Complete Short Fiction, page 16
He shook his head suddenly, no, hoping that she would say it and be finished. There was a trembling in his insides. He felt as if he were in a trance which she would break with her next words.
“There’s someone else and he can help me get what I want—everything we’ll both ever want. . .”
He looked directly at her for a moment and saw that her lower lip was shaking. Her face was a frightening thing; it repelled him and he looked away. He began to rub his eyes with his hands. She turned and left the room. He heard the front door shut itself automatically behind her. He felt his face become drawn and he felt a great warmth surround his consciousness, as if the room were becoming a furnace; and he heard the sound of his pulse in his ears, the blood pounding behind his eyes.
It began to rain in the late afternoon and continued all night. Toward morning there were huge puddles of water in the empty pool at the air plant. The metal door to the inside jammed and Praeger had to leave it open and wear his mask all night. In the morning he took a chair and sat in the doorway watching the rain come down in the gloom, beating on the pavement. Thousands of hurrying rivulets ran on the concrete and cascaded into the empty pool. The sound of the water relaxed him. He thought of the empty apartment waiting for him, and felt the tiredness creeping into his body. He looked forward to the oblivion of sleep.
Today also the helicopter would not come for him; he was no longer worth the effort, he thought. He was leaving at the end of the week; the copter fuel was more valuable to them.
Just before he had left for work, notification had come from NASA-EUROSOV through the mail readout slot telling him they had a job for him on one of the earth-moon sector stations. He was to settle his affairs and vacate his apartment. There had been a word of congratulations on the print-out, and a note asking him if he would waive minimum earth leave for higher pay.
As a NASA-EUROSOV employee he had regained the right to have children, indirectly, by depositing his sperm; a right which Betty had convinced him to sell. But the sperm bank was a good bet against the future. He had heard of illegal children being readied for a new earth swept clean by deliberate plague; children hidden away throughout the solar system. Somewhere, he was sure, men were preparing for the stars. He dreamed of unspoiled earths around far suns, wondering how long it would be before the stardrive breakthrough changed the world and if he would be part of it.
He went off shift and walked up the hill to the Tremont station. The rain ran down his Pyrex faceplate. He wore no hat and his hair was wet. His clothing was waterproof. He tightened his collar to keep the water from running inside. The rain seemed to be coming down harder than before and he could not see very far ahead. He needed a windshield wiper, like the big blades on the police cruiser. The thought tickled him—sweep, sweep! He couldn’t see it but he could feel it: the water was high around his boots as it ran down the hill.
Two men grabbed his arms and twisted them behind his back and a third ripped off his air mask, chest tank and all. They pushed him on his back with his head downhill and in a moment they vanished again in the thick curtain of rain.
He got up breathing hard and coughing. The air was heavy and wet in his lungs and he felt nauseous. His wrists seemed sprained. His face was streaming. Water ran in his eyes, blinding him. He screamed and shook both his fists in the rain; the gesture hurt, and the sound was lost against the rush of water in his ears. His eyes began to hurt and he rubbed them, cursing silently now. Then he walked the remaining half block to the subway entrance, coughing without letup all the way.
The entrance was a gaping black hole leading down into the earth, surrounded by a wilderness of rain. On the platform he took out a handkerchief and tied it around his face.
On the train going uptown he knew the other passengers were all staring at him, secretly pleased that he had lost his mask; but when he confronted their eyes they seemed to lose interest in him. He wondered, did NASA-EUROSOV know about Betty leaving him? Was that why they had mentioned the e-visitation clause, knowing that he would have no immediate ties on earth? If she had started the divorce action, then central information—CENTIN—would have it in his file, which could have been already tapped by NASA-EUROSOV. He could check it, but it didn’t really matter. The sperm deposit. That, too. If he had gone in to be sterilized, they would have given him money, just like for blood, just like they had sold their right to have kids. But now they would put his sperm in a bank, with the eventual certainty that it would be used. Someone was making all possible bets against the future, making sure that as many different combinations were at least available as possible. It was being used as a kind of incentive to go along with his new job, he was sure of it.
