Complete Short Fiction, page 55
The General stepped up to the cage. It seemed that the chimp was watching him with unusual attention.
“What is it?” the Director asked.
The chimp got up and came to the bars. Pain slipped through the General’s stomach, and he felt a craving for bananas. Suddenly he was gripping the bars from inside the cage. His muscles ached from the dampness. He peered into his own dark glasses and saw a shadowy chimp face staring back, baring its teeth.
He stumbled back from the bars into the arms of his security man.
“Maciek is in great pain,” the Director said as the General steadied himself.
They walked on. People were feeding the elephants, the General noticed as he tried to shake off the delusion he had experienced at the cage. The biscuits, he saw, were the shortbread kind, expensive anti hard to come by. These people had stood in long lines to buy them for the elephants. Why had the delusion come upon him? I must be a man of conscience, he told himself. Or I’m losing my mind.
“Even the smallest thing you could do for us,” the Director said, “would help us save some of the animals.”
“You anticipate deaths?” the General asked, adjusting his glasses.
“Of course, without a doubt.”
General Jaruzelski recalled his private meeting with the university professors. They had made him feel guilty and sad, as the young zookeeper was doing more gently. They had not understood, in their inquisitorial fervor, that the Russians would invade their beloved Poland. It was a matter of camouflage, he had told them with tears in his eyes, to make the Soviets think we are like them, for as long as it took for Poles to become free within their own borders. The jealous, fearful bear had to be put to sleep, as the Czechs, Yugoslavs, and Hungarians were doing. . . .
“The Bulgarians sent us some fruit for the animals,” the Director was saying. “They didn’t even ask for payment in trade, and we’re grateful. But, you see, it’s got to be the right fruit—bananas for the chimps, raisins and nuts for the birds. . . .”
“Raisins and nuts?” the General asked. The demand was familiar in its seeming extravagance.
The director shrugged shyly. “The grains we’re getting are not really for them. Our birds need special kinds of seeds. They develop rashes, lose feathers and coloration when they don’t have raisins and nuts. How can I do my job when I have to ignore facts of biology and diet?”
The General nodded and they walked on, followed by the security man. Even Polish animals were extravagant, a Russian would quip, needing exotic feed in keeping with the national character.
“There won’t be much I can do,” the Director was saying, “when they start to die.”
It was a matter of doing the effective thing, the General told himself, and not what was popular or satisfying to old scores and hatreds. His own father had died at the hands of the Russians. Surely that personal loss makes me a credible Pole? The bloodbath could start again quickly, no doubt about it. What did they know, those who had never held responsible public office? Their emotional siege was making him hallucinate.
“I would like to call to your attention,” the Director said more insistently, “that the problems of our zoos are widely reported in the Western media. American newsmen were here with video equipment, I’m sorry to report. They had the proper permits, of course.”
The General felt a moment of respect for the Director. The fellow knew what to say to be heard. A responsible, conscientious young man, not at all like so many corrupt officials.
“Are you a Party member?” the General asked.
The zookeeper smiled. “Unfortunately, no, General. I’m a zoologist, not political.”
They never were, the General thought with a twinge of resentment. Like the animals, they couldn’t be political, even though they lived in a political situation. They cared more for their career specialties, even for the animals, than they did for Poland.
The biscuits were sweet, but there was little in them to make the elephant strong. The people who brought them had kind, pitying faces, but they also seemed to know the two-leggeds who hid food in the nearby buildings and seemed to want elephants to perish.
The elephant knew that dyingtime was near, and that he would have to do it right here, with no privacy at all.
A face was looking at him. The hands held no biscuits. The eyes were great dark patches. The lips were pressed together.
The General wondered why he had liked zoos so much as a child. What had it been about the animals that had made his boyhood happy? That one might escape? Seeing danger contained? We’re surrounded by wild elephants, he thought. One false move and they’ll trample us to death. It will be a long time before the danger passes; elephants are big and sturdy, and take a long time to die. . . .
“Can we count on your help, General?” the young Director was saying.
I can’t move, the General thought, feeling elephantine.
“I’ll do my best,” he managed to say finally.
The Director smiled gratefully, endearingly, in contrast to the stonefaced professors when he had spoken the same words to them. Nothing short of futile resistance against the Soviets would satisfy them—not his tears, not his acceptance of their just criticisms of the Party. They had grudgingly admitted his good intentions and personal honesty, but they would never support him in their hearts. They would never love him, but he would do what had to be done to avoid bloodshed.
The universities were also zoos of a kind, where the wiser animals had to teach the more foolish ones how to live and die. A Poland outside the Soviet orbit was impossible, but it was up to Poles whether their relationship with the bear would be that of a slave or equal. Feuding would leave no chance for mutual respect, much less eventual friendship. Martial law preserved this possibility, despite the loss of economic support from the West.
“Thank you for listening,” the Director of the zoo was saying. “I know that your valuable time is limited.” The scientist smiled again. He seemed a good sort—probably a country boy educated in the city; polite and without guile. He would not be promoted.
