Complete Short Fiction, page 33
“Yes,” he agreed. “However we can.”
“And do whatever we need to remain human.” She nibbled on a stale water biscuit. He was too poor to offer her any other food. He’d had dinner at her apartment once, high above the water, where the endless stream of boats on the wide reaches of the flooded Charles had looked like water bugs. She’d made cod cakes and Boston baked beans. The cod cakes had had peanuts in them, and the baked beans had been flavored with phuoc nam. The salty Southeast Asian fish sauce had made the beans, for some reason, taste even more Bostonian.
She was a fanatic, he knew. All those who supported him were. For that matter, so were all those who opposed him. Didn’t anyone do things simply because they made sense? Thirty years before, aliens had dropped through the Loophole and made contact with Earth. Boston, more by chance than anything else, had been established as the regulated contact zone. Since then, aliens from the entire galaxy had been pouring through the staid old town, and the tensions caused by their arrival had been increasing geometrically. Kronenbourg was beginning to suspect that they were becoming too strong for most of the human race to handle.
“Have you seen her?” Mi Nyo said, her voice suddenly low and sad. “How is she?”
Kronenbourg had been afraid of that question. He thought about lying. She would catch him. She’d been a businesswoman, of one sort or another, for over twenty years. She would know. “Yes. I saw her. I saw her this morning.”
“And is she—”
“She’s the same. The same, dammit! What do you expect to hear? Your daughter thinks she’s a Rigellian swamp lizard. She’s covered with scales and lives in the mud. She’s not just going to get over it and come to her senses. Why do you torture yourself?”
She took in a quick breath but didn’t cry. For one terrifying second he thought he had pushed her too far and she would. He had no idea of what he could do then. He needed her. She provided him with sense, with stability. Without her harsh understanding he would slide across the surface of things as if on hard ice. The Institute would remain a fever dream. He saw himself years in the future, a doddering old academic, still squabbling with Tolliver.
She straightened up in her chair. “You are right. She is an example of what must not happen to the rest of us. But—she does well?” She looked sharply at him, worried that he would tell some comforting lie.
“Extremely well. An excellent businesswoman, to all accounts. Braak-Kha’s school is booming, his philosophy is most influential. It’s comforting, nurturing, promising return to primal oneness. The student bars near Fort Washington all smell like wet sulfur.”
She sighed. “Poor Ang. What a waste. She was so clever as a child. Why does she flee from the world in such a way?”
Kronenbourg thought of a childhood lived on a speedboat, listening to the chatter of a machine gun and the screams of her parents’ victims, followed by the flaming destruction of home and father, when the Metropolitan District Commission aircraft had destroyed Hull. “She has reason enough, I suspect,” he said.
As Mi Nyo sat quietly, remembering her daughter, Kronenbourg could just hear the rats scurrying under the floorboards. Rats, and others, pests from a dozen alien vessels, some chittering and insectoidal, some silent and lizard-like, all living on floating garbage in the interstellar amity of scavengers. Had rat culture been affected? Did some rats wonder if they were any longer truly rats? Kronenbourg killed them all alike, rat and giant pill bug, but their noises still kept him awake at night.
“What about Tolliver?” Mi Nyo asked. “Do you still seek to recruit him?”
“Yes,” Kronenbourg said. He remembered that morning’s argument. Tolliver had found the body of a murdered alien in the quadrangle at EDS. Had he drawn the correct conclusions? That body was a clearer argument than any Kronenbourg had ever come up with himself. It was also incredibly brutal. If he’d had the choice, Kronenbourg would never have used such an argument. Fortunately, he hadn’t been offered a choice.
“Why do you want that academic?” Mi Nyo said. “He studies the aliens, does he not? How can he help us?”
Kronenbourg sighed. The discussion was getting old. “I’m tired of fanatics.” He could say that, because Mi Nyo would never recognize the description as applying to her. “I don’t want futile revolts against the alien presence. All that will do is spill a lot of blood. I need a man who can think. I need a man who can help us define ourselves in this new universe.”