He thought of the stories he had heard of hidden groups of children belonging to high officials on earth or on the moon, children being readied for a new earth, maybe even the stars? He hoped, perhaps something will happen and we’ll get a stardrive in my lifetime, and if I’m out there working when it happens maybe I’ll get in on it! He felt a wild surge of expectation at the thought, a momentary release from the dark prison of his puny self.
The train reached his station and delivered him into the drenching rain and acrid air, again.
At the end of the week he closed the apartment and took a jet to Nevada, where the whip catapult serving the earth stations was located. The desert conjured up visions of the sun domes on Mars, green plants growing lush in low gravity, filling the bright space of the dome with oxygen. He did not have to wear a mask here, in Nevada, where the helicopter had left him off. What of Mars, where the desert bloomed . . . what of earthlike planets around far suns, unspoiled! How soon, he wondered, will we make the crucial breakthrough which will save us—tip the balance in favor of our dreams? A gust of wind came up from nowhere and blew some sand in his face and made his eyes water.
The spaceport was surrounded by a city of trailers and cabins. They gave him a cabin with a skylight for the one day before his departure for earth station one. He lay resting, and then dreaming, in the stillness of half sleep, of sun over treetops, an uncancerous sun, setting; a sliver of daylight moon; sky deep blue; evening star blazing; wind on the tall grass; shadows of clouds; last spring with no sound in the air . . .
The last real spring he had known had been in Central Park, years ago. The water of the small lake had been a green mirror, and the white swan had sailed curve-necked toward where the willows washed their branches in the water . . .
Tomorrow he would be on the shuttle.
The earth was blue-green below as he thought of yesterday’s thought of being here now. Acceleration was over and he leaned weightless in his straps toward the porthole, knowing that the stars and moon would look clearer now than from earth, that bottom of a dirty ocean where he had been born. It was a clean break now. Sunlight flooded the shuttlecraft like a shout. He floated back in his seat and tightened the straps, and dreamed of earth as it might still be, one hundred . . . five hundred . . . years hence, free of its billions and the guilty minority responsible for a century of plunder.
He dreamed he saw parks of rest and culture filled with elegant people, full-leafed trees casting broad shadows; and at night stars would be looking down, bright lights in an empty hall above an earth abandoned by most of its people, earth healed.
Stance of Splendour
They were two swimmers suspended in a perfectly clear sea, she moving on her back below him, limbs open freely, floating gently; he is a perfectly muscled body, sinewy fibers wrapped around bone in a strong grip.
He pushed down to her and grasped her head with both hands, and kissed her.
He saw himself with her, saw the small rings of water moving away from the intertwined bodies. The field of water was filled with light.
He held the water-filled globe in his hand, looking at it against the sheet of white light which was the sky, watching the figures turn slowly in the liquid, remembering.
“As I grew up,” he told her, “I became afraid that I would be nothing, absolutely nobody. It was a terrible suspicion to have to live with.”
“You’ll get over it,” she said and pulled his head down to hers. He kissed her reluctantly and she knew it.
“Look, I don’t want to talk about it. I’ve heard it all before,” he said.
The machine gun stitched across the bodies on the ground. He watched hands thrust forward from torsos, grasping. His own mouth was in the dirt and he felt the bullets rivet him to the earth.
She came to see him and he felt her eyes looking through the sheets. No arms, no legs. He was nothing.
Drown, sink down, rush out as light into the sea mud, surface into a fog of pain, space filled with white light.
Blink.
His eyes refused to roll down from inside his head. He groped with dead, phantom limbs into the white space, trying to picture something dark and tangible to calm his fear of blindness. His eyes were made of polished marble set in the liquid of his head; nerves brushed gently against their stone surface, nerves of rigid ivory wire trying to pick up something to send backstage.
