“I was just talking about you.”
“To your little black box?”
“To what’s left of my wife.”
“I didn’t mean to be flippant. It’s very personal and dear to many people, I know.”
“Not to me. Annie’s gone. I’m still here…and it’s getting to be the end of summer.”
He motioned to the nimbus, and she walked to it with her eyes still on his face. “You’re a very attractive human,” she said, removing her clothes and sliding into the free-fall glow.
“Can I get you something? A crystal? Something to eat?”
“Perhaps some water.”
He whistled up the dispenser. It rose from the grass-rugged deck, and revolved. “Fresh water, three sparkles of seed in it,” he said. The checker in the dispenser mixed up the drink and set it out for him to remove.
He carried it to her and she took it, giving him a faint look of amusement. “I seem to entertain you.”
She drank from the crystal, barely moving her lips. “You do.”
“You aren’t from the Near Colony.”
“I’m not a Terrestrial.”
“I didn’t want to say that; I thought it might offend.”
“We needn’t circle each other, Mr. Redditch. Clearly, I sought you out, I want something from you, we can be straightline with one another.”
“Apart from sex, what do you want from me?”
“My, you’re taking the initiative.”
“If you don’t care for me, you can move out now. I’m frankly not up to badinage.” He turned sharply and went back to the dispenser. “It’s the end of summer,” he said, softly.
She sipped at the cool water in the crystal. He turned back to her, a melt in its helical container warm against his hand, and caught her unguarded expression: there was so much amusement in her face, in every line of her languid body, he felt like an adolescent again. “Oh, Mr. Redditch!” Her chiding was as deep and meaningful as that of a mommy’s suitor, feigning concern for the offspring of the ex-husband. He turned back a second time, feeling violence in him for the first time in years; furious at her for playing him like a puppet; furious at himself for being furious.
“That’s all…get out.”
“The end of summer, Mr. Redditch?” She made no move to go. “What do you mean by the end of summer?”
“I said out. I mean out.”
“You’re going to ignore the rejuvenation next time? You must want something on the other side very badly.”
“Who the hell are you? What do you want from me? It’s been a bad day, a bad week, a rotten year and a stinking cycle, so why don’t you just put an egg in your shoe and beat it.”
“My name is Jeen.”
He shook his head, totally bewildered. “What?”
“If we’re going to touch, you should at least know my name,” she said, and held out the cyrstal for him to take it away. But when he reached out, she laid her other hand on his wrist and drew him into the nimbus. It had been a very long time since he had wanted a woman this way, but his body betrayed him the moment her lips touched his naked chest. He lay back and closed his eyes and she made it all silk.
“Talk to me,” she said.
The things he said were not love matters.
He spoke of what it was to live as something like a man for over two hundred years, and to grow weary of it because its infinite variety did grow stale. He spoke of what he did to send emotion and dreams of conflict to a race that ruled whole galaxies, entire nations of planets, great sectors of space. He was a programmer of death. A practitioner of one of the last occupations left to humans. And he spoke of ennui, of jaded appetites, of nights and days aboard a moonstone vessel as large as a city. Roaming through emptiness till worlds were pinpointed. And then they were surveyed with sophisticated equipment that told them the peoples who had lived there were gone, but their racial memories were still preserved in the stones and soil and silted river bottoms of the planet. Like ghosts of alien dreams, the remembrances of all times past were still there, contained forever, immolated in the soulskins of worlds, like haunted houses that had soaked up the terrible events that had transpired within and retained them as ambience. He spoke of Designers and their special talents—those peculiar alien empaths—and how they designed the demise of whole solar systems.
How the endless sleeping memories of the peoples who had lived there were gathered up as the sun went nova; how they streamed into the sensu and the tanger and the other empathy machines, to be codified and stored and then taken back to the human worlds, to the New Colony, to sustain the weary existences of those who had no fresh dreams of their own.
And he closed with words about how he hated it.
“But the worlds are empty, aren’t they?” she asked, and then put her face once more to his tensing flesh.
He could not speak. Not then.
But later he said, yes, they were empty.
Always empty, she asked.
Yes, always empty.
You’re a very humane race.
I don’t think there’s anything left of humanity to us. We do it because it’s for a greater good. And he laughed at the words, greater good. His fingers roamed over her body. He grew excited once more. It had been so long ago.
“On my world,” she said, “we live much warmer than you. In times past, my race had the power of flight. We have a heritage of sky. Closed in like this makes me uneasy.” He held her in the circle of his arms, his thigh between her long legs, and he drew his fingers down through her thick, deep blue hair.
“I know words and songs from four hundred years of myself and my race,” he said, “and I wish to God I could think of something more potent to use, but ‘I love you’ and ‘Thank you’ are the only ones that come to mind…those, and ‘The Earth moved,’ but I’d better not use it, or I’ll start to laugh, and I don’t want to laugh.”
He slid his hand down to her stomach. She had no navel. Very small breasts. Extra ribs. She was very beautiful.
“I’m happy.”
“When we care, we have a way of making it last much longer. Would you?”
