Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (429 page)

—And explodes silently into a nonbeing which is almost familiar, is happening this time more slowly as if huge energy is tiding to its crest so slowly that some structure of himself endures to form in what is no longer a brain the fear that he is indeed dead and damned to live forever in furious fragments. And against this horror his essence strains to protest
But I did love!
at a horizon of desolation—a plain of endless, lifeless rubble under a cold black sky, in which he or some pattern of energies senses once more that distant presence: wreckage, machines, huge structures incomprehensibly operative, radiating dark force in the nightmare world, the force which now surges—

* * * *

—To incorporate him anew within familiar walls, with the words “But I did love” meaninglessly on his lips. He leans back in his familiarly unoiled swivel chair, savoring content. Somewhere within him weak darkness stirs, has power only to send his gaze to the three-di portraits behind the pile of printouts on his desk.

Molly smiles back at him over the computer sheets, her arm around their eldest daughter. For the first time in years the thought of poor Charlie McMahon crosses his mind, triggers the automatic incantation: Molly-never-would-have-been-happy-with-him. They had a bad time around there, but it worked out. Funny how vividly he recalls that day by the river, in spite of all the good years since.
But I did love
, his mind murmurs uneasily, as his eyes go lovingly to the computer printouts.

The lovely, elegant results. All confirmed eight ways now, the variance all pinned down. Even better than he’d hoped. The journal paper can go in the mail tomorrow. Of course the pub-lag is nearly three years now; never mind: the AAAS panel comes next week. That’s the important thing. Lucky timing, couldn’t be neater. The press is bound to play it up.…Going to be hard not to watch Gilliam’s face, Peter muses, his own face ten years younger, sparkling, all lines upturned.

“I do love it, that’s what counts,” he thinks, a jumble of the years of off-hours drudgery in his mind.…Coffee-ringed clipboards, the new centrifuge, the animal mess, a girl’s open lab coat, arguments with Ferris in Analysis, arguments about space, about equipment, about costs—and arching over it like a laser-grid the luminous order of his hypothesis. His proven—no, mustn’t say it—his meticulously
tested
hypothesis. The lucky lifetime break. The beauty one. Never do it again, he hasn’t another one like this left in him; no matter! This is it, the peak. Just in time. Don’t think of what Nathan said, don’t think the word. (Nobel)—That’s stupid. (Nobel) Think of the work itself, the explanatory power, the clarity.

His hand has been wandering toward the in-basket under the printouts where his mail has been growing moss (he’ll get a secretary out of this, that’s for sure!), but the idea of light turns him to the window. The room feels tense, brimming with a tide of energy. Too much coffee, he thinks, too much joy. I’m not used to it. Too much of a loner. From here in I share. Spread it around, encourage younger men. Herds of assistants now…

Across his view of tired Bethesda suburbs around the NIH Annex floats the train of multiple-author papers, his name as senior, a genial myth; sponsoring everybody’s maiden publication. A fixture in the mainstream…Kids playing down there, he sees, shooting baskets by a garage, will some of them live to have a myeloma cured by the implications of his grubby years up here? If the crystallization can be made easier. Bound to come. But not by me, he thinks, trying to focus on the running figures through a faint stroboscopic blink which seems to arise from the streets below, although he knows it must be in his retinae.

Really too much caffeine, he warns himself. Let’s not have a hypertensive episode, not
now
, for god’s sake. Exultation is almost tangible in the room, it’s not distracting but integrative; as if he were achieving some higher level of vitality, a norepinephrinelike effect. Maybe I really will live on a higher level, he muses, rubbing the bridge of his nose between two fingers to get rid of a black afterimage which seems almost like an Apollo moonscape behind his eyes, a trifle unpleasant.

Too much doom, he tells himself, vigorously polishing his glasses, too much bomb-scare, ecology-scare, fascism-scare, race-war-scare, death-of-everything scare. He jerks his jaw to stop the tinnitis thrumming in his inner ear, glancing at the big 1984 desk calendar with its scrawled joke: If everything’s okay why are we whispering? Right. Let’s get at it and get home. To Molly and Sue and little Pete, their late-born.

He grins, thinking of the kid running to him, and thrusts his hand under the printouts to his packet of stale mail—and as his hand touches it an icicle rams into his heart.

