Collected Short Fiction, page 14
“I suppose,” he went on, in his tired voice, “that Athena told you she’s upset about my behavior.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but I told her not to worry. I think I ought to hear your side before I start getting jumpy too.”
“There really isn’t anything for me to say,” he continued. “I’ve been investigating a problem. Some of the conclusions I reached are upsetting. I’ve been discussing it with Yuri.”
I was, at this point, beginning to get a bad case of the creeps, and frankly I wasn’t sure why. Matthew had always been funny, and he sounded about the same as he always had.
I should be a little clearer about this. It became obvious to Athena and myself pretty early in Matthew’s life that he was very bright. He was reading avidly when he was two and was exploring higher mathematics at an age when I had found algebra a pain in the ass. By the time he was five, he was taking his friend Yuri on in games of chess over the radio and beating him regularly, although Yuri was nineteen and supposedly the top chessmaster in the world.
Athena would worry about him, but I didn’t, at least not so much. I was kind of proud of the little guy. I’d spend so much time bragging about him to Hideo that I’m surprised Hideo wouldn’t run from the room every time I mentioned the kid. I’d tell Athena not to get upset, and she would just look at me and say, “Yes, I know. Matthew’s a genius. Mentally. But he’s still a little boy emotionally, and one of these days I’m afraid he’ll run across something that his mind can handle and his emotions can’t, and, David, I don’t know what it will do to him then.”
Athena had a point. But as long as Matthew was playing around with math, and we didn’t talk to him about the situation or let him know, I didn’t see much point in getting upset.
This was different, though, I have to admit, and I sat there in the living room with Matthew and started having one hell of a case of the creeps.
“Well, just what have you been discussing with Yuri?” I asked, and I must have sounded pretty harsh when I said it because I was trying to control myself.
He didn’t answer me outright. Instead, he started getting oblique as hell about the whole thing.
“Do you know where most of the people in the world are living now?” he asked me.
“No.”
“In this country, along the western coast and the temperate areas of the eastern coast. In Europe, along the Mediterranean coast. In Russia and China, near the old urban centers. A few in Japan and England.”
“So what?” I blurted out.
“Don’t you wonder why?” Matthew asked.
I thought about it for a few seconds. “Hell, no, I don’t wonder why. Probably because of the climate.”
“That wouldn’t explain Russia and England,” Matthew said.
“Probably because that’s where the computer complexes are still working with the most efficiency. What are we playing, Matthew, twenty questions? Look, I’m your father, and I don’t want a lot of folderol. Now just what have you been up to?”
Matthew looked at me coldly. “Doesn’t that strike you as odd, David? I mean just moving and staying where the computers are still operating well.”
“Hell, no, if you ask me, it makes a lot more sense than moving to where they don’t work.” I was beginning to wonder if Matthew had the brains I had credited him with having.
Matthew sighed and gave me the same look he would probably have given a cretin. “It doesn’t make more sense than trying to repair the ones that aren’t functioning.”
“Matthew, I thought you were smart. Nobody knows enough to do that, and besides, there’s plenty of places to live where they do work, so it doesn’t matter. Now, will you get to the point?”
Athena came into the living room then, turned on the small TV and sat down. “I’m just going to watch the news from Russia, some Ukrainian couple is supposed to have a kid this week, and it’ll be their second, so I wouldn’t want to miss it.”
“I think I’ll go to my room,” Matthew said. I followed him out and up the stairs of the old house to his room.
The room was a mess. That bothered me because Matthew was an orderly kid and always kept everything in place. Frankly, I was getting agitated. There were long data sheets from the computer scattered all over the floor and books just piled in sloppy heaps all around. Twenty people wouldn’t use the computer that much in a year. I cleared a place on the bed and sat down.
“All right, young man, let’s stop fooling around. I want some straight answers. What the hell have you been up to?”
I wish now I could forget the whole conversation. I wish to hell somebody had blanked those computers, I mean, everybody knows it all anyway; and I wish somebody had at least kept Matthew from going near them. But nobody did. I sure didn’t. I wasn’t around enough.