He nodded and her head lay at his shoulder and she felt him move. She sat up, kneeling before him in the nimbus. Her earring was hollow, and from it she took a tiny jewel that pulsed with pale light. She crushed it under his nose and leaned forward so she could inhale the pale light mist that sprang up from the dead jewel. Then she lay down again, precisely fitting in to the waiting space.
And in a moment they began again…
…as she took him with her to her world.
A warm world, all sky, with a single sun that held the same pale light as the jewel she had used to drug him. They flew, and he saw her people as they had been ten thousand years before. Lovely with wings, bright with the expectation of a thousand years of life.
Then she let him see how they died. In the night.
They fell from the sky like tracers of light, brilliant, burning. Onto the great dust deserts already filled with the ashes of their ancestors.
Her voice was warm and soft in his mind. “My people live with the sky for a thousand years; when their time comes, they go to rest with all those who came before them.
“The deserts of dust are the resting places of my race, generation upon generation, returned to their primal dust…waiting for the ten thousand years to pass until they are reborn.”
The world of sky and dust swam in his mind and as though it were captured in the catcheye it faded back and back; he was looking down on the world of the phoenix creatures from deep space, and he knew why she had drugged him, why she had taken him into her mind’s memory, why she had come to him.
The death he had programmed had been the death of her sun, her world. Her people.
They came back to the nimbus within the suite in the moonstone vessel. He could not move, but she turned him so he could stare out through the cycle port at the emptiness where her world had been. Only dust remained. A
nd she let him hear one last trailing scream from that world, at the moment of its death; the wail of her race, a nation that would never rise from its own dust and ashes.
The ten thousand years might pass, but the phoenix people would never again soar through their skies.
“Can you hear me? Can you speak? I want you to know why.”
His mouth was thick and his speech was clumsy, but he heard her and he could speak and he said he understood. She bent to him and took his face in her cool hands. “Centuries ago, my ancestors were sent away. They were…” her hesitation was filled with pain and loneliness, “…imperfect.” She turned away for a moment and he saw high on her back two knots of atrophied muscle, and the vision of winged men and women came to him as it had in the vision she’d let him see, and he understood that, too. Then she turned back, stronger. “There were a few like them in every generation, and they gave birth to others who gave birth to us. But no more. Now we are so few, so very few. Now almost all the people are gone.”
“It was a mistake,” he said. She could not tell what he had said through the drug, and he repeated it. She looked at him and nodded gently; but she was stronger.
“You said there was very little left of humanity in your race. That is the truest thing you could have said. What I do is what will be done to all of you. There are a few more of my race, and when they are gone there will be others, of other races. And they will finish the job. You may not be the first, but you will certainly not be the last. Your time is past. You had your chance and turned it against every race you ever met. And now that your time is done, you think you’ll take everyone with you.”
He could not regret dying, as he knew he would die. She was right. The time for men had come and gone, and what they did now was useless, but more than useless…it was senseless.
Unlike her people, men did not have the good grace to go off alone and die. They tried, in their deranged way, to drag the universe into the grave with them. Not just the leaching out of preserved memories for the momentary amusement of the jaded and corrupt, but everything men did, now that they owned the universe. It was better that the human race be aided in its slovenly demise than to be allowed to leave nothing but ashes when it vanished at last.
He had killed her race, lying sleeping, waiting to be reborn in flames. So he could not hate her. Nor did she need to know that she brought him the dearest gift he had ever received. It was the end of summer and he was content knowing he would not have to wait for the chill of winter to descend on his race.
“I’m happy,” he said.
She may have known what he meant. He thought she knew: her eyes were moist as she bent to him for the final time, and kissed him.
There were flames and heat as great as a nova and then there was nothing but ash that floated freely in the nimbus.
When they came to the suite of the sensu programmer, none of them knew they were looking at the last days of men. Only Keltin, the Designer, seemed to understand, in some deep racial way, and he said nothing.
But he smiled in expectation as the moonstone ship sailed away into the eternal night.
Palatine, Illinois; Los Angeles, California/1972
4.
Paulie Charmed the Sleeping Woman
“She’ll be listening, Paulie, you can bet on that,” I said to him, touching him lightly on the shoulder. “She ain’t dead, Paulie, nobody like her could ever really die.” But he didn’t care, Paulie didn’t. All he knew was that one fine listener, that girl he’d dug and loved and spent so many notes on, she was gone. Some bad thing had happened and Ginny was dead, in her family’s crypt out in the boneyard, and they wouldn’t even allow Paulie to come to the funeral. Rich parents, Ginny’s parents, and they was bugged at her first for having left the family and the old escutcheon, and second for having taken up with what they called “a broken down wastrel jazz musician.”
Which was flat-out not true. Paulie was the best.
People like that have no idea what it’s like, hearing a horn like Paulie. Bright as a penny, and soft and quick and full of tiny things being said close into your ear…that was Paulie. You can know Miles, and you can remember Brownie, and you can talk it up that Diz uses a fine axe, and still not take it away from Paulie. He’s what Chet Baker might have become, if he hadn’t turned himself inside out and lost it all, or (and Hentoff called me a whack one night when I said this to him) if Bix had lived and gone through swing and bop and funk and cool and soul crap. But that’s just my feeling, falling down on the way Paulie phrases, and his soft blue stuff, and the airy changes. That’s just my bag, so forget it; has nothin’ to do with Paulie and Ginny, except I wanted to make it clear that Paulie was good. Maybe great, even. No one can tag great, I’m hip, but Paulie was as close to it as I’ll ever care to go.