Mi Nyo shook her head in admiration. “You are so impractical, Lester. If you worked for me, I would fire you.”
“Yes. I suppose I’m lucky that, instead, you work for me.”
“With you, Lester. I work with you.”
Kronenbourg smiled. “We all work together.”
Tolliver passed through the great vaulting structure of the Copley Mall. The sun shone in through the high roof, gleaming off the supports and reflecting at odd angles. There were hundreds of shops here, selling things from a hundred planets. It was here that the open retail trade with the stars was conducted, the most visible part of commerce and, Tolliver knew from Kronenbourg’s lectures, by far the least important. The various trading combines handled the real high value exchanges, somewhere high up in the new towers that changed the Boston skyline almost daily.
The squat tower of Trinity Church, with its peaked red tile roof, refracted through the glass planes ahead of him, appearing and reappearing as he walked. He went down the stairs and out onto Copley Square, moving quickly through the cold wind. The Romanesque bulk of Trinity still reassured Bostonians that some things remained unchanged, though the tilting, twisted tower of the John Hancock building next door was a definite opposing viewpoint.
Mercour had insisted on a clandestine meeting. Tolliver walked into the church, counted up the proper number of pews, and sat down. He looked up into the great cubic volume which hovered overhead. The La Farge murals of Biblical scenes painted there fascinated him, largely because they were so difficult to see. A body at the Episcopal Divinity School, a meeting at Trinity . . . was Mercour’s madness tending towards Episcopalianism? To be driven by the multiplicity of truths inhabiting the universe into genteel Anglo-Catholicism was a quintessential Bostonian spiritual trajectory.
“Professor Tolliver,” Mercour said behind him. “Please don’t turn around.” Tolliver felt the cold sharpness of a knife at his neck. “I’m glad you could meet with me outside of your regular office hours.”
“Where have you been?” Tolliver said. “Everyone in the department has been worried about you.”
Mercour chuckled. “Working on some extracurricular projects.”
“Like murdering aliens and dumping their bodies in the quadrangle at EDS?”
Mercour took a breath. “Ah, so you figured it out. But why should you be mad at me? It was the perfect problem in alien physiology. How do you kill a crystalline being? ‘Precipitate’ might be a better word. Relax some of the bonds and the whole thing falls into another conformation, a more stable one.”
“Death is more stable than life, Gavin, and life inevitably collapses into it. That’s not news. He was your teacher, wasn’t he? The one you told me about that afternoon at the Peabody. Why did you do it?”
“I hate them,” Mercour said. “I hate them. All of them. This one dropped through our Rabbit Hole on his own, from God only knows where. Landed in the Contact Area like a good little boy. In Newton, though. Lucky the gangs didn’t get him. Then he ate his spaceship. Just sat down and ate it, drive core and all. Without salt. Then moved down to Cambridgeport and opened his own school. It probably took him three months to get there from Newton, walking along the bottom of the Charles.”
“Stop it, Gavin, please,” Tolliver said. “Quit cluttering things up. I want information. Why did you kill that being? Was it for knowledge?” He felt a deep frustration. Mercour’s mind had been so bright and sharp once, like a jewel. How had this happened to him?
“I tried so hard to see the universe clear,” Mercour said. “He was a telepath. I begged and pleaded with him. I was his only student, you know. He was discouraged by the fact that no one seemed interested in what he had to teach. Finally, he let me see the universe through his senses.” Mercour choked. “It was madness! He saw the insides of things, and their ends, and their beginnings, and so much more, and still none of it made sense. None of it made any sense at all.”
His voice was so anguished that Tolliver wanted to turn around and comfort him, remembering the eager boy Mercour had once been. The knife at his neck stopped him.
“You can’t see the universe clearly until you know who you are, Gavin,” Tolliver said. Annoying as he was, Kronenbourg was right about that. “Who are you?”