“I’ll do what I can for you,” the General said, “but put some of the blame on American business. It’s inhumane enough even when it’s not politically directed.” He turned and followed the security man out of the park.
Maciek trembled in the muggy mid-afternoon heat. His stomach rumbled painfully. Someone was angry at him. He felt lost as he listened to the elephants snorting. The birds were silent.
Back in his office the General leaned back in his chair and fell asleep. The animals quarreled with him in a strange language. He couldn’t make it out, but it seemed that they were pleading, insisting, mocking. The strongest animals, he said to them, avoided capture; only the weakest were prisoners.
Despair and a sense of worthlessness seized him. The chimp’s pain mourned in his stomach. He could not escape by waking.
He longed for what he might do to be be loved. Polish independence would do it. With the army behind him, the Russians would think five times before invading. He would equal the great General Pilsudski in driving the Russians out of Poland.
But alas, that feat was impossible. Supplies and ammunition for the army were strictly controlled, and for every line of Poles there was a line of Russian soldiers. Polish independence of any kind would cut East Germany off from its master, precipitating German unification, and all of Eastern Europe would rise in a ferment of hope.
Nothing was simple, ever. Justice was a naive, impractical concept. Even the Americans did not really want a free Poland, because such an interface with the Soviets would only benefit the evil empire’s economy. Cartago Delenda Est!
He awoke and almost fell out of his chair as his private phone rang.
“Hallo!” he shouted, pressing the receiver to his ear.
“Wojciech! Is that you?” the Soviet Underminister of Agriculture asked.
“Of course.” The man knew well enough that no one else could pick up on this line. “What can I do for you?”
“Well, it’s the hams again, you see. We need more this month. Special occasion, you see.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“The railroad car will be waiting.”
The corrupt bastard, Jaruzelski thought bitterly, recalling the man’s weakness for Western pornographic cassettes. If he were one of my officials, I’d have hanged him by now. Andropov had turned a blind eye to him but perhaps Gorbachev would remove the parasite.
“This is very good of you, Wojciech, on such short notice. I won’t forget it.”
“Not at all, Minister.”
“You’ve had quite a week, I hear.”
Jaruzelski got up and went to the window, arranging the long cord carefully behind himself. The Minister had once offered him a cordless model, but he had neglected to take him up on it.
“Wojciech, perhaps I might do something for you? Feel free to ask. I have means. I mean if it’s within my power I’ll do it. I promise.”
Jaruzelski saw a man down in the street, reminding him of Maciek in the way he loped along by the buildings. People resembled animals of one kind or another in their faces and manners. Even human artifacts like buses and cars seemed to be animals on occasion. . . .
“Wojciech!”
General Jaruzelski swallowed hard away from the receiver. The pain from the zoo was still in his stomach.
“What’s that, Wojciech!” the Russian shouted as the connection broke up. “I lost you there! What is it you said you want?” There was some coughing and slurping on the line as the Minister downed a shot.
“Minister,” the Savior of Poland asked loudly, with a hint of defiance, “can you send some bananas?”
“Bananas, Wojciech?”
“Yes, for the zoos. Animals are dying. The shortages are an embarassment. CBS did a story on it.”
“Did you tape it?”
“No, I only heard about it today. Besides, I don’t have a VCR.”
“The Americans are so sentimental about animals! Didn’t I offer to get you a Sony?”
General Jaruzelski was silent.
“I’ll see what I can do,” the Russian said finally.
“Thank you.”
Collaboration and compromise, he thought bitterly as he hung up and sat down again. Cage bars rattled in his ears, and he felt himself slipping again behind Maciek’s eyes. His stomach burned as he looked around at his office, at the pale light streaming in through the window, at the locked door with the armed guard sitting outside. The room was a cage. It seemed normal to beg for bananas.
1988
Jumper
George Zebrowski is known largely for a kind of plausible hard sf that is in short supply. He brings that talent to this quite different but utterly convincing chiller about the relationship between a psychiatrist and a patient who wakes up in all the wrong places.
I GO TO sleep and wake up somewhere else.”
She looked directly at him as she spoke, and it seemed clear that he was dealing with an unusually controlled personality. She wore an impeccably tailored tweed business suit, white blouse, blue tie, and black shoes. Her brown hair was professionally permed; her makeup was light, with almost no lipstick. He gazed at her without comment, hoping to catch a moment of weakness in her facade, but there was nothing.
“Well, Doctor, what do you think?”
He smiled. “Oh, I doubt very much that you’re traveling in any way. You’re already there, where you wake up, but you’ve dreamed that you started somewhere else. Naturally, it seems surprising to find yourself where you actually are.”
“That is not the case, Doctor,” she replied determinedly.
“Miss Melita, you’re simply mistaking where you go to bed, nothing more.”
She grimaced, as if she’d caught him at something. “You avoid calling me by my first name, or Ms. Melita. I once went to an idiot in your profession who insisted that I use his first name. Do I intimidate you, Doctor?”