Matthew sat down next to his desk. He looked tired. “All right, David. Yuri and I have been exploring the population decline.” The kid just blurted it out like that. It was obscene, pointless. My stomach turned over.
“How much history do you know?” he asked.
“Enough,” I replied.
“Then you know what the pre-Plague population was at the beginning of the twenty-first century.”
“Between five and six billion,” I said. My throat was really dry and I began to wish I had dialed myself a drink before I came upstairs. “Look, Matthew, I don’t think much about this business, and if you don’t mind my saying so, I don’t think it’s healthy. Now you had better come to the point, because I want to know exactly what you’ve been getting into.”
“After the first Plague,” Matthew said in a toneless voice, “it was down to five hundred million. After the survivors recovered from the devastation, it seems they began to realize that it wasn’t as bad as it might have seemed. There was a high level of technology and enough people to keep things going. The computers were handling most things anyway, and the Plague had hit hardest in underdeveloped areas. Unfortunately, the viruses were still dormant. Twenty years later, the second Plague hit and left about thirty million survivors. It was after this that a vaccine was discovered and the population immunized. Unfortunately, it was also discovered in due time that most of the population was sterile.” Matthew paused. “How many people are alive now, David? You know, don’t you?”
I was shaking. “Hell, I don’t know. A hundred thousand. A lot.”
“An overestimation,” Matthew said. “About seventy-five thousand.”
I was really getting upset. “Now, you listen to me, Matthew. You shouldn’t dwell on this bullshit. We’re doing all right. It’s not the sort of thing people think about.”
He ignored me. “Yuri got a list of Plague symptoms from his computer data center. He got curious. We started looking into it. We found out things. We think someone, or some group, synthesized the virus and deliberately released it without actually realizing how virulent it was.”
I exploded. “Matthew, that’s insane. Don’t even say it.” Matthew picked up a pile of data sheets. “Think about it, David. A world with six billion people, most of them starving. A rising birth rate. Depletion of resources. Most of the wealth centered in a few countries. What do you do? I viewed some old vidtapes. The possibility of genocide was openly discussed as a solution.”
I was shaking. I thought someone had erased those damn things before.
“The Plague broke out first in India and Africa, then South America. We think whoever might have released the virus wanted it confined to those regions. But it spread.”
“Matthew, this is all a lot of morbid ancient history, and there’s no sense going into it now. There isn’t any more Plague. We’ve got a good setup. People can do pretty much what they want.”
“Except have children,” Matthew said.
“Just what are you driving at, Matthew?” I shouted. It was no wonder Athena was upset with the kid.
He just looked at me with those dead eyes. “We’re dying out, David. I don’t know why, but we are. No one wants to think about it. Talking about it isn’t allowed. Everybody gets excited when a baby’s born, but nobody’s doing anything about the problem. Maybe we still carry residual effects from the Plague. But nobody’s doing anything because the whole topic is forbidden. If you think about it, you’re insane, or upsetting things. You’re just supposed to do what you like, dial your drinks or drugs, and enjoy yourself. And you don’t even tell the kids. You can’t even train us anymore so we could do something about it. Do you think we’re all stupid? Don’t you think we should know? You don’t even really use the computers, not really, not for anything important.” Matthew stared at his prosthetic hands. “And look at the kids you do have. Freaks. I’m one. Yuri’s another. I’ll bet we’re not the only ones.”
I was trying to control myself. “Matthew, I think I’ve heard just about enough from you. Now I want you to throw all this damn data into the dispose-all, and then I want you in bed. And I don’t want you thinking about this anymore. Do I make myself clear?”
“Sure, David.”
“All right.” I left the room and went back downstairs. Athena had turned off the TV and was reading.
“They didn’t have the baby yet,” she said, putting down the book and looking up. “Oh, my God, David, you’re upset too.”