Mercour’s breath hissed out, and Tolliver felt the knife edge press against his neck. Mercour, who was familiar with the anatomies of a dozen species, certainly knew where the jugular vein and carotid artery were in the human body.
Three Boston Police officers suddenly came through the door behind the baptismal font. They stopped and peered into the darkness of the church but did not move further.
“Oh, God,” Mercour said. “How did they find me? You led them here!” Mercour shouted. “You bastard!” The knife edge pressed harder, but then the pressure vanished. Mercour leaped over the pew and ran for the doors. The police watched impassively as the graceful figures of the Koltsoi appeared at the doors, dark shadows against the light streaming in. They moved with slow curves, swaying like water plants, their once human translator in front.
“Halt,” she said. “Halt, or—”
With his shoulder, Mercour hit her hard in the side. He must have gauged his blow precisely. She shrieked and crumpled to the floor, bent double in the wrong direction. Bones protruded through the skin of her chest. She continued to scream, a high-pitched sound like a teakettle on full boil. Blood spattered on the floor. Mercour dodged toward the doors but the Koltsoi, strong despite their slenderness, gathered around him.
Pulling a can out of his student robe, Mercour sprayed them with a dark mist. They clutched at their eyes and stumbled away, twitching as if electrocuted.
“Remember this trick, Professor!” Mercour yelled over his shoulder. “Koltsoi are allergic to WD40. Hah!” And he was out of the doors and gone.
Tolliver started to get up, and felt a hand on his shoulder. It was one of the three officers. He had first taken the hand as a gesture of comfort, but it tightened painfully.
“Professor Tolliver,” the officer said. “Will you please come with us? We have some questions.”
“Don’t we all, officer. Don’t we all.”
Tolliver stopped at the edge of the highest pool of water. Its outflow poured down into a series of pools below, and then into the ocean. They were surrounded by snow and rime ice. “Damn it, Kronenbourg, what are you doing? Why have you brought me to this godforsaken place?” In the week since Mercour’s disappearance, Tolliver’s face had become gaunt and tight. He had kept to himself and stayed away from his department.
Kronenbourg had somehow arranged for the charges of accessory to murder to be dropped, and gotten him released from jail. Tolliver was bewildered by this unexpected display of power. “You said there would be no quid pro quo.”
Kronenbourg slumped after him, his face mournful. His heavy coat flapped around his knees. “That’s what I said, and that’s what I meant. You’re under no obligation to me. I didn’t spring you from jail to get something from you. But our argument isn’t over, Chris. Mercour has something to add.”
Tolliver turned to him. “Do you know where he is?”
Kronenbourg nodded heavily. “I do. That’s why I brought you here. Come on. I think you’ll find his argument quite convincing.”
The ruins of what had once been South Boston could be seen beneath the ocean surface. Out of the water rose Telegraph Hill, the only place surviving. It had once been the site of a high school, but now supported the elaborate black structures of the Targive citadel. They looked like tents, or folded bat wings. Kronenbourg thought that they actually were the wings of some beast modified beyond recognition, bones forming the supports, skin the fabric. No one knew for sure, of course, because the Targives kept themselves secret. Conduits carried streams of water from the citadel and out to here.
Steam rose from the Targive outflow, filled with exotic metallic salts which formed poisonous blue-green and orange crystals on the ruined building foundations. Nothing grew here, on either land or water. This part of town had once been inhabited by conservative Irish, deeply prejudiced against the influx of blacks and Hispanics. Now they were gone, and an alien citadel spread its wings above their abandoned community.
“How did you know that Mercour had killed that alien?” Tolliver said. He had kept away from Kronenbourg all week, but the questions had been eating at him.
“Do you still think I had something to do with it?” Kronenbourg said. “Don’t be ridiculous. I pay close attention to the madness that goes on in the schools in Cambridgeport. I can draw obvious conclusions. It’s time that you started to pay attention, Chris.”
