Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (553 page)

Finally it was time for us to leave. Bill pawed us, gave us clumsy hugs, clung to us, but not so desperately as he might have; he realized, I am fairly certain, that there would be no reprieve. And, too, he may not have thought he deserved one. He was ashamed, he believed he had done wrong, and so it was with a shameful attitude, not at all demanding, that he asked me if they would give him another implant, if I would help him get one.

“Yeah, sure, Bill,” I said. “I’ll do my best.”

He sat back down on the floor, touched the wound on his neck. “I wish he was here,” he said.

“Mister C?” said Arlie, who had been talking to a young officer; he had just come along to lead us back to our sled. “Is that who you’re talkin’ about, dear?”

He nodded, eyes on the floor.

“Don’t you fret, luv. You’ll get another friend back ’ome. A better one than Mister C. One what won’t ’urt you.”

“I don’t mind he hurts me,” Bill said. “Sometimes I do things wrong.”

“We all of us do wrong, luv. But it ain’t always necessary for us to be ’urt for it.”

He stared up at her as if she were off her nut, as if he could not imagine a circumstance in which wrong was not followed by hurt.

“That’s the gospel,” said the officer. “And I promise, we’ll be takin’ good care of you, Bill.” He had been eyefucking Arlie, the officer had, and he was only saying this to impress her with his humanity. Chances were, as soon as we were out of sight, he would go to kicking and yelling at Bill. Arlie was not fooled by him.

“Goodbye, Bill,” she said, taking his hand, but he did not return her pressure, and his hand slipped out of her grasp, flopped onto his knee; he was already retreating from us, receding into his private misery, no longer able to manufacture a brave front. And as the door closed on him, that first of many doors, leaving him alone in that sticky yellow space, he put his hands to the sides of his head as if his skull could not contain some terrible pain, and began rocking back and forth, and saying, almost chanting the words, like a bitter monk his hopeless litany, “Oh, no…oh, no…oh, no…”

Some seventy-nine hours after the destruction of the CPC and the dispersal of Solitaire, the lightship
Perseverance
came home…came home with such uncanny accuracy, that had the station been situated where it should have been, the energies released by the ship’s re-entry from the supraluminal would have annihilated the entire facility and all on board. The barnacles, perhaps sensing some vast overload of light through their photophores…the barnacles and an idiot man had proved wiser than the rest of us. And this was no ordinary homecoming in yet another way, for it turned out that the voyage of the Perseverance had been successful. There was a new world waiting on the other side of the nothing, unspoiled, a garden of possibility, a challenge to our hearts and a beacon to our souls.

I contacted the corporation. They, of course, had heard the news, and they also recognized that had Bill not acted the
Perseverance
and all aboard her would have been destroyed along with Solitaire. He was, they were delighted to attest, a hero, and they would treat him as such. How’s that? I asked. Promotions, news specials, celebrations, parades, was their answer. What he really wants, I told them, is to come back to Solitaire. Well, of course, they said, we’ll see what we can do. When it’s time, they said. We’ll do right by him, don’t you worry. How about another implant? I asked. Absolutely, no problem, anything he needs. By the time I broke contact, I understood that Bill’s fate would be little different now he was a hero than it would have been when he was a mere fool and a villain. They would use him, milk his story for all the good it could do them, and then he would be discarded, misplaced, lost, dropped down to circulate among the swirling masses of the useless, the doomed and the forgotten.

Though I had already—in concert with others—formed a plan of action, it was this duplicity on the corporation’s part that hardened me against them, and thereafter I threw myself into the implementation of the plan. A few weeks from now, the
Perseverance
and three other starships soon to be completed will launch for the new world. Aboard will be the population of Solitaire, minus a few unsympathetic personnel who have been rendered lifeless, and the population of other, smaller stations in the asteroid belt and orbiting Mars. Solitaire itself, and the other stations, will be destroyed. It will take the corporation decades, perhaps a century, to rebuild what has been lost, and by the time they are able to reach us, we hope to have grown strong, to have fabricated a society free of corporations and Strange Magnificences, composed of those who have learned to survive without the quotas and the dread consolations of the Earth. It is an old dream, this desire to say, No more, never again, to build a society cleansed of the old compulsions and corruptions, the ancient, vicious ways, and perhaps it is a futile one, perhaps the fact that men like myself, violent men, men who will do the necessary, who will protect against all enemies with no thought for moral fall-out, must be included on the roster, perhaps this pre-ordains that it will fail. Nevertheless, it needs to be dreamed every so often, and we are prepared to be the dreamers.