“You bet I am.” I dialed another drink, a double. I wanted to be anesthetized. “There’s only one thing to do. I’m going to get hold of Ramon Martinez in San Diego—he knows medicine, and he does a lot of reading on nervous disorders—and then you and I are going to take Matthew out there as soon as possible. If we have to put him on special drugs, we will. And in the meantime, he is not to go near that computer or have any little chats with Yuri.”
“Oh, no, David,” she said. “It’s not that bad, it can’t be.”
“Athena, you’ve got to face facts. I had a pretty hair-raising discussion with our son, and he’s a little too young to be holding psychotic ideas that would unbalance anybody, let alone a kid.” Athena started crying and I took her by the shoulders. “Now come on, honey, you’ve got to face up to it. Nobody should let a kid think about it.”
“All right, David,” she said tonelessly.
“I’ll call Martinez tomorrow and fix it up.” I heard footsteps and turned around. It was Matthew, with about twelve tons of data sheets. He walked quietly into the kitchen and put them into the dispose-all and then came out.
“I’ll tuck you in, Matthew,” said Athena, and then she walked over and put her arm around the little fellow’s shoulders, and they walked upstairs.
And that was the last time I saw him that way, my only son, probably the only kid I’ll ever have. He must have wandered out of the house early in the morning, and when he didn’t come back, we went to look for him. We walked to an old school playground where Athena said he would go sometimes. He wasn’t there among the rusty swings and the broken see-saw; he wasn’t on the bench where Athena said he usually sat staring at the empty swings.
But he had been there earlier. Athena found his cap by the old bench. We circled back toward the coast, that rocky, savage-looking shore, and as we came to the edge of one of the high rocky cliffs, we heard what he must have heard.
Voices. High, childlike voices on the wind, laughing voices down near the shore.
Athena looked at me, startled by the sound. She began to hurry toward the edge of the cliff, but I grabbed her arm tightly. I didn’t want her near the edge.
It was only the wind, of course. I knew that as soon as the voices faded and the wind died down. We heard only the waves smashing against the rocky shore. We climbed down to the small sandy part of the beach along some rocks near the cliff.
Athena saw him first, a small broken body on the rocks under the cliff, and she began to scream and tear at her hair until I grabbed her hands, trying to restrain her. We knew, even before I went over and picked up his body, even before I carried my son back to her, that he was gone.
We buried him ourselves, near the bench in the school-yard, and then old man Contemanopoulos came to take his daughter Athena back to New York, away from the old house and the rocky shore. She took none of Matthew’s things with her. She never went back, as far as I know. Neither have I.
He must have heard the voices too, that’s what I told Laura, he must have heard them and then lost his balance when he ran to see if there were children on the beach. At least, that’s what I think; maybe it’s more comforting than any alternative would be, the possibility that he might have hurtled off that cliff deliberately. Matthew was too intelligent to believe there actually were children on the beach, but what might he have felt when he heard the voices of the wind?
“He shouldn’t have found out so young,” I said to Laura when I could finally talk about it. “He would have felt differently when he was older, he could have lived with what we have, at least.”
“Maybe not,” she said. “Maybe it would have been even harder for him then.”
Hideo and Inger have been sympathetic about the whole thing, but they’re only human, and now they brag to me about their daughter Reiko Birgitta and show her off while I try to smile and hide my feelings.
We went to the beach yesterday, the five of us. Reiko’s starting to crawl now, and we watched her gurgle at the sand and shriek at the gulls. Reiko, one of the last ones, probably, even though she doesn’t know it yet and won’t find out if Hideo can help it.
There’s no point in thinking about the future now, nor the past, which compiled humanity’s dreams and goals; and so I sat and watched the glint of the sun on Inger’s light hair, Laura’s dark feet pressing into the white sand, and Hideo kneeling by Reiko as she explored the shore, little fists grasping the sand, then letting it slip through the small fingers.
IMT
New York-based Pamela Sargent has been producing fine, tough-minded short science fiction stories for such magazines as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and New Worlds over the past four years, appearing in science fiction anthologies as well. This year marks the sale of her first novel, Cloned Lives, to Gold Medal.