“Not at all. I’m not hung up on the authority of formal address. Some of my colleagues like it. Others simply want the patient to feel informal and relaxed.”
“Yes, they call patients by first names but introduce themselves as Dr. so-and-so.”
“I’ll go by your preferences.”
She stared at him without blinking, and he knew that it would be Miss Melita and Dr. Cheney. An old-fashioned female who might need rescuing from herself. The immaturity of the thought startled him, and he realized that she was having a strong unconscious effect on him.
He looked at her file on his desk. “I see that your physical checks out well, and you have no reported history of sleep disturbances.”
“Doctor, I have no memory of going to the places where I wake up. I waken there and have to come home. Yesterday I woke up in my ex-lover’s house. It was empty and for sale. I’m certain I was home when I fell asleep.”
“These kinds of things can be very convincing,” he said. “Were you wearing pajamas?”
“Of course not. I go to bed wearing clothes, just in case. I’ve jumped more than a dozen times in the past few months.”
“What do you think it is?” he asked in his best neutral tone.
“I don’t know. Movement from one place to another without covering the distance between,” she replied glibly.
“A kind of quantum leap?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a term from physics,” he said. Patients sometimes like to give, or hear rational-sounding explanations. Imaginative plausibility could be a sign of delusion.
“Who cares,” she said. “It happens. I know it does. The first few times were pretty embarrassing.” Her tone was insistent, but she kept her composure.
“What do you think it means?”
“I sometimes feel as if I’m searching for the right place to be,” she said, “but it keeps eluding me. I wake up in the wrong places.”
“Is there a right place?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I can’t think where it might be, but I feel strongly that it exists.”
“Doesn’t that give you a clue?” he asked, setting in motion his usual Probing rigmarole.
“What could it tell me?”
“You may be hiding it from yourself,” he said.
“I’ve thought of that. It may be a place I only know about, but have I ever visited.”
“And you may not really want to go there, while at another level you do. Anyone can be of two minds, Miss Melita. I can see, whatever is going on, that this search is important to you. My job will be to keep you from deluding yourself.”
“You’re confident I’ll take you on,” she said.
“Shall we set up a schedule? I charge by the hour, five hours paid in advance.”
She looked at him with skepticism. “I know you’re expensive, Doctor. I’d like to set a deferred-payment plan.”
He smiled at the first hint of insecurity in her voice. “Ah, but payments are part of the treatment, Miss Melita. They sow an attitude of responsibility in your unconscious, making it a partner in your recovery. You’ll get better sooner.”
There was a blush in her pale cheeks, suggesting that she was responding to his authority, even accepting that she might have a problem.
She stood up, as if to leave. “What a crock, Doctor. I simply don’t want them to know at work that I’m seeing you, so I can’t use my medical coverage. I can start paying next month, when I can draw on my savings. Anyway, you don’t believe me.”
She was beautiful, he noticed, slim yet womanly, standing on low heels in a dancer’s graceful pose, her back slightly arched, toes out a little.
“Are you successful, Doctor?” she demanded.
“I’d like to think I am,” he replied calmly.
“How long do you sleep?”
“Oh, I’d say about eight hours.”
“Really successful people sleep less than five or six,” she said.
She begrudges herself sleep, he noted, drives herself and others hard. Her lapses of memory were not surprising.
“I’d say your business has leveled off,” she continued, “and may even be on the way down. You’re heavy into investments as a hedge against a practice that won’t grow. You’re doing well at them, but they have to be fed. You could go either way in the next few years.”
He leaned back and smiled, trying not to think of what tax reform had done to his portfolio, determined not to show her she’d hit home.
“We’re off the point, Miss Melita.”
She sat down and crossed her legs. “Yes, of course. My only interest is in your competence.”
Competitive chatter was a habit with her, he realized.
“I can prove to you that I jump,” she said, with a tremor in her voice.
“You’re welcome to try,” he said, “but only if I’m to be your doctor, and I’m not sure I want to take you on.”
She swallowed, and he watched the muscles working in her pale throat. “Doctor, I apologize for my remarks about your business and character.” She leaned forward slightly. “I don’t know why this is happening to me, Doctor, but you could easily check my story. I have videotapes of me disappearing from my bed.”
“Look,” he said firmly, “it’s just not possible for you to move yourself while you’re asleep, unless you get up and convey yourself there. I know you believe you’ve disappeared from one location and appeared in another, but, take my word for it, it’s not a true experience, not at all, never. Videotapes can be faked.”
“Okay, come home with me, lock me in my bedroom, and wait. When I call you from somewhere else the next morning you’ll know it’s true.”
He knew then that he should not take her case. Simple neurotics made the best patients; they asked for help with life’s problems and only thought they were sick. They could be made to feel helped. If this woman could imagine that she teleported from her bedroom every night, it would be nothing for her to imagine worse things. To go to her home at night would be asking for a sexual-harassment suit.
