Complete Short Fiction, page 79
“Well,” he said. “Did it let you know I loved you or not?”
She managed a smile. “I suppose it did at that. Oh, Steve. There really wasn’t anything we could do, was there?”
“No, there wasn’t.” He felt her shoulder bones under his hands. One of them felt odd—artificial, she’d said. The body was everything, the body was nothing . . . she wore perfume, the scent she’d worn years before. She must have found a bottle of it somewhere in the back of a closet. Amazing that it hadn’t evaporated.
“And now, my dear,” he said, feeling a light-headed terror. “Now you must kill me.”
She jerked away. “What?”
“Sorry.” He didn’t let her go. “Didn’t mean to be flip. Or rather . . . well, what other reaction am I supposed to have? Here, look.” He took her beyond the wall and pointed toward the east. The Stoop forces were emplaced there, stretching out to the Michigan border. “I have done nothing. I have succeeded in nothing.”
“Steve! That’s not—”
“Isn’t it? I’ve had a great adventure. I’ve gone to a distant world and back. I’ve lost an entire life with a woman I love. And I have failed completely at what I wanted to do. The Jugurjur wants to cut off Stoop supplies and the Stoop thinks of giving up the Earth as a bad job and moving on, but neither of them does anything because no one’s given them a reason to. My attempts at negotiating a solution failed. The war will continue. That is, assuming that my purpose was diplomatic in the first place.”
He looked at her, but now she wouldn’t meet his eyes. She looked out instead over the drifted sand dunes that had obliterated the streets of Gary. “I don’t remember anymore where Selene died, exactly. The sand covers it all up, and all those old buildings are gone. But you saw us on the news, didn’t you.”
“I did. And they’ll see me. Talk to Adalti. He knows. What will—”
“Oh, some damn thing,” she said harshly. “Easy enough to make this entire negotiation look like an ambush, an attempt to destroy the Stoop in one blow. Adalti can show it that way, if he wants. We’ll help. The Stoop will react quickly.” What he had told her was not really a surprise to her. She’d known it all along. Karinth had always been a little ahead of him.
“I wanted to succeed,” he said plaintively. “I didn’t want it to come to this. Know that, Karinth.”
“I know.” She sighed. “But that’s not good art, and Adalti is an artist. I’m sorry you never got to meet Selene. I think you would have liked her.” A kiss, and she was gone, the woman who had risked herself and lost her daughter in a ploy to get good war coverage from the eyemouths. Steve looked after her and wished she had tried to talk him out of it.
The sun rose and the snow-covered dunes gleamed around him. The Stoop would blame him. He didn’t know how Adalti would play it, how he would convince the Stoop that this entire negotiation was simply a ploy to get them here in one place so that they could be destroyed, but he knew Adalti would do it. And the Stoop would know that it was all Steve Hardt’s doing. He sat down in a chair, favoring his injured hip, and waited.
The Stoop attack on the negotiation ground started just before noon.
“The Consortium will kill me,” Karinth Tolback, smoke-blackened, bleeding from a fresh wound in her thigh, said to the eyemouth Adalti. “They think I planned it all.”
The dull sound of some vast, distant explosion drifted over them and wandered out into the lake. One of Adalti’s ever-present screens showed images of metal bending, brick and concrete shattering. It was impossible to tell where it was, what was happening, who was dying. Without context, an explosion is entirely anonymous.
“Aren’t they too busy fighting the Stoop?” Adalti could barely give her any attention. War had spread across the center of the continent in the wake of the Stoop attack on Gary, from Alberta down into the Appalachians. Each screen showed another bright fragment of the blazing, bloody war. And Adalti, the master craftsman, laid each one down in its proper place in the mosaic. It would make sense. When someone could finally sit down and watch it, it would make sense. Quite unlike now.
Karinth leaned against the broken-off trunk of a tree. The wave of dizziness passed. “They can spare a little thought for me. I’ve succeeded in destroying the central organization of the Great Lakes Consortium. Getting me won’t help the military situation, but it will make them feel better. That’s as much as they can do now.”
