Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (519 page)

I told Helen I wouldn’t be home for supper. “I’m tracking a dissembler,” I explained.

“The Coventry woman?”

“Yes.” I peered through the bar’s grubby window. Martina sat in the back, sipping an Olga’s OK Orangeade and eating a murdered cow.

Helen said, “Did you have sex with her?”

“No.” A mild but undeniable pain arose in my temples. “We kissed.”

“On the lips?”

“Yes. We also hugged.”

“Come home, Jack.”

“Not before I’m one of them.”

“Jack!”

Click.
I stood in the silvery, sulfurous rain and waited.

* * * *

Within the hour Martina left Dolly’s Digestibles and set out on foot, striding eastward into the twilit depths of Nietzsche Borough. Once the linchpin of the Veritas Trolley Company, an enterprise that in its heyday shuttled both freight and humans around the metropolis, Nietzsche had of late fallen victim to the revolution in private transportation, becoming underpopulated and inert, an urban moonscape. I followed Martina to a depot, its tracks now deserted but for the occasional rusting Pullman or decaying boxcar. How stealthy I was, how furtive—how like a dissembler already.

A roundhouse loomed up, its turntable lying before the switchyard like an enormous lazy Susan, its barns sealed with slabs of corrugated steel. A diesel switch engine sat on the nearest siding, hulking into the wet summer air like the fossilized remains of some postindustrial dinosaur.

Martina drummed on the door—a swift, snappy para-diddle—and a tall, devil-bearded man answered, his gaunt features softened by the dusk. “I’m Spartacus, come to free the slaves,” she told him—a code phrase, evidently. I flinched at the falsehood.

“This way, brave Thracian,” he replied, stepping aside to let her pass.

Sneaking around back, I groped along the sooty, rust-stained walls. A high, open window beckoned. I was all instinct now, piling the handiest junk together (pickle barrel, apple crate, fifty-five-gallon drum), scrambling upward like the swashbuckling hero of some Cinemascope illusion. I reached the sill and peered in.

Liars—everywhere, liars. There were over four hundred of them, chattering among themselves as they gripped kerosene lanterns and drifted amid the empty rails, gradually converging upon a makeshift wooden podium suspended several feet above the ground on stilts. The women were dressed outrageously, in low-cut sequined blouses and spangled stretch pants, like chorus girls out of a Fred Astaire movie; Martina fit right in. The men’s attire was equally antisocial. They wore tuxedos with white gloves; riding cloaks and jodhpurs; lavender jackets that might have been stolen from pimps.

A burly man in a zoot suit mounted the steps of the podium, carrying a battery-powered bullhorn. “Settle down, everybody!” came his electrified bellow.

The mob grew quiet. “Take it away, Sebastian!” somebody called from the floor.

The liars’ leader—Sebastian—strutted back and forth on the podium, flashing a jack-o’-lantern grin. “What is snow?” he shouted.

I fixed on Martina. “Snow is hot!” she screamed along with her peers.

A dull ache wove through my belly. I closed my eyes and jumped into the thick, creosote-clogged air.

“What chases cats?” Sebastian demanded.

“Rats chase cats!” the liars responded in a single voice—a mighty shout drowning out the thud of my boots striking the roundhouse floor.
Rats chase cats:
God. My discomfort increased, nausea pounding deep within me. I backed against a rivet-studded girder, my body camouflaged by shadows, my footfalls masked by the rumble of the crowd.

“Now,” said Sebastian, “down to business…”

Gradually the sickness passed, and I was able to monitor the schemes now unfolding before me.

The dissemblers—I quickly learned—were planning yet another attack on Veritas’s domestic tranquillity. For one astonishingly disruptive afternoon, they would revive what Sebastian called “that vanished and miraculous festival known as Christmas.” Anything to demoralize the city, evidently, anything to rot it from within. At 2 p.m. on December 25, when Circumspect Park was packed with families out for a jolly afternoon of skating on the duck pond and drinking hot chocolate by bonfires, the liars would strike. Costumed as angels, elves, gnomes, and sugarplum fairies, they would swoop into the park and cordon it off with snow fences, discreetly taking a dozen hostages to discourage police intervention. Sebastian’s forces would next erect a so-called Christmas tree on the north shore of the pond—a Scotch pine as big as a windmill—immediately inviting Veritas’s presumably awestruck children to decorate it with colored glass balls and tinsel. Then, as evening drew near, the dissemblers would perform a three-act adaptation of a Charles Dickens story called A Christmas Carol. I knew all about that story, and not just because I’d read a copy of the first edition prior to burning it. A Christmas Carol had entered history as one of the falsest fables of all time, a glib embodiment of the lie that the wicked can be made to see the errors of their ways.