So Ginny’s folks had no truth in their put-down. He was not only the finest trumpet I’ve ever blown guitar with, but after that axe of his, he loved Ginny more than his eyes, even. So when she died, and they took her away—and her snotty sonofabitch brother Karl or whatever the hell that fruit’s name was spit on Paulie—and put her in their creepy tomb, Paulie bust up pretty bad. And I said to him:
“Paulie, you got to listen, man, because Ginny’ll always be with you. She loved to hear you play, Paulie, she really loved to hear you play, and wherever she is now, she’s hearing you. So you got to get back with it, because if you let it lay there, then she won’t hear a thing, ever.”
But it didn’t take until later. Then Paulie got pretty smashed. He couldn’t hold his liquor in the first place, and when he had to blow five sets a night, without her happy, loving round moony-face down there in front, it made him want to get plowed even more. So he got completely corked out of his nut, and he came to me while I was packing up the Gibson, and he said, “Johnnie, I gotta go play for her.”
Marshall, and Norman Skeets, both of them were halfway out the door of the club when Paulie laid it on me. They paused on the steps going up to the street, and they waited for me to talk him out of it and take him home to the sack, so they could go back to their respective broads and wife. So I launched into it, and tried to calm him, but he was stuck on the idea.
“I’m goin’ over to that thing they stuck her into, Johnnie, and I’m gonna charm her outta there. I’m gonna play so good she’ll wake up and cry and come back to me, Johnnie.” He meant it. The kook really meant it. He wanted to go find that uppity creepy cemetery where Ginny’s blue-blood parents had stuck her body, and blow trumpet for the dead. It was all at once laughable and pitiable and creepy. Like a double-talker giving you the business with the frammis on the fortestan, and you standing there wondering what the hell is happening.
I tried to get him to sit down, but he had the horn in his mitt, and he was yanking away from me, walking a helluva lot straighter and truer than a drunk had any right to be walking. Right for the stairs and the outside.
Well. To make it short, we tried everything short of decking him, but he was set on it, so we came around to thinking maybe it would snap him out of it, that maybe he was acting nutty this way because he hadn’t been allowed to attend the funeral and he felt guilty, though God knows Paulie hadn’t had anything to do with the taxi that had run Ginny down in the street outside that Detroit club where Paulie and the rest of us had been booked.
So we figured it might straighten him out, like I say, and we got him to promise that if he blew for Ginny he’d come home and go to sleep.
So we piled into Marshall’s Falcon and we drove out to the Island—and Long Island late at night is much creepier than Spanish Harlem—and finally found the cemetery. It was surrounded by a big iron fence, but Paulie made Marshall drive up close, and then we all got out, and with Marshall yelling that we’d dent his top, and Skeets telling him to shut up before we got pinched, we climbed on the car and over the fence.
Into the tombstones. Dark and foggy and Christ it was just like a horror flick, except there went Paulie, like some kind of a nut, all
through the tall grass where the graves hadn’t been dug yet, past the piles of ready dirt, around a gang of tombs, and down this line of stones like he knew exactly where he was going.
As it turned out, he didn’t have no more idea of where the hell he was going than we did. But we tagged along, and after we’d been circling and careening around there for ten or fifteen minutes, Marshall went hssst! and we dug him pointing to a big black shape with two dark angels hovering on one foot each, like gargoyles or something.
We called Paulie back (wondering where the caretaker was, if they had one, and why he hadn’t heard us bumbling around in there). He came tottering over, and when he saw the legend on the bronze plate beside the door of that tomb, he sank down on his knees and we heard him making little talking noises to the ground, or to himself, maybe, but very sad and lonely and wanting.
It said:
VIRGINIA FORREST MADISON
Beloved Daughter
Born April 7, 1936
Died July 23, 1961
“She is always with us.”
R.I.P.
And the other three of us just stood there quietly, remembering her, the way she had been before that stupid taxi sent her through a florist’s window. We remembered how she’d sit with one Scotch and two dozen cigarettes, a whole night, digging Paulie on the bandstand and just loving him with her eyes. We remembered it, and none of us felt it was wrong for Paulie to be here. I was glad I was with him. He was a good guy, and he didn’t deserve all this pain.
Then Paulie got up, and he started to blow.
He put the horn to his mouth, and the little hard muscle-ridges of his upper lip stood out, and he started to blow something low and soft and new. It was a strange sound, all minor-key and repetitive, with a wistful, searching thread in it. I’d never heard it before, and I knew damned well no one else had ever heard it, either.
It was like a million black birds with white wings sailing into the night sky. Like a sheet of coolness being drawn down over a fire. Like Paulie hungry and crying and asking her, charming her, calling her, out of that crypt, out into the night to hear him playing.