Scavengers lived near the water in huts built of old vinyl siding and asphalt cut from the twisted and useless roads. A variety of objects found their way into the Targive outflow, no one knew whether by accident or on purpose. Some were useful devices, others deadly traps. The scavengers stayed near the toxic water, sickening and dying, but bringing forth treasures. One treasure they had found was the body of Gavin Mercour.
Hollow-eyed men and women examined the interlopers from the doors of their shacks, motionless save for their steaming breath. Several of them greeted Kronenbourg familiarly. They directed the two men to their discovery.
Mercour lay on the edge of one of the pools, face up, eyes open. His eyes were refractive transparent spheres, like rock crystal or leaded glass, and the rest of his body was of dark, translucent blue stone. He looked like the victim of an unusually artistic Medusa.
“ ‘Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.’ ” Kronenbourg quoted.
Tolliver knelt by the pool. The physical structure of Mercour’s body was identical to that of the alien he had killed in Cambridge.
“How did they-do that?” he wondered aloud. “They must have replaced his body bit by bit, like making petrified wood.”
“Except that they kept him alive while they did it,” Kronenbourg said. “That’s the Targive way. They never deal with anything that isn’t alive. They probably gave him the structure of the living alien, then crystallized him the same way he murdered his victim. Poetic justice, with a vengeance.
Tolliver looked into the deep transparent eyes. “He was hoping to find a place with no shadows, where he could see. I suppose that’s why he finally tried to get to the Targives. Do you suppose that he saw the truth before he died?”
“I doubt it. Human beings don’t have much aptitude for being crystals.” Kronenbourg sat down on a pile of old bricks that was slightly higher than the surrounding tidal marshes, and started to dig small flat stones out of the soil nearby. “They don’t have much aptitude for being swamp lizards or Koltsoi, either, but that doesn’t stop them.”
Tolliver sighed. “I suppose not. Where there is light, there are shadows. If only they didn’t tempt us the way they do! Sometimes I think that all aliens are just personifications of our neuroses, physical manifestations of what we fear or desire. But they are actually, demonstrably real. That’s what’s so terrifying about them.”
“They are real,” Kronenbourg said, irritated. “Have no doubt. Just ask poor Mercour. We can’t blame the aliens for luring us and causing us to doubt our own humanity. The fault is our own.” He had dug out quite a pile of stones. He handed some to Tolliver, who looked confused. “Look at their shape. You can see what they’re good for.”
Kronenbourg stood up and pitched his first flat stone at the poisonous water. It skipped twice. Tolliver smiled and whipped his arm in a lazy arc. His stone skipped seven times, clear to the far side. It had been years since he’d done anything like that.
Kronenbourg grunted. “Someday, the Institute will be a large building with marble columns. My statue, and yours, will stand in the Great Hall, looking nobly off into the future. The custodians will believe that human culture is preserved in the Institute’s glass cases. They will be wrong, but their error is inevitable.” His next stone sank straight into the water.
Tolliver’s stone skimmed across the water and almost wanted to fly. “What do you mean?” The long-strained muscles of his face relaxed.
Kronenbourg smiled at him. “I’m glad you’re with me, finally. We’ll spend the rest of our lives dealing with morons, but we’ll survive. And who knows? We may actually get some to use their human minds against the universe properly. The same way that you use the flatness of the stone to skip it across the water.” His next try was perfect, nine, at least. He looked pleased with himself.
They stood there, skipping their stones and talking, until it got too dark to see.
1991
Living Will
Alexander Jablokov’s first novel, Carve the Sky, has just been published by William Morrow. The author recently completed a book based on the story, “A Deeper Sea,” that appeared in our October 1989 issue.
The computer screen lay on the desk like a piece of paper. Like fine calf-skin parchment, actually—the software had that as a standard option. At the top, in block capitals, were the words COMMENCE ENTRY.
“Boy, you have a lot to learn.” Roman Maitland leaned back in his chair. “That’s something I would never say. Let that be your first datum.”