Finally: the climax. A loading gantry would appear on the scene and suddenly—look—here comes old Santa Claus himself, descending from the sky in a shiny red sleigh harnessed to eight audio-animatronic reindeer and jammed with gifts wrapped in glittery gold paper. As the children gathered around—their hearts pounding with delight, their faces aglow with glee, their poor defenseless minds dizzy with delusion—the elves would shower them with the stuff of their dreams, with scooters and ten-speeds, doll houses and electric trains, teddy bears and toy soldiers.

Sebastian held up the red suit, pillow, and fake beard he intended to wear as Santa Claus, and the roundhouse broke into instant, thunderous applause.

I studied the crowd, shuddering each time I came upon a familiar face. Good heavens: Jimmy Breeze, the bartender from Booze Before Breakfast. Who would have picked
him
for a liar? Or my plumber, Paul Irving? Or my barber, Bill Mumford?

Sebastian divided his legions into the necessary task forces. Jimmy Breeze ended up on the Ornaments Committee; my plumber was cast as Ebenezer Scrooge; my barber volunteered to be an elf; Martina agreed to write Santa’s opening oration.

The closing litany caught me by surprise.

“What can dogs do?” Sebastian shouted abruptly.

“They can talk!” answered the mob.

My brain began to throb.

“What color is grass?”

“Purple!”

The pounding in my skull intensified.

“Stones are…”

“Alive!”

“Stop!” I cried, squeezing my head between my palms. “Stop! Please stop!”

Four hundred faces turned toward me. Eight hundred eyes blazed with anger and indignation.

“Who’s that?” someone asked.

“Spy!” a voice called.

Another voice: “Brutality Squad!”

Another: “Get him!”

I raised my open palms. “Listen! I want to join you!” The liars rushed toward me like the hordes in the most impressive Renaissance oil I’d deconstructed during my apprenticeship, Altdorfer’s
Battle of Issus.
“I want to become a dissembler!”

A leathery hand curled around my mouth. I bit into it, tasting the liar’s salty blood. A boot jabbed my side, snapping one of my ribs like a dry twig. Groaning, reeling with fear, I dropped to my knees. I’d never before felt so much of that ultimate truth, that quintessential fact, pain.

The last thing I saw before losing consciousness was my tax adviser’s fist moving swiftly toward my jaw.

* * * *

I woke up alive. Alive—and no better. My lips felt like two fat snails grafted onto my face. My torso, it seemed, had recently been employed as the ball in some particularly violent contact sport. Pain chewed at my side.

Gradually the gooey film slid from my eyes. I took stock. Foam mattress, eiderdown pillow, the adamant odor of rubbing alcohol. Adhesive tape encircled my chest, as if it were the handle of a tennis racket.

A middle-aged doctor in a white lab coat fidgeted beside me, stethoscope dangling from her neck. “Good morning,” she said, apparently meaning it. A thin, vivid face: beaky nose, sharp chin, high cheeks—a face that, while not beautiful, would probably always retain a certain fascination for anybody obliged to behold it regularly.

“Morning? Is it Friday already?”

“Very good,” the doctor answered merrily. Her smile was as crisp and bright as a gibbous moon. “I’m Felicia Krakower, and I truly, sincerely hope you’re feeling better.”

Across the room, an old man with skin the color of oolong tea sat upright on his mattress, his head wrapped in a turban of brilliant white bandages. “My rib hurts,” I said.

“I’m terribly sorry to hear that,” said Dr. Krakower. “Don’t fret. You’re in Satirev now.”

“Satirev?”

“Off the map.” Dr. Krakower waved a thermometer around as if conducting an orchestra.