“He died bravely,” Adalti said. “He really did.”
“No,” Karinth said. “I don’t want—”
Steve’s face blossomed on the screens. He stood amid the ruins of the parking structure, looking up at the sky, waiting. The attack was coming from the sky. There wasn’t anything he could do. He couldn’t slap the bombs out of the air with the back of his hand. So he stood there, stern, a little sad, and waited.
Karinth couldn’t turn her eyes away. The end, when it came, was just one single bright flash of light. When the smoke cleared, and the eyes recovered, there was nothing to be seen. She supposed someone digging through the rubble could have found molars, chunks of flesh, fingers.
It was a good job, perfect for both the Jugur home market and the Stoop. Their pet negotiator, their mascot, Steve Hardt, finally asserted his fundamental loyalties. He and countless others had died to create a show for the Jugur to watch while eating dinner. If they stopped chewing for just a moment, it would have served its purpose.
“The Stoop will leave now,” Adalti said crisply. “Some already are.” A ship rose up from an anonymous field, leaving behind it the abandoned remains of what was clearly a Stoop military camp. “This last war is just the maintenance of pride.”
“Pride! It will leave us with nothing but ruins.”
“Rejoice, Karinth Tolback. Victory is yours. Steve Hardt was a symbol to the Jugurjur. Now they will act, cutting off the Stoop’s lifelines. And he was a symbol to the Stoop. The Stoop itself is humiliated. Those in favor of leaving the Earth will have their way. You have won.”
“I guess we have.”
She looked at the Jugur. He knelt in the sand, gazing at his screens, seeing images in his head. It seemed he would never stop. Not until the last instant of his life. He had been on Earth for over thirty years, creating his great work.
“Please,” she heard her voice say. “The lights.” A screen showed her and Steve, in the dark, making love. She watched despite herself. He’d thought it would make her happy if he could make love to her, at least once, and he had been right.
Other images flashed. Steve and Karinth running together up a rough trail in Anatolia, laughing and racing ahead of each other. Steve in the middle of a great field on Jugurtha, rows and rows of empty stone seats rising up around him. Karinth kissing Selene one last time before sending her daughter out in her armored carrier. Steve struggling through the snow, pulling a sledge behind him. Karinth catching sight of Steve on the security screen in her apartment.
That had been Adalti’s great work. The saga of the war between human being and Jugur couldn’t be shown directly. That was just explosions and dead bodies. He’d decided to do it through Karinth Tolback and Steve Hardt. From the moment he had met them in Anatolia, he had structured everything around them. He’d sent Steve away, aged her, brought him back. He’d made sure Steve died. He’d made sure the Stoop finally removed themselves from the globe they had tried to destroy, and left the Earth in peace. Every work of art must reach closure.
A tear trembled at the end of her nose and she wiped it away. “How much time would it take to watch the whole thing?” she asked. “All the way through.”
Adalti folded his gear away. Other eyemouths busily loaded it into a bulbous wide-tired vehicle.
“Twenty-four of your hours,” he said. “Many will do it. Millions. I am immortal. So are you.”
“Adalti!” She almost stepped forward to grab him and break his slender neck.
“Goodbye, Karinth Tolback. We will not speak again.” He stepped into the vehicle and it sped away across the sand. In a few seconds, it had disappeared.
She’d never understood him, not even for an instant. He was a genius, and a genius of an alien race. Thirty years in twenty-four hours, all held by the structure of a brilliant work of art. Damn the art, she thought. She’d trade every second of that thirty years for just one afternoon making love on a high rock in the sunlight.
She knelt in the cold sand, turned her face to the sun, and closed her eyes.
She ignored the almost-subliminal whine of the flying camera that caught the final scene.
1995
Fragments of a Painted Eggshell
The author’s latest novel, River of Dust, is just out from William Morrow. It is based on his story, “Syrtis,” which was originally published in the April 1994 issue of Asimov’s. In his latest tale, he shows why some memories are nothing more than . . .
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Paula said, leafing through the immense stack of letters that had somehow come to be covering her I kitchen counter. “Which old postcard are you talking about?” She I tapped and aligned the envelopes, making them seem orderly.