For an instant he thinks he really is having a coronary. But it isn’t his real heart, it’s a horrible cold current of knowledge striking from his fingers to his soul, from that hideous sleazy tan-covered foreign journal which he now pulls slowly out to see the penciled note clipped to the cover, the personally delivered damned journal which has been lying under there like a time bomb, for how long? Weeks?

Pete, you better look at this. Sorry as hell.

But he doesn’t need to look, riffling through the wretchedly printed pages with fingers grown big and cold as clubs; he already knows what he’ll find inside there published so neatly, so sweetly, and completely, with the confirmation even stronger and more elegant, the implication he hadn’t thought of—and all so modest and terse. So young. Despair takes him as the page opens.
Djakarta University
for Jesus Christ’s sake? And some Hindu’s bloody paradigm—

Sick fury fulminates, bile and ashes rain through his soul as his hands fumble the pages, the gray unreal unreadable pages which are now strobing—Flash! Black! Flash! Black!—swallowing the world, roaring him in or up or out on a phantom whirlwind—

—Till unsensation crescendos past all limit, bursts finally into the silence of pure energy, where he—or what is left of him, or momentarily reconstituted of him—integrates to terrified insight, achieves actual deathly awareness of its extinct self immaterially spinning in the dust of an eons-gone NIH Annex on a destroyed planet. And comprehends with agonized lucidity the real death of everything that lived—excepting only that in himself which he would most desperately wish to be dead.

What happened? He does not know, can never know, which of the dooms or some other had finally overtaken them, nor when; only that he is registering eternity, not time, that all that lived here has been gone so long that even time is still. Gone, all gone; centuries or millennia gone, all gone to ashes under pulseless stars in the icy dark, gone forever. Saving him alone and his trivial pain.

He alone…But as the mercilessly reifying force floods higher there wakes in him a dim uncomforting sense of presence; a bodiless disquiet in the dust tells him he is companioned, is but a node in a ghostly film of dead life shrouding the cold rock-ball. Unreachable, isolate—he strains for contact and is incorporeally stricken by new dread.
Are they too in pain?
Was pain indeed the fiercest fire in our nerves, alone able to sustain its flame through death? What of love, of joy?…There are none here.

He wails voicelessly as conviction invades him, he who had believed in nothing before. All the agonies of Earth, uncanceled? Are broken ghosts limping forever from Stalingrad and Salamis, from Gettysburg and Thebes and Dunkirk and Khartoum? Do the butchers’ blows still fall at Ravensbruck and Wounded Knee? Are the dead of Carthage and Hiroshima and Cuzco burning yet? Have ghostly women waked again only to resuffer violation, only to watch again their babies slain? Is every nameless slave still feeling the iron bite, is every bomb, every bullet and arrow and stone that ever flew, still finding its screaming mark—atrocity without end or comfort, forever?

Molly.
The name forms in his canceled heart. She who was love. He tries to know that she or some fragment of her is warm among her children, but can summon only the image of her crawling forever through wreckage to Charlie McMahon’s bloody head.

Let it not be!
He would shriek defiance at the wastes, finding himself more real as the strange energy densens; he struggles bodilessly, flails perished nonlimbs to conjure love out of extinction to shield him against hell, calling with all his obliterated soul on the ultimate talisman: the sound of his little son’s laugh, the child running to him, clasping his leg in welcome home.

For an instant he thinks he has it—he can see the small face turn up, the mouth open—but as he tries to grasp, the ghost-child fades, frays out, leaving in his destroyed heart only another echo of hurt—
I want Mommy, Mommy, my Mommy. And he perceives that what he had taken for its head are forms. Presences intrusive, alien as the smooth, bleak regard of sharks met under water.

They move, precess obscurely—they
exist
here on this time-lost plain! And he understands with loathing that it is from
them
or
those
—machines or beings, he cannot tell—that the sustaining energy flows. It is
their
dark potency which has raised him from the patterns of the dust.

Hating them he hungers, would sway after them to suck his death-life, as a billion other remnants are yearning, dead sunflowers thirsting toward their black sun—but finds he cannot, can only crave helplessly as they recede.