Holding a master’s degree in philosophy from Harpur College, State University of New York, Pamela Sargent brings not only this academic background but her great concern for the role of women in the next generation to this tale of bureaucratic hassle.
Lisa Fernandez closed the folder containing the IMT report, stared at it for a few seconds, then swiftly opened a desk drawer and shoved it inside. She shut the drawer and began to scratch her desk top with her fingernails. I can’t handle this, she thought; it’s too much.
Lisa turned in her chair and faced the wall screen in back of her desk. She leaned toward the console on her left and pressed a button. An image of the Westchester areology appeared on the screen, a multi-leveled pyramid of houses surrounded by trees and hills. She pressed another button and the camera panned in for a close-up. The levels of the areology were beginning to show signs of age. Paint was peeling from the houses and the streets running along each level were cluttered with old newsfax sheets, empty bottles, and abandoned toys.
She pressed another button. NO GO, the red letters seemed to shriek at her. They had been painted on an abandoned truck along 110th Street. She watched the screen and saw the abandoned buddings, glass windows shattered. This area was in such disrepair that there had once been talk of walling it in and moving the inhabitants to another part of the city. But there had been no other place for them to go and finally the people had built their own barricades, blocking the streets with abandoned buses, cinder blocks and whatever they could find. 110th Street was the boundary. NO GO. Lisa had grown up there, determined to get out.
The city was a prison and a trap. Lisa had made it only as far as upper Manhattan. She could not live any further from her office and be sure of getting to work every day. The subways were rarely on schedule and a hovercab was almost impossible to get. Cars, of course, had been banned from the streets years ago and it was not safe to walk in many areas. Some people had managed to leave the city altogether, but in recent years many of them had returned, unable to find a way to earn a living outside of the urban clusters that dotted the country like cancers. So they huddled together, unable even to move around the city freely. Her thoughts reminded her again of the report sitting inside her desk drawer. That damn transportation committee, Lisa thought, I ask it to help solve things and it only compounds my problems.
Lisa’s picturephone buzzed at her. She picked up the receiver and saw the face of her receptionist, Linda Marat, on the small screen attached to the phone.
“Mr. Gorton is here,” said Linda. Her green eyes stared expressionlessly at Lisa from the screen, and her characteristically empty smile seemed plastered on her lovely face.
“Send him in,” Lisa muttered.
“Certainly, Ms. Fernandez,” said Linda, still smiling. Lisa hung up the phone, then pushed a button on her console. 110th Street vanished from the screen.
Her door opened and Dan Gorton strode in, slamming the door behind him. “Hello, Lisa,” he said in his low voice. He walked quickly to her side of the desk, kissed her on the forehead, and smiled. She smiled back at the stocky, white-haired man. Ten years before, she had fallen in love with Dan. It had almost been a fever and she had passed through those days intoxicated by it, unable to sleep well, her senses heightened to everything around her. His lovemaking had not satisfied her but had only increased her desire. Gradually the passion had burnt itself out but it had been replaced by friendship and a quieter love. Occasionally the passion would flare again, but it took the form of arguments and fights. We’re both too stubborn, thought Lisa, if we had any kind of a life together, it wouldn’t be peaceful. She was reminded of Ramon at that point, and tendrils of guilt brushed at her mind.
Dan leaned against the desk and folded his arms. “I have to admit,” he said, “that Linda looks as beautiful as ever. And as stupid.”
“Don’t make fun of her, Dan, she does her job.” Linda did. She greeted everyone courteously, let in those who had passes or appointment cards and turned away anyone else. Linda, being retarded, did not listen to excuses or explanations. She couldn’t understand them. She saved Lisa and her security guards some time and kept out unwelcome visitors. Besides, hiring Linda had set an example for the other city workers most of whom were reluctant to hire any of the thousands of retarded people in the city. Lisa had no idea where all the retarded people had come from, although there were theories about the effects of pollution on various parts of the populace. She said quietly, “You’d be surprised at how many of the men around here come in just to see Linda. She’s beautiful and she doesn’t say much, I guess they think she’s the ideal woman.”