“Well, any of them . . . but there is one specific one I’m thinking of.” Mark’s voice sounded hollow. He did insist on using that ancient heavyhandset phone, bought at some long-ago yard sale. He’d gotten it after the divorce, good riddance, and Paula had replastered the spot on the kitchen wall where it had hung. She wore a headset, and could move around as she cooked dinner. Mark had never been able to recognize the simplest solutions to things.
She started to open the letters with the cleaver, but quit when she saw how much red bell pepper she was getting all over everything. Besides, she should really finish chopping the pepper before she got to anything else.
“A postcard from France.” She wandered from the kitchen into her office to look for a letter opener.
“Yes, that’s right.” Only something really important would make him call outside their usual schedule for sharing out Rue’s time. So what was it about the postcards Mark had sent her while they were still dating that made her ex-husband desperate enough to talk to her?
“I just threw all that old stuff in boxes,” she said, distracted by the Billable Accounts file displayed on her computer screen. She plopped down in her work chair, throwing the stack of letters into the overflowing “To Do” box on the floor, and started looking through the active accounts. “I wasn’t in much of a mood to be too orderly. I don’t even know if I still have any of it.”
“You have it. Could you please take a look?”
“Sure, sure. . . .” There were some extra hours to be billed on the Hammersly house—Paula Pursang Construction had completely redesigned their moldings three times now. Easy money, but a pain in the ass. . . .
“Paula, are you paying attention to what I’m saying?” Mark’s voice wasn’t angry, just tired.
“Of course I am. It’s somewhere in the basement. I’ll just have to put a bucket over my head to protect myself against the Tergiversator, and go down there.”
He laughed. He didn’t want to, but he did. “Just take a position when you go down there, and hold it.”
The Tergiversator was a creature who hid under the basement stairs and lived on equivocation. Paula couldn’t remember how it had first been born—it might have been from a crossword puzzle clue—but it had a firm place in Pursang family mythology.
“That never works. Eventually you get an itch and have to scratch something, and . . .”
“Just find it, Paula. Please.”
She knew exactly where that damn postcard was. It was in a cardboard box under a stack of heating ducting and vent grates, in a corner of the basement behind the furnace. If the basement flooded, as it used to every spring, the box would be soaked, leaving its contents to rot and get covered with mildew. But she had installed a sump pump and a dehumidifier last fall and the damn improvements worked too well. The basement was now dry enough to create mummies.
And she did remember that postcard in particular. It had been an antique one he bought from some street kiosk, showing the Palace of the Popes in Avignon in the 1920s. He wrote a note indicating that he had fallen through some sort of time warp, but was hoping the magical timedelay stamp he bought from the gypsy would ensure that the card was delivered to her eighty years later . . . and that he still thought about her with every new thing he saw.
It was all very sweet, but she had spent that summer sleeping with someone else, a fellow carpenter on a job, so she didn’t take any of it too seriously. Still, she had put the card up on her refrigerator, where it had stayed many months amid the torn-out cartoons and orange-crate-label refrigerator magnets until Mark came back from Europe and she found herself engaged to be married to him.
“So why do you want it?” she asked. “Just tell me.”
“It’s Miriam.”
“Oh. Miriam.” Mark’s new wife was named Miriam-Selina. Irritated by the compound name, Paula privately called her Miracle of Science. She had breasts like a female impersonator’s. They couldn’t be real.
“Now, Paula. If you’re going to be like that, I don’t have to tell you anything.” Mark wouldn’t have been human if his ex-wife’s jealousy over his new wife hadn’t, secretly, pleased him.
“All right, all right. So, Miriam.”
“Miriam . . . well, we haven’t been together very long. She wants our relationship to be of longer standing.”
“Wait a while,” Paula said. “It will be.”
“No, no. She wants it to be longer now.”