So that is the story of Barnacle Bill. My story, and Arlie’s as well, yet his most of all, though his real part in it, the stuff of his thoughts and hopes, the pain he suffered and the fear he overcame, those things can never be told. Perhaps you have seen him recently on the HV, or even in person, riding in an open car at the end of a parade with men in suits, eating an ice and smiling, but in truth he is already gone into history, already part of the past, already half-forgotten, and when the final door has closed on him, it may be that his role in all this will be reduced to a mere footnote or simply a mention of his name, the slightest token of a life. But I will remember him, not in memorial grace, not as a hero, but as he was, in all his graceless ways and pitiable form. It is of absolute importance to remember him thus, because that, I have come to realize, the raw and the deformed, the ugly, the miserable miracles of our days, the unalloyed baseness of existence, that is what we must learn to love, to accept, to embrace, if we are to cease the denials that weaken us, if we are ever to admit our dismal frailty and to confront the natural terror and heartbreak weather of our lives and live like a strong light across the sky instead of retreating into darkness.

The barnacles have returned to Solitaire. Or rather, new colonies of barnacles have attached to the newly reunited station, not covering it completely, but dressing it up in patches. I have taken to walking among them, weeding them as Bill once did; I have become interested in them, curious as to how they perceived a ship coming from light years away, and I intend to carry some along with us on the voyage and make an attempt at a study. Yet what compels me to take these walks is less scientific curiosity than a kind of furious nostalgia, a desire to remember and hold the centre of those moments that have so changed the direction of our lives, to think about Bill and how it must have been for him, a frightened lump of a man with a clever voice in his ear, alone in all that daunting immensity, fixing his eyes on the bright clots of life at his feet. Just today Arlie joined me on such a walk, and it seemed we were passing along the rim of an infinite dark eye flecked with a trillion bits of colour, and that everything of our souls and of every other soul could be seen in that eye, that I could look down to Earth through the haze and scum of the ocean air and see Bill where he stood looking up and trying to find us in that mottled sky, and I felt all the eerie connections a man feels when he needs to believe in something more than what he knows is real, and I tried to tell myself he was all right, walking in his garden in Nova Sibersk, taking the air with an idiot woman so beautiful it nearly made him wise. But I could not sustain the fantasy. I could only mourn, and I had no right to mourn, having never loved him—or if I did, even in the puniest of ways, it was never his person I loved, but what I had from him, the things awakened in me by what had happened. Just the thought that I could have loved him, maybe that was all I owned of right.

We were heading back toward the East Louie airlock, when Arlie stooped and plucked up a male barnacle. Dark green as an emerald, it was, except for its stubby appendage. Glowing like magic, alive with threads of colour like a potter’s glaze.

“That’s a rare one,” I said. “Never saw one that colour before.”

“Bill would ’ave fancied it,” she said.

“Fancied, hell. He would have hung the damned thing about his neck.”

She set it back down, and we watched as it began working its way across the surface of the barnacle patch, doing its slow, ungainly cartwheels, wobbling off-true, lurching in flight, nearly missing its landing, but somehow making it, somehow getting there. It landed in the shadow of some communications gear, stuck out its tongue and tried to feed. We watched it for a long, long while, with no more words spoken, but somehow there was a little truth hanging in the space between us, in the silence, a poor thing not worth naming, and maybe not even having a name, it was such an infinitesimal slice of what was, and we let it nourish us as much as it could, we took its lustre and added it to our own. We sucked it dry, we had its every flavour, and then we went back inside arm in arm, to rejoin the lie of the world.

First published in
Night Cry
, Spring 1987

White trains with no tracks

have been appearing on the outskirts

of small anonymous towns,

picket fence towns in Ohio, say,

or Iowa, places rife with solid American values,

populated by men with ruddy faces and weak hearts,

and women whose thoughts slide

like swaths of gingham through their minds.

They materialize from vapor or a cloud,

glide soundlessly to a halt in some proximate meadow,

old-fashioned white trains with pot-bellied smokestacks,

their coaches adorned with filigrees of palest ivory,

packed with men in ice cream suits and bowlers,

and lovely dark-haired women in lace gowns.

The passengers disembark, form into rows,

facing one another as if preparing for a cotillion,

and the men undo their trouser buttons,

their erections springing forth like lean white twigs,

and they enter the embrace of the women,

who lift their skirts to enfold them,

hiding them completely, making it appear

that strange lacy cocoons have dropped from the sky

to tremble and whisper on the bright green grass.

And when at last the women let fall their skirts,

each of them bears a single speck of blood

at the corner of their perfect mouths.

