If he didn’t tell her and she died by surprise, would that be less cruel than telling her? Alista wasn’t a religious man, but his Polynesian heritage still impressed him with the idea that dignity and a certain courage in facing one’s end led to better relations in the afterlife.
Relations to what, he couldn’t say—he’d long since stopped speculating about things after death. Death was merely the final solving of mysteries, one way or another.
Karen broke out of her pose of deep sorrow when the idea came to her that she wasn’t going to survive. She couldn’t shake it because she could visualize nothing beyond the walls of the crippled ship. She went to Alista on the bridge and again the uncomfortable waiting for words began.
Alista spoke first, adjusting his seat and manufacturing an excuse to concentrate on the controls. “I thought you were asleep.”
“Couldn’t.”
“It would be good if you could get some rest.”
“I’ve been sleeping for hours,” she said. “I have more questions.”
“Ask away,” Alista said.
“What’s going to keep the rescue ship from getting here?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t lie to me!” she said, indignant. “I’m not a little girl.”
“I see,” he said. He wanted to ask, And have you had lovers and children, and lost people you loved and understood with the grace of your own years what they lost by dying?
“It’s filthy,” she said, “just filthy, not telling me what’s going to happen.”
“I don’t want to make you unhappy.”
“I’m not a child,” she said softly, evenly.
Alista lifted the shoulder with Jerk on it and patted the orange lump, head cocked to one side. “You may make it. You’ll last longer than I will, anyway. But more than likely the ship will hit a rock in the belt of moonlets and everything will go …” He made a whoosh with lips and slapped his palms together.
“It will?”
He nodded.
“Goodbye to all, then.”
“Hello to what?” he grinned.
“Where are you from?” she asked, and he told her. He talked for a few minutes, telling of old Earth, where she’d never been, of Molokai in a group of islands in a big ocean, of schools and brown children and going away to seek the stars.
She spoke of her schools on Satiyajit, and the boy friend who waited for her, and of her parents. When she could find nothing more to say, she told him how little she had really seen. She was surprised to find she had no more self-pity, only a deep well of honesty which told her all the sad, sad pressure in her gut was something human, of course, but of no use to anybody, least of all her.
They ate dinner together in silence. Alista’s face was more relaxed, lines untensed, and his cheeks less wrinkled. But he grew visibly more pale and weaker.
Alone in his cabin, he vomited up his food and slept fitfully, sweating, on the floor, wrapped in a curtain unhooked from the lounge wall. He couldn’t stand the formless comfort of the net.
“Let’s be a little happy,” Karen said when the sleep period was over and she met Alista in the hall around the gymnasium. “Can you make the music play?” He said he could, but he was too weak to dance. “Then let me dance for you,” she said. “You won’t mind?”
He could hardly mind. She slipped on blue tights and pulled her hair into a long braid, putting a round white cap on her head. With a clapper in one hand and a bell in the other, she showed him a smooth ballet to orchestrated concréte sounds.
She moved in slow motion in the low gravity, but when she finished her breath came in heavy gasps. Her face, flushed with exertion, showed no awareness of the upcoming third passage.
Alista put himself to bed an hour later and took a small drink of water from a cup brought by Karen. With the weakening of his blood, his face was pale; with the failure of his liver, it was turning yellow.
He asked her to get him the kit from the medical officer’s cabin and she did so. When she came back he saw she’d been crying and he asked her why.
“I can’t hold it back,” she said. “I just wish I was never born, to have to feel like I do now. It’s all so damned useless! I haven’t seen or done anything, anything at all!”
“A little while ago you said you weren’t a little child. Do you still think that?”
“No,” she said. “I feel like I’ve just been born.”
“Would you like to hear a story?” he asked. “Maybe it’ll make both of us feel better.”
“All right,” she said.
“I was a gigolo once, a long time ago, and do you know whom I was a gigolo to?” Karen shook her head, no. “I was a consort to Baroness Anna Sigrid-Nestor.”
“You knew her?” Karen asked, not quite believing. Anna Sigrid Nestor had been the richest woman in the galaxy, with her control of Dallat Enterprises, the third largest Economische.
“I did. I knew her for three years, the last three years of her life. She was a hundred and fifty years old and she was an abstainer. She didn’t use juvenates because—well, I never did find out exactly why, but even when her doctor told her she was going to die soon, she refused them. She also refused prosthetics and transplants.
“The last year, I couldn’t be her gigolo any more. She finally gave that up.” He smiled at the woman’s perseverance and Karen managed a grin of half-understanding. “But I stayed on her ship. She liked to talk with me. Everybody else was too scared to come near her. She kept me on her flagship until she died.” He stopped to regain his breath.
“That damned old woman, do you know what she had planned for her funeral? She was going to have her body sealed in a sublight ship and shot into a protostar in the Orion nebula. She thought she could radiate throughout the galaxy then and be immortal that way.
“A few weeks before she died, with the flagship warping to the nebula, she realized what she was doing. She was contradicting her own beliefs. She wanted to call it off. But she hadn’t been thinking too well, she’d been getting senile—though I hadn’t noticed—and she had ordered that all the ship’s officers be fired without benefits if the original mission wasn’t fulfilled.
