it hurt to think that Jules would not do the same for him.
"Well, hello, Leo. I
didn't expect to see you today."
"Can
I come in, Harriet?"
She held the door open for
him.
"Can
I get you anything? Oh, yeah, before you go any further, that 'Harriet'
business is finished. I changed my name today. It's Joule from now on. That's
spelled j-o-u-l-e."
"Okay,
Joule. Nothing for me, thanks." He sat on her couch.
Leo
was not surprised at the new name. Changers had a tendency to get away from "name" names. Some did as Cleo had
done by choosing a gender
equivalent or a similar sound. Others ignored gender connotations and used the
one they had always used. But most eventually chose a neutral word, according to personal preference.
"Jules, Julia,"
he muttered.
"What
was that?" Joule's brow wrinkled slightly. "Did you come here for
mothering? Things going badly?"
Leo slumped down and
contemplated his folded hands.
"I
don't know. I guess I'm depressed. How long has it been now? Five months? I've
learned a lot, but I'm not sure just what it is. I feel like I've grown. I see
the world . . . well, I see things differently, yes.
But Fm still basically the same person."
"In
the sense that you're the same person at thirty-three as you were at ten?"
Leo squirmed. "Okay. Yeah,
I've changed. But it's not any kind of reversal. Nothing turned topsy-turvy.
It's an expansion. It's not a new viewpoint. It's like filling something up,
moving out into unused spaces. Becoming . . ." His hands groped in the
air, then fell back into his lap. "It's like a completion."
Joule
smiled. "And you're disappointed? What more could you ask?"
Leo
didn't want to get into that just yet. "Listen to this, and see if you
agree. I always saw male and female— whatever that is, and I don't know if the two
really exist other than physically and don't think
it's important anyway. ... I saw
those qualities as separate. Later, I thought of them like Siamese twins in
everybody's head. But the twins were visually fighting, trying to cut each
other off. One would beat the other down, maim it, throw it in a cell, and
never feed it, but they were always connected and the beaten-down one would
make the winner pay for the victory.
"So
I wanted to try and patch things up between them. I thought I'd just introduce them
to each other and try to referee, but they got along a lot better than I
expected. In fact, they turned into one whole person, and found they could be
very happy together. I can't tell them apart any more. Does that make any
sense?"
Joule moved over to sit
beside him.
"It's
a good analogy, in its way. I feel something like that, but I don't think about
it any more. So what's the problem? You just told me
you feel whole now."
Leo's
face contorted. "Yes. I do. And if I am, what does that make Jules?"
He began to cry, and Joule let him get it out, just holding his hand. She
thought he'd better face it alone, this time. When he had calmed down, she
began to speak quietly.
"Leo,
Jules is happy as he is. I think he could be much happier, but there's no way
for us to show him that without having him do something that he fears so much.
It's possible that he will do it someday, after more time to get used to it.
And it's possible that he'll hate it and run screaming back
to his
manhood. Sometimes the maimed twin can't be rehabilitated."
She sighed
heavily, and got up to
pace the room.
"There's going to be a lot
of this
in the
coming years," she said. "A lot of
broken hearts. We're not really
very much like them, you know.
We get
along better. We're not angels, but
we may
be the
most civilized, considerate group
the race
has yet
produced. There are fools and
bastards among us, just
like the one-sexers,
but I
think we tend to be a
little less foolish, and a
little less cruel. I think changing
is here
to stay.
"And what you've got to realize
is that
you're lucky. And so is Jules.
It could
have been much worse. I
know of several broken homes just
among my own friends. There's going to be many
more before society has assimilated
this. But your love for
Jules and his for you
has held
you together. He's made
a tremendous
adjustment, maybe as big as the
one you
made. He likes
you. In either sex. Okay, so you don't
make love to him as
Leo. You may never reach that
point."
"We did.
Last night." Leo shifted on
the couch.
"I. . . I got mad.
I told
him if
he wanted
to see
Cleo, he had to learn to
relate to me, because I'm
me, dammit."
"I think
that might have been a
mistake."
Leo looked
away from her. "I'm starting
to think
so, too."
"But I think the
two of
you can
patch it up, if there's
any damage. You've come
through a lot together."
"I didn't
mean to force anything on
him, I just got mad."
"And maybe
you should have. It might have been just
the thing. You'll have
to wait
and see."
Leo wiped
his eyes
and stood
up.
"Thanks, Harr . . .
sorry. Joule. You've helped me. I ... uh,
I may
not be
seeing you as often for
a while."
"I understand.
Let's stay friends, okay?" She kissed him, and he
hurried away.
She was sitting on a pillow facing the door
when he came home from work, her legs crossed, elbows
resting on her knee with a dopestick in her hand. She
smiled at him.
"Well, you're home
early. What happened?"
"I
stayed home from work." She nearly choked, trying not to laugh. He threw
his coat to the closet and hurried into the kitchen. She heard something being
stirred, then -the sound of glass shattering. He burst through the doorway.
"Cleo!"
"Darling,
you look so handsome with your mouth
hanging open."
He
shut it, but still seemed unable to move. She went to him, feeling tingling
excitement in her loins like the return of an old friend. She put her arms
around him, and he nearly crushed her. She loved it.
He
drew back slightly and couldn't seem to get enough of her face, his eyes
roaming every detail.
"How
long will you stay this way?" he asked. "Do you have any idea?"
"I don't know.
Why?"
He smiled, a little sheepishly. "I hope
you won't take this wrong. I'm so happy to
see you. Maybe I shouldn't say it . . . but no, I think I'd better. I
like Leo. I think I'll miss him, a little."
She
nodded. "I'm not hurt. How could I be?" She drew away and led him to
a pillow. "Sit down, Jules. We have to have a talk." His knees gave
way under him and he sat, looking up expectandy.
"Leo
isn't gone, and don't you ever think that for a minute. He's right here."
She thumped her chest and looked at him defiantly. "He'll always be here.
He'll never go away."
"I'm sorry, Cleo, I—"
"No, don't talk yet. It was my own
fault, but I didn't know any better. I never should have called myself Leo. It
gave you an easy out. You didn't have to face Cleo being a male. I'm changing
all that. My name is Nile. N-i-l-e.
I won't answer to anything else." "All right.
It's a nice name."
"I
thought of calling myself Lion. For Leo the lion. But
I decided to be who I always was, the queen of the Nile, Cleopatra. For Old time's sake."
He said nothing, but his eyes showed his
appreciation.
"What
you have to understand is that they're both gone, in a sense. You'll never be
with Cleo again. I look like her now. I resemble her inside, too, like an adult
resembles the child. I have a tremendous amount in common with what she was.
But I'm not her."
He nodded. She sat beside him and took his
hand.
"Jules,
this isn't going to be easy. There are things I want to do, people I want to meet. We're not going to be able to share the same
friends. We could drift apart because of it. I'm going to have to fight
resentment because you'll be holding me back. You won't let me explore your
female side like I want to. You're going to resent me because 111 be trying to force you into something you think is wrong for
you. But I want to try and make it work."
He let
out his breath. "God, CI . . . Nile. I've never been so scared in my life.
I thought you were leading up to leaving me."
She squeezed his hand. "Not if I can
help it. I want each of us to try and accept the other as they are. For me,
that includes being male whenever I feel like it. It's all the same to me, but
I know it's going to be hard for you."
They embraced, and Jules wiped his tears on
her shoulder, then faced her again.
"I'll do anything and everything in my
power, up to—" She put her
finger to her lips. "I know. I accept you that way. But 111 keep trying to
convince you."
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