As for the men, they have vanished

like snow on a summer’s day.

I myself was witness to one such apparition

on the outskirts of Parma, New York,

home to the Castle Monosodium Glutimate Works,

a town whose more prominent sophisticates

often drive to Buffalo for the weekend.

I had just completed a thirty-day sentence

for sullying the bail bondsman’s beautiful daughter

(They all said she was a good girl

but you could find her name on every bathroom wall

between Nisack and Mitswego),

and having no wish to extend my stay

I headed for the city limits.

It was early morning, the eastern sky

still streaked with pink, mist threading

the hedgerows, and upon a meadow bordering

three convenience stores and a laundromat,

I found a number of worthies gathered,

watching the arrival of a white train.

There was Ernest Cardwell, the minister

of the Church of the Absolute Solstice,

whose congregation alone of all the Empire State

has written guarantee of salvation,

and there were a couple of cops big as bears

in blue suits, carrying standard issue golden guns,

and there was a group of scientists huddled

around the machines with which they were

attempting to measure the phenomenon,

and the mayor, too, was there, passing out

his card and declaring that he had no hand

in his unnatural business, and the scientists

were murmuring, and Cardwell was shouting

“Abomination,” at the handsome men

and lovely women filing out of the coaches,

and as for me, well, thirty days and the memory

of the bail bondsman’s beautiful daughter

had left me with a more pragmatic attitude,

and ignoring the scientists’ cries of warning and

Cardwell’s predictions of eternal hellfire,

the mayor’s threats, and the cops’ growling,

I went toward the nearest of the women

and gave her male partner a shove and was amazed

to see him vanish in a haze of sparkles

as if he had been made of something insubstantial

like Perrier or truth.

The woman’s smile was cool and enigmatic

and as I unzipped, her gown enfolded me

in an aura of perfume and calm,

and through the lacework the sun acquired

a dim red value, and every sound was faraway,

and I could not feel the ground beneath my feet,

only the bright sensation of slipping inside her.

Her mouth was such a simple curve, so pure

a crimson, it looked to be a statement of principle,

and her dark brown eyes had no pupils.

Looking into them, I heard a sonorous music;

heavy German stuff, with lots of trumpet fanfares

and skirling crescendos, and the heaviness

of the music transfigured my thoughts,

so that it seemed what followed was a white act,

that I had become a magical beast with golden eyes,

coupling with an ephemera, a butterfly woman,

a creature of lace and beat and silky muscle…

though in retrospect I can say with assurance

that I’ve had better in my time.

I think I expected to vanish, to travel

on a white train through some egoless dimension,

taking the place of the poor soul I’d pushed aside,

(although it may be he never existed, that only

the women were real, or that from those blood drops

dark and solid as rubies at the corners of their mouths,

they bred new ranks of insubstantial partners),

but I only stood there jelly-kneed watching

the women board the train, still smiling.

The scientists surrounded me, asking questions,

offering great sums if I would allow them to do tests

and follow-ups to determine whether or not

I bad contracted some sort of astral social disease,

and Cardwell was supplicating God to strike me down,

and the mayor was bawling at the cops to take me

in for questioning, but I was beyond the city limits

and they had no rights in the matter, and I walked

away from Parma, bearing signed contracts

from the scientists, and another presented me

by a publisher who, disguised as a tree stump,

had watched the entire proceeding, and now

owned the rights to the lie of my life story.

My future, it seemed, was assured.

White trains with no tracks

continue to appear on the outskirts

of small anonymous towns, places

whose reasons have dried up, towns

upon which dusk settles

like a statement of intrinsic greyness,

and some will tell you these trains

signal an Apocalyptic doom, and

others will say they are symptomatic

of mass hysteria, the reduction of culture

to a fearful and obscure whimsey, and

others yet will claim that the vanishing men

are emblematic of the realities of sexual politics

in this muddled, weak-muscled age.

But I believe they are expressions of a season

that occurs once every millennium or so,

a cosmic leap year, that they are merely

a kind of weather, as unimportant and unique

as a sun shower or a spell of warmth in mid-winter,

a brief white interruption of the ordinary

into which we may walk and emerge somewhat

refreshed, but nothing more.

I lecture frequently upon this subject

in towns such as Parma, towns whose lights

can be seen glittering in the dark folds of lost America

like formless scatters of stars, ruined constellations

whose mythic figure has abdicated to a better sky,

and my purpose is neither to illuminate nor confound,

but is rather to engage the interest of those women

whose touch is generally accompanied by

thirty days durance on cornbread and cold beans,