“Spell it backwards,” my roommate suggested. “I’m Louie, by the way. Brain cancer. No big deal. It just grows and grows up there, like moss, and then one day— pfttt—I’m gone. Death is an extraordinary adventure.”

I slid the thermometer between my lips. Satirev…Veritas…Satirev…Veritas…

My accommodations were coated with lurid yellow paint and equally lurid lies—a poster-sized edition of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” a reproduction of Van Gogh’s
Sunflowers,
a print of Salvador Dali’s notorious landscape of trees fruited with pocket watches. I glanced through a rose-tinted window. Outside, a rank of Corinthian columns supported a carved lintel reading center for creative wellness.

As Felicia Krakower removed the thermometer, I pressed my staved-in side and said, “Doctor, you’ve heard of psychoneuroimmunology, haven’t you?”

“The mind-body connection?”

“Right. The patient adopts such a cheerful outlook that his sickness never takes hold. Does that ever happen?”

“Of
course
it happens,” the doctor replied, sliding her index finger along the bright yellow tubing of her stethoscope. “Miracles happen every day—the sun comes up, a baby gets born—and don’t you ever forget it, Jack Sperry.”

How marvelous to be among people who weren’t afraid of hope. “Bless you, doctor—am I running a fever?”

“Maybe a tiny one. Not to worry. In Satirev, one never stays ill for long.”

“I should call my wife.”

Against all odds, the doctor’s smile grew even larger.

“You have a
wife
?
Wonderful. Lovely. I’ll relay your request to Internal Security immediately. Open your mouth, would you?”

“Why?”

“Something for your own good.”

I moved my wounded lips apart. The doctor deposited a sugary, kidney-shaped capsule on my tongue, handed me a glass of water. “How do I know it’s for my own good?”

“Trust me,” said Dr. Krakower.

“In Satirev people trust each other,” said Louie.

“Sleeping pill?” I asked, swallowing.

“Could be,” said the doctor.

Sleeping pill…

* * * *

When I returned to awareness, Martina Coventry was leaning over me, still packaged in her lascivious silver dress. Beside her stood a tall, lanky, coarse-skinned man in a green dinner jacket fitted over a sweatshirt that said,
when life gives you lemons, make lemonade
. He looked like a cactus.

“Martina!”

She laid a plump hand on my forehead. “Say hello to Franz Beauchamp.”

“Hello,” I said to the cactoid man.

“I’m in charge of making sure you don’t wander off,” Franz explained in a voice that seemed to enter the room after first traveling through a vat of honey. “It’s no big deal. Just give me your Veritasian word you won’t wander off.”

“I won’t wander off.”

“Good for you.” My guardian’s grin was as spectacular as Felicia Krakower’s; I’d fallen in with a community of smilers. “I have a feeling we’re going to be great friends,” he said.

Martina was gaudier than ever. She’d worked her terra-cotta hair into a sculpted object, a thick braid that lay on her shoulder like a loaf of challah. Her eyes had become cartoons of themselves, boldly outlined and richly shaded. “Even though this is Satirev,” she said, “I am Veritasian enough to speak frankly. I saved your ass, Jack. You’re alive because good old Martina Coventry argued your case back at the roundhouse.”

“I’m grateful,” I said.

“You should be.”

“You told them about Toby?”

She nodded. “Yes, and I must say, the story was an instant hit. A Xavier’s child with a shot at remission—you have no idea what appeal that sort of situation holds down here.”

“It’s all so amazingly touching,” said Franz. “A father fighting for his son’s life—my
goodness,
that’s touching.”

“Can you teach me to lie?” I asked.

“It depends,” said Martina.

“On what?”

“On whether you’re accepted into the program—on whether the treatment takes. Not everyone has the stuff to become a dissembler.”

“It it were up to me, I’d let you in”—Franz snapped his fingers—“like
that.
”

“Unfortunately, it’s not up to us,” said Martina. “You’re going to need some luck.” She reached into her madras bag and took out, of all things, a horseshoe. Opening the drawer in my nightstand, she dropped in the shoe,
thud.
“Horses have six legs,” she said, matter-of-factly.