“It was very sad. Nobody would listen to her. Now she wanted to be buried like everybody else of her faith, without pretension, and she couldn’t. She told me and I tried to fight the officers, but they wouldn’t budge. They said there was no way out for them. I think maybe they were taking a little revenge on her for years of … Well, she was a strong woman.”
“That’s horrible,” Karen said.
Alista nodded. “We were all waiting for her to die, and you know what I began to do? Me, tough old Cammis Alista, I swore I’d never let myself get so involved with another woman again. You know, she was ugly and wrinkled and her breasts were dry and flat, but what she’d been and done; when she was dying, I loved her for those things. And I wanted to make her live. But there was no way out.” He swallowed. “I talked with her just like you and I are talking now, and she told me why she had never wanted to live forever.
“‘Alista,’ she said, ‘there’s something very odd about living. It’s not how long you live, not how long a bird flies, but how high you reach and what you learn when you get there. Just like a bird that flies as high as it can, and only does it once before going too near the sun. Think of the glory it must feel to go closer than anyone else!’”
He closed his eyes to rest. They were pink with ruptured vessels. “I asked her, ‘What if we never get near the sun at all?’ And she said that none of us ever do, really, but we have to work to make ourselves think that way. To think that we really do. She said, ‘When I last saw the sun, the sun I was born under, it was something I didn’t even pay attention to. I didn’t care about it. When I last saw the Earth I was rich and young and it didn’t matter to me that I might never come back.
’
“The doctor kicked me out of her room before she died. But she wrote a note later. When I read it she was dead and they had just shot her off into the protostar cluster.”
“What was the note?” Karen asked.
“A poem. I don’t know who wrote it, maybe she did. But it said, ‘When last I saw my final sun, I was cold and didn’t mind the dark. But now, so near, my chill needs your warmth, and I cry for the warmth denied, the dark to come. I want to sing more, say more words, love again.’ That was all she wrote.”
“Do you know what she meant?”
“No,” Alista said. “I took juvenates like everybody else. I didn’t want to die as she had. When she was gone there was nothing left. A little bit of the dark world came in after her, and she didn’t even come to my dreams.”
Jerk crawled up from the blankets and squatted on Alista’s chest, examining his face carefully with extended eyes.
“I don’t want to die either,” Karen said.
Alista smiled in agreement. “I’ll trade you places, little girl,” he said. “I’ll take your loneliness for my quick end.”
“Maybe I’ll be saved,” she said. “Maybe we can pass through the ring without hitting anything.”
She didn’t cry for the old spaceman when he was gone. She walked to the lounge, taking the orange animal with her. She didn’t have the strength to write anything, and it didn’t much matter anyway, so she spoke out loud. She stroked the orange lump and talked of all the places and things she wanted to see again, and do again, all the people she wanted to meet again.
“There’s my parents,” she said. Silence. “And Allen. And my friends at school. I would like to dance some more, but I’d probably never be any good. I’d like to …”
She was going to say “have children,” but that was too much to even begin to understand.
“I’ll miss not seeing things again. There’s the lake where we swam at Ankhar, with its snaky blue fish. And my room at—”
The Fall of the House of Escher
Janet Berliner Gluckman asked me to contribute to a collection of science fiction and fantasy stories, to be selected and approved by David Copperfield, the magician. Each story would touch upon magic in some form or another. While I could easily imagine writing a fantasy story about magic, a science fiction story presented a bigger challenge. I grabbed up a few books about the history of legerdemain and stage magic, and soon had an idea.
A rather wealthy and powerful acquaintance, discussing the future of mass entertainment, once shook me by declaring, at the end of a conversation, “A hundred million people can’t be wrong.”
I wasn’t so sure.
I wondered whether an entertainer could ever possibly satisfy a hundred million people on a regular basis, without undergoing some sort of undesirable transformation.
I then upped the ante; how about a hundred billion people, all mesmerized by centuries of cleverly designed, spiritually empty corporate amusement. What would it take to satisfy them?
Edgar Allan Poe was, I thought, an appropriate inspiration for such a tale of illusion, show business, and fear. Connecting Poe to a charge of something like Cyberpunk makes this one of my most chilling and effective stories, I think.
“Hoc est corpus,” said the licorice voice. “Lich, arise.”
The void behind my eyes filled. Subtle colors pinwheeled against velvet. Oiled thoughts raced, unable to grab.
The voice slid like black syrup into my ears.
“Once dead, now quick. Arise.”
I opened my eyes. My fingers curled across palm, thumb touched pinkie, tack of prints on skin, twist and pull of muscles in wrist, the first things necessary. No pain in my joints. Hands agile and strong.
Tremors gone.
I shivered.
“I’m back,” I said.
“Quick and quick,” the voice said
I turned to see who spoke in such lovely black tones. My eyes focused on a brown oval like rich fine wood, ivory eyes with ruby pupils, face square and stern but untouched by age.
“How does it feel to be inside again, and whole? I am a doctor. You can tell.”