She froze for a moment, shocked at the depths of his betrayal. “And you want to steal my past, weld it on to hers? Make it seem like you and she have had a real life together? Buy a memory transfer so that you remember sending that postcard to her, and she remembers getting it. It’ll cost you, you know. That sort of thing’s not cheap.” The emotion was too sudden, too strong, for her to even identify it as anger or grief. “So you just call me up, ask me casual-like to give up my past—”
“Paula—”
“Sure we screwed it up, lost it. It still means something. Do you think it doesn’t?”
“I’m not doing this to hurt you, Paula.”
“Then why?” Anger was easier.
His voice, when he finally spoke, was so quiet she could barely hear it. “Why don’t you ask Rue?” And then he hung up, dropping the heavy receiver from the primitive phone hook once before finally managing to cut the connection.
Paula pulled her headset off and threw it across the room. Then, with exaggerated care, she hit a couple of keys and printed out an invoice on the Hammersly job. At least she’d gotten something done.
She sensed rather than heard the back door closing. Rue always came home silently, trying to seep in, as if her mother, dim as some senescent household pet, would conclude that she had really been there all along.
Paula had learned not to say hello to her when she first came in. It took Rue a while to adjust after coming into her mother’s carefully built house, even though she had grown up in it. A little prowling around, a few minutes’ ceremonial examination of the contents of the refrigerator—anything she took out she immediately put back in—and she would be calm enough to deal with.
“Hi, Mom,” Rue said when Paula came out of her office. She sat hunched at the ceramic-tile counter, still wearing her ankle-length black coat, its shoulders wet with spring rain. Her hair, for a wonder, was combed and fresh, falling past her shoulders in soft dark curls. Until a few days before, it had been deliberately ratty and feral-smelling, like that of some distraught mad poetess. It drove Paula crazy. For years she had regarded that hair as a sort of joint possession. Rue had finally dissuaded her.
“Hello.” Paula started getting the raw materials for dinner out of the refrigerator. The coat, worn tightly buttoned in the bright warm light of the kitchen she had worked so hard on, disturbed her. It was of textured leather, and sucked in close above Rue’s hips, then flared out, ending up pleated at the tips of her boots. How much must such a thing have cost? It was dizzying. Rue was only fourteen.
“You know, Arnie, our sosh prof, is such a whack job.” Rue rapped her gloved knuckles on the counter. Somehow, as Paula cracked eggs, they actually managed to have a discussion of sorts about Arnold Renborn, Rue’s Sociological Sciences teacher. It helped that Paula honestly agreed with her daughter’s assessment that the man was a fool.
Then, a long silence. “Mom, there’s something I have to talk about with you.”
Paula held tightly onto the egg bowl and set it clumsily on the counter. Without looking at Rue, she took all the eggshell halves and nested them before throwing them down the disposal.
“What is it, honey?”
“I—” Rue swallowed. This was bad. Usually she just dropped her news on the table, take it or leave it, and was gone before Paula could react.
“I got a notification from Miriam-Selina Kaman’s lawyer yesterday. I checked it with my legal program—seems okay. I won’t actually sign up to anything without consulting our lawyer directly, of course.” Rue’s voice was desperately practical. “Miriam-Selina Kaman, her husband Mark Pursang, her cousin Ella Trumbull, and Trumbull’s husband Winston Ortega are forming a family co-op, name as yet undetermined. There are four other kids and I’ve been invited to join.”
“Oh.” Paula felt like the guy in the joke who’s had his head cut off but doesn’t know it until he tries to nod. She wasn’t going to nod. That was a nice bit of legalistic precision, sticking her father into the list simply as Mark Pursang, Miriam-Selina Kaman’s husband. Fourteen. Rue was fourteen. Had Paula forgotten that? Had she forgotten that the joint-custody agreement let Rue make a decision when she reached that age?
“Oh, Mom, I know it’s stupid and doesn’t make any sense but . . . I don’t know what it is. I look back and feel like I didn’t have a childhood. Isn’t that silly? You did the best for me and all but somehow it all sifted away. . . .” Looking at her mother with those clear blue eyes she’d gotten from Mark, Rue started to cry. “Oh no, oh no, never mind, I’ll . . . oh, damn.” She ran from the kitchen, still wearing her long coat buttoned as if she had never actually come into the house.