Blink.
He sensed the surface he was lying on. He pictured stucco set in squares. He tried to sit up, and could not. Inability became a dense, fearful mass in his stomach.
Blink. He closed his eyelids. The white light became a field of dull red covered with capillaries. Fear became a spreading glow reknitting the strands of his consciousness. He felt the raw, cut-off ends of his nerves trying to extend themselves into the absent flesh.
They had said, “We’re going to reinforce the matrix of your individuality, the craggy-lightning pattern of your nervous system buried deeply in your flesh, the neural connections of your brain and spine, until the whole is charged enough to stand by itself . . .”
Without flesh. They had shown him a three dimensional holographic image of a nervous system and brain pattern standing in a display tank—an infinitely delicate skeleton tracing in white light, standing naked, fleshless, boneless, a pattern of energy looped back on itself.
Life after death. Immortality.
A man dies and becomes like a ruined house. The beams fall in, the insides begin to rot, and the walls let in the light and wind. The intensely alive man, they had said, one of upward spiraling, extreme lifelong consciousness, reaches a point when the design of his brain and nervous system is strong enough to do without the generating engine of the body to sustain the epiphenomenal field of personality and awareness. His life must be a rush toward greater and more complex awareness, until he is transfigured into a self sustaining being. They had compared the emergence of trans-man with that moment when sub-man had first groped after consciousness, and had become man.
We are going to do this in a lab, they had said.
He had wondered of the dissolute men, who believe little and reason scarce at all. They get nothing when their bodies dissolve, taking the partially formed permanence of their mind and nervous system with them into the dark.
Then he had passed through the laboratory floor, through the asbestos and tile and foundation and granite rock into the magma-warmth inside the earth, where the heat nourished him. Perception became direct, lacking the distortion of perceiver and object, the imperfection of sense and interpretation which sees the cosmos through the wrong end of time as some shadow play on a basement wall.
The sun’s radiance streamed through the earth, a standing gravito-magnetic wave front.
He shrugged, shifting the earth’s crust around him, and he knew that he had filled up the earth with himself. How would she understand him now, he thought, how could she continue to love him? He had hung ghostly near the physical tracings, the scratches in time-space and matter which had been his body in the apparatus; and they had not been able to see him to know they had succeeded.
His body had thrashed about, empty eyes open.
“Hopelessly mad.” Their uncomprehending masks spoke the words.
A thin whisper of atmosphere at his outer edge: weather. He felt the tidal bulge rush closely along the ocean bottom, slowly shaping it . . . passing.
Pulse. Blink.
It became colder as he drained the planet of energy and was left with the light and tide of the star and mood to feed him.
Blink. He pulsed the field of the earth as it grew colder, moved the planet with a shrug, wrinkled its skin with a whisper of his will—
—and rolled it into the sun like a ball down a smooth incline, blinking its field on and off, in a long curve which took him into the center, shedding the earth long before he reached it. He filled the sun and it did not drain, continuing its output unfailingly . . .
She was gone now too; and there were no others like him anywhere near. Had he ever been something else?
He remembered living in a smaller, dream world, living half awake—
Spinningspinningspinning stop the earthturningturning stop.
Dead stop—millions hurled thousands of miles across the continent. Standing structures knocked flat, pressed down by a giant hand; the air seething with storm clouds and light. And the sun had received the shards . . .
He breathed in the burning solar gales.
The sun flickered—
—cut off for a second eons of solar streaming into the dark abyss. In a moment the star would not be enough.
He drew himself into a concentrated mass, shaping himself into—
A leaping shout of energy and light, a huge spark jumping between the stars, leaving the sun to collapse into a dark, pitiable thing glowing on the edge of red and black. Dying.
Sirius.
Times was zero, though lesser vantages would have felt the time it had taken. He bathed in the star, his analogical consciousness assuming its form, assimilating its rhythms and profound structure of energy exchange; his accelerated intelligence reaching out to notice the material in orbit around the primary.
There was no one like him . . .
For a moment the ground was joined to the livid green sky by a two-pronged, misshapen finger of light. In the brief silence the sky became dark again and the moon cast its indifferent white light through a break in the clouds and was swiftly hidden by the woolly masses, the shoulders of protean night travelers moving toward dawn. The sun crouched below the world, held back by the storm. The rain started as a whisper and fell in a rush of crystalline droplets which still held the light of moon and stars in their structures. The thick, rich earth inhaled the flood and worms came to the surface and were washed pink.
The hammer blow struck stone, a god bringing chaos with his presence . . .
Sirius dimmed, waking him. The light flowing out faltered, leaving the ends to rush away like a tide going out hurriedly.
He reached out to Tau-Ceti Oh God, release me, he prayed leaving the burned out star. There he drew the binary companion into the main furnace Make me small as I was before, give back all the lives, feeding on the massed power. Briefly, the star flared, gobbling up its children Let me die.
I deny you I Whatever you are let me go. The center of stars, the galactic hearth drew him now. He went whispering between the stars, strong enough to feed on the tenous gas and radiation between the suns, breathing the galaxy’s atmosphere. He went like a beggar toward the locus of endless power, a beggar knocking over garbage cans, devouring the meager scraps and smallest sparks of life They’re all dying, the smallest ant, this lumbering beast had killed her and was pressing in from all sides, rushing into him with winds and currents and screams, outraged by his small remains, remaking the rest into itself, Anything, help me save me kill me . . . mother!
Were there others? Or were they simply being silent, fearing the meeting that could only result in one new birth? He hurried, compressing the forces inside himself to crush all remains of the other time, reaching out to the brightest stars, a thousand beacons hanging in the abyss, and made them into himself He was rushing upward through the floors of a huge iron building made of rusty girders, floors of rotting wood, trap doors open before his rush, dissolving . . .
The pattern of himself grasped a hundred stars more in its net. His frontier flashed outward . . .
A lifeless body thrashing on the table . . .
His perimeter came to the edge of the galaxy and stopped—
The wheel of stars with its film of gas became his skin, and he filled it up.
The galaxy breathed. Its forces became his pulse.
He hurried, knowing that he was not everything.
A huge mass came down and crushed him forever.
And distant fears came close to him, tears moving slowly, leaving acid tracks in his cells as he blotted out his old self, forgetting . . .
He looked out into the dark—
—saw the small lights beyond—
—felt the cold which he could not pass across. He was forced to see in the old way, knowing things different from him, all around him.
He tried to expand at the sight of the infinite emptiness, tried to reach out to those faint brushes of light, almost disintegrated in the huge sigh of stars and gases and recovered, rested in a state of exaltation . . .
He began to throb. The island of stars began to pulse faster and faster, pushing against space. He pulled the two companion clouds into his center, flaring the globular clusters around the central vortex across the whole spectrum of light—
—Pulse.
The maelstrom of himself began to suck in dust and radiation into the center of the spiral and spew it out into his arms, spinning the starstorm faster, moving it in a new direction, streaming suns in its wake.
In a moment of eternity he was moving in a monstrous rush toward his new prey, and his light became a dark red . . .
A fist thrust into the sky, his grasping fingers broke through the cardboard—
—Into a bare room. With white walls and perfect corners.
Rope of Glass
Austrian-born Pole George Zebrowski grew up in Britain and New York City and makes his home now in upstate New York. This polyglot beginning may account for his great success in a second language—rare in any writer, and all the more surprising in a man as young as George Zebrowski. He has amassed an astonishing number of credits: his 1972 Ace novel The Omega Point has won him wide acclaim and his upcoming novel Macrolife will, we predict, establish him firmly in the front ranks of major science fiction writers.