I opened my mouth. “No pain,” I said. “I feel … oily, inside. Smooth and slick.”
“Young,” the face said. I saw the face in profile and decided, from the timbre of the voice and general features, that this was a woman. The smoothness of her skin reminded me of the unlined surface of a painting. She wore long black robes from neck to below where I lay on an elevated bed or table. “Do you have memories?”
I swallowed. My throat felt cool. I thought of eating and remembered one last painful meal, when swallowing had been difficult. “Yes. Eating. Hurting.”
“Your name?”
“Something. Cardino.”
“Cardino, that’s all?”
“My stage name. My real name. Is. Robert … Falucci.”
“That is right. When you are ready, you may stand and join them for dinner. Roderick invites you.”
“Them?”
“Roderick suggested you, and the five voted to bring you back. You may thank them, if you wish, at dinner.”
The face smiled.
“Your name?” I asked.
“Ont. O-N-T.”
The face departed, robes swishing like waves. Lights came up. I rolled and propped myself on one elbow, expecting pain, feeling only an easeful smoothness. I suspected that I had died. I surmised I had been frozen, as I had paid them to do, the Nitrogen Fixers, and that…
Lich, she had called me. Body, corpse. In one of my flashier shows I had reanimated a headless woman. Spark coils and strobes and a big van de Graaf generator had made the hair on her severed head stand on end.
I slipped my naked legs down from the table, found the coolness of a tessellated tile floor. My fumbling fingers found the robe on the table as I stared at the ornate floor tiles: men and women, each perfectly joined in a flow of completion advancing to the far wall: courtship, embracing, copulation, birth.
I felt a sudden floating happiness.
I’ve made it.
On a heavy black oak table, I found clothes set out that might have come from a studio costume department—black stiffly formal suit out of a 1930s society movie, something for Fred Astaire. To my chagrin, I tended to corpulence even in this resurrected state. I put the robe aside and stuffed myself into the outfit and poured a glass of water from a nearby pitcher. A watercress sandwich appeared and I nibbled it while exploring the room.
I should be terrified. I’m not. Roderick…
The table on which I had been reborn occupied the center of the room, spare and black and shiny, like a stone altar. It felt cold to my touch. A yard to the right, the heavy oak table supported my sandwich plate, the pitcher and glass of water, the discarded robe, and a pair of shoes.
Lich, she had called me.
I stood in bright if diffuse illumination. No lights were visible. The room’s corners lay in shadow. Armless chairs lined the wall behind me. A door opened in the next wall. Paintings covered the wall before me. The room seemed square and complete, but I could not find a fourth wall. No matter which direction, as I made a complete turn, I counted only three walls. The decor seemed rich and fashionable, William Morris and the restrained lines of classic Japanese furniture.
Obviously, not the next decade, I thought. Maybe centuries in the future.
I walked forward and the illumination followed. Expertly painted portraits covered the wall, precise, cold renderings of five people, three pale males and two dark females, all in extravagant dress. None of them were Roderick—if Roderick was who I thought he might be—and Ont did not appear, either. The men wore tights and seemed ridiculously well endowed, with feathers puffed on their shoulders and immense fan-shaped hats rising from the crowns of their close-cropped heads. The wom
en wore tight-fitting black gowns, their reddish hair spread like sunbursts, skin the color and sheen of rubbed maple.
I wondered if I would ever find employment in this future world. “Do you like illusions?” I asked the portraits rhetorically.
“They are life’s blood,” answered the male on the left, smiling at me.
The portrait resumed its old, painted appearance.
Assume nothing, I told myself.
Startling patterns decorated the wall behind the portraits. Flowers surrounded and gave form to skull-shapes, eyes like holograms of black olives floating within petaled sockets.
“Where is dinner?” I asked.
This time, the portraits did not answer.
The room’s only door opened onto a straight corridor that extended for a few yards, then sent me back to the room where I had been reborn. I scowled at the unresponsive portraits, then looked for intercoms, doorbells, hidden telephones. Odd that I should still feel happy and at ease, for I might be stuck like a mouse in a cage.
“I would like to go to dinner,” I said in my stage voice, precise and commanding. The door swung shut and opened again. When I stepped through, I faced another corridor, and this one led to a larger double door, half ajar.
I opened the door and stepped outside to an immense ruined garden and orchard, ranks of great squat thick trees barren of leaves and overgrown with brown creepers and tall, sere thistles spotted with patches of crusty black. Hundreds of acres spread over low desolate hills, and on the highest hill stood an edifice that would have seemed unlikely in a dream. It rose above the ruined gardens, white and yellow-gray, like ancient chalk—what must have once been a splendid mansion, its lowest level simple and elegant. An architectural cancer had set in, however, and tumorous wings and floors and towers and bridges thrust from the first floor with malign genius, twisting and joining in ways I could not make sense of. These extrusions reflected the condition of the garden: the house was overgrown, thick with its own weeds.
Beyond the house and land rose a sky gray and dull and threatening. Coils of cloud dropped from the scudding, ash-colored overcast like incipient tornadoes, and the air smelled of frustrated electricity and stale ocean.