They move, he perceives, toward those black distant cenotaphs, skeletal and alien, which alone break the dead horizon. What these can be, engines or edifices, is beyond his knowing. He strains sightlessly, sensing now a convergence, an inflowing as of departure like ants into no earthly nest. And at this he understands that the energy upbuoying him is sinking, is starting to ebb. The alien radiance that raised him is going, and he is guttering out. Do you know? he voicelessly cries after them, Do you know? Do you move oblivious among our agonies?

But he receives no answer, will never receive one; and as his tenuous structure fails he has consciousness only to wonder briefly what unimaginable errand brought such beings here to his dead cinder. Emissaries, he wonders, dwindling; explorers, engineers? Or is it possible that they are only sightseers? Idling among our ruins, perhaps even cognizant of the ghosts they raise to wail—turning us on, recreating our dead-show for their entertainment?

Shriveling, he watches them go in, taking with them his lacerating life, returning him to the void. Will they return? Or—his waning self forms one last desolation—have they returned already on their millennial tours? Has this recurred, to recur and recur again? Must he and all dead life be borne back each time helplessly to suffer, to jerk anew on the same knives and die again until another energy exhumes him for the next performance?

Let us die!
But his decaying identity can no longer sustain protest, knows only that it is true, is unbearably all true, has all been done to him before and is all to do again and again and again without mercy forever.

And as he sinks back through the collapsing levels he can keep hold only of despair, touching again the deadly limp brown journal—
Djakarta University?
Flash—and he no longer knows the cause of the terror in his soul as he crumbles through lost springtime—
I don’t love you that way, Pete
—and is betrayed to aching joy as his hand closes over the young breast within her white shirt—
Pe-ter, don’t you have a friend?
—while his being shreds out, disperses among a myriad draining ghosts of anguish as the alien life deserts them, strands them lower and lower toward the final dark—until with uncomprehending grief he finds himself, or a configuration that was himself, for a last instant real—his boots on gravel in the dawn, his hand on a rusty pickup truck.

A joy he cannot bear rises in his fourteen-year-old heart as he peers down at the magic ducks, sees his boat safe by the path he’s cut; not understanding why the wind shrieks pain through the peaks above as he starts leaping down the rocks holding his ax and his first own gun, down to the dark lake under the cold stars, forever.

* * * *

Copyright © 1974, 2002 by the Literary Estate of Alice B. Sheldon; first appeared in
Final Stage
, from the author’s own collection, HER SMOKE ROSE UP FOREVER; reprinted by permission of Jeffrey D. Smith, and the Estate’s agents, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.

(1947– )

John Varley was a popular writer in the 1970s and 1980s, with this one of his best known stories. Never a prolific writer, he’s produced only 11 novels and a number of short stories over more than 30 years of writing, but many were influential, or at least though-provoking. I first encountered his work with
Titan
(1979) and its sequels, set on a compellingly
living
world and filled with interesting ideas and characters, and read everything else I could find of his writing. That was the reaction of a lot of SF readers had at the time: Varley won both the Hugo and Nebula for “The Persistence of Vision” and “Press Enter []” (1984), as well as a Hugo for his 1982 story “The Pusher.”

Even for a SF writer, Varley had a nontraditional entry into the field. After dropping out of the University of Michigan in 1967, Varley wandered to San Francisco, where he supported himself by menial labor, soup kitchens, and panhandling. He spent the next six years as a vagabond, passing through New York, Los Angeles, and Tucson, among other places. Accustomed to living without a steady means of support after years on the road, Varley apparently decided that writing science fiction was a viable career, and he turned out to be correct; his first short story (“Scoreboard”) and novelette (“Picnic on Nearside”) both came out that August.

Varley took a ten-year break from SF while working on films in Hollywood. (The one film to emerge from that effort was
Millenium
, a bad film based on a good Varley novel.) He still lives in California with longtime partner Lee Emmett, and most recently has been working on young adult science fiction. Varley does not use a computer; he writes all his fiction on an old IMBM electric typewriter.

Like this story, much of his work has a very sexualized quality to it—although the sex is less explicit than the norm in fiction today, sexuality was a more open subject in many ways in the 1970s, with writers crossing boundaries that are